golden clay

I scrub my dinner plate, soap suds reaching up to the crease in my elbow. They’ll be singing worship songs now, but I don’t belong in a worship service on a Thursday night.

Because there’s nothing like a room full of Christians to remind you how little you’ve thought of Christ lately.

Sunday mornings can be the same.

When I was a little girl, the twins would save me a seat at the front of the church. I still remember the way they sang, belting hymns from the second row. I could never match their volume.

“Religion–my a**.” She spat on the soccer field in front of me when I was fifteen.

That’s when the weekly glimpse of the cross-centered red brick building started to cause my stomach to churn. Breathe. Breathe.

I couldn’t hold my own on the soccer field. How could I go to church and sing beside the twins?

And on a Thursday night, I can’t bring myself to worship with the other twenty-somethings because I’ve spent the past five days thinking more about basketball than Jesus.

I’m a fraud if I stand in the second row of a Christian service and cheer for anyone other than the MVP of the Raptors.

Because sometimes church can make me feel like I’m an actor in a terrible dramatic production.

But it’s not as obvious if I just stay home.

Then there’s the tiny group of people who meet in an old public school and it’s a bit like a family reunion whenever I visit. Dave’s always in his Sunday best, Steve in bare feet behind the pulpit.

“It feels like family,” she tells me after we finish eating ham sandwiches in the gymnasium.

An odd assortment of misfits.

Because Sunday morning isn’t a trial on who is good enough to belong in a pew. It’s a reminder that our seats have been saved by the only One who deserves to sit in them.

Not even Dave in his Sunday best deserves a seat with the saints.

The reason we fill them is because of the cross on the wall at the front.

Because He fills them.

With misfits like Peter the denier. And Paul the persecutor.

And me.

And that’s why I set my alarm on a Sunday morning and walk through the doors and try to choose a seat that’s not in the darkest corner.

To remember why I don’t deserve to be there.

But also why I am.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone…” Ephesians 2:19-20

Years later, I wonder why he never wanted me.

Because I need to be wanted.

And you’d think I’d grow out of it at 25, but I just have to ask him before he can hang up the phone: “Dad, do you miss me?”

Because I need to be needed.

I always feel it when I’m standing in places far away from telephone lines, when the bars of service on my phone shrink down to blanks.

How human affirmation only reaches as far as my service provider.

And how we’re different.

It’s what He told Moses when Moses was trembling at the thought of leading a nation out of slavery.

I Am Who I Am.

But I am the mess that Monday left in its wake.

I am the aftermath of a three-hour long meeting that didn’t go my way.

I Am Who I Am.

He doesn’t need us to call Him the Creator to confirm that He made the unnamed galaxies.

He doesn’t need us to show up to church and sing Hallelujah to know that His place is a heavenly throne.

But He invites us to worship.

To want Him, need Him, lean on His all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful self.

Because He loves us.

Because when I’m coming out of a three-hour meeting or when I’m sitting in my basement apartment after the funeral or in the window seat of plane flying towards the unknown, I can exalt something other than the fearfulness of my situation.

Because worship is not a burden or an obligatory rite of passage. It’s a gift. It’s an undeserved opportunity to delight in Someone who is always better than everything else.

“It’s hard to know if I’m really making the most of my life,” she tells me as she stretches out between the seats of the train.

I watch the darkness pass and force myself to breathe deeply. I had just read that most writers complete their greatest work in their mid-twenties. My mid-twenties are here.

And soon gone.

I want to leave a legacy with words. She wants to leave one with cross-cultural missions, with the kids he raises, the career she builds.

“What am I doing? What am I doing?” I press the palm of my hand into the steering wheel after a night at the movies.

I say I want to build a legacy, but I really just want my name to live forever. To step outside time.

Am I any different than Eve reaching out to pluck the chance to be like God?

I try to see through the smudged fingerprints on the glass. Darkness flies past and the occasional blur of lights. I’ve heard of trains that fly like bullets, crossing borders and consuming the tracks in a matter of seconds.

But there’s no train I can ride to the outskirts of time.

Even the great people in history books get the past tense beside their name. She was. They were the greatest of their time.

But God stands before the beginning and after the end.

I am.

I flip past another meme of a millenial in their twenties, having accomplished 0% of the goals they ever made.

But the only lasting Legacy sits on His throne, finished with His work.

Even the future is finished.

The number of my days are tucked safely in the hands of the One who cannot be defined by numbers or calculations.

We get off the train together. I start to pray, not that I would make a difference in this world, but that I would trust in the One who has already made all the difference.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Revelation 1:8

I turn sideways to get a good look in the mirror. It’s an involuntary reaction, the way I grab my tummy and try to pull it tighter.

I hate it.

That’s when I think about what I’m thinking. I pull on my favourite pants, the ones that always make me feel proud of my legs.

My reflection stares back, unimpressed.

Maybe it’s being in her house for two days, the 48-hour reminder that I’ll never look the same as her.

Yet, when another friend fiddles with her chopsticks over a platter of sushi and says that body image is maybe one of the biggest struggles women face, I want to say no.

I don’t struggle with that.

The next day, I catch my disapproving look in the mirror. It’s so common, I never even noticed it before.

“The thing I’ve realized,” she says, “is that you never actually get where you want to be with your body.” We used to exercise together.

I always think my inner monologue will change once I look a certain way.

And yet, when I first met her, I awkwardly stared. I thought she might be a model. Later, she told me she struggled with body image.

Because body image is not based on the reflection, but the reflector in the mirror.

Ugliness?

That’s in my heart as I scroll through their Instagram selfies, discontentment growing.

Take every thought captive.

Or the unbelief that my image was defined from the beginning of time–cellulite or not.

In the image of God, He created them.

Or the forgetfulness that skin particles become dust particles, but the soul lives in the end. Faith lives in the end. Contentment lives in the end. Joy lives in the end. Love lives in the end.

It’s a Friday when I look in the mirror and decide to make a change.

A permanent diet, of sorts.

A restricted consumption of discontented thoughts.

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

 

My finger hovers over the mouse. To post or not to post? I’m not worried about what my friends think or my co-workers or my grandmother. I’m worried about my friend’s mother’s friend–some woman I hardly know.

For a moment, some woman I hardly know has the power over my decision.

It’s the same after the party I attend. I fall on my bed without taking off my coat. Did I come off too strong or too quiet? Were my jokes funny? Did they even know they were jokes?

“You think too much about the details,” she tells me.

It’s paralyzing. People.

All the things I can’t control in my relationships.

She tells me she’s been studying this book lately, studying what she says.

“I know people who do that,” I tell her.

There’s the girl who has never shared someone else’s secrets with me and has barely breathed a bad word about anyone since I’ve known her.

There’s the woman whose words are like mortar. Every word she tells me about myself has built me brick by brick.

And there’s the man who listened to me for fifteen years before I started asking him for his opinion and advice.

Because they already knew there are so many things we can’t control about people.

They knew.

The girl with a harsh mentor.

The woman with an abusive husband.

The man with a depressed wife.

They knew.

We can control our words. We should.

How they bruise.

How they build.

“There is one whose rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” Proverbs 12:18

 

It’s a Wednesday morning when I realize that I can’t just run 10 km one night and not wake up in pain the next day. It’s a small thing compared to the way she can’t bathe herself anymore.

But now it’s not the responsibility of growing older that scares me, it’s the loss of abilities. And the fact that I’m only getting less attractive by the minute.

“I’m not going to be one of those women who is constantly worried about getting older,” she tells me when we’re both 21.

How should it be then?

I wish I had known then what I know now. Ageing is not simply a process, it’s progress.

There’s one man who has always seemed old to me. For the last twenty years, he has seemed old. Ageless, almost.

I envy him, watching his joy grow with every passing year.

The more life throws at him, the more he smiles quietly at the front of the church. The closer he gets to the gates of heaven, the less he cares about self-preservation–and his tearful vulnerability shows up boldly on a Sunday morning. The less able, the more he prays.

The start of the race is hard, the middle is brutal. But the end? It’s pure adrenaline.

Because it’s a race to the prize. To the Life we’ve always wanted.

Because Christ is risen.

Because this isn’t it. It’s the warm up.

It was the same with her, the way her peace grew in palliative care. “This was the best year of my life, Kate,” she tells me.

Even still, the best is yet to come.

The bloom of spring, the prime of life, the strength unfailing, the glimpse of God.

I know she’s going to ask me how she can pray for me.

“Pray that I would manage my time.”

That I’ll run hard until I catch my second wind.

I wander down the all-too-familiar halls of the hospice until I find her room. He’s there too, sitting near the hospital bed. Close enough to touch her hand. He offers her another muffin from Tim Hortons.

He’s there every day.

She’s been here for months and he’s there every day with his cane and a bag from Tim Hortons.

It’s a different love than the kind I saw during the summer of twelve weddings. It’s different than the vows they read fervently to each other from the front of the church.

Not any less solemn. But quieter, somehow.

I come across it in a folder Mom had asked me to sort. A mission statement, signed and dated by a passionate young girl.

A mission statement to serve Christ to the death, with abandon, and other 17th-century-type words.

For years, I wondered where that girl went? Who was she? Was that ever really me?

Years of stale faith, of doubts and of sin that came back again and again to the point where I wondered if I ever really knew Him.

But also years of loss.

Of prayers to help me pray.

Of desperate dives into the deep context of His Word.

On a Tuesday night, I tell her all of this. How I used to envy 15-year-old Kate’s confidence in how life and faith are supposed to work.

“Now I better understand what I’m giving up to love Christ, but I also better understand what I’m gaining.”

She agrees.

A quieter, deeper love.

A love that shows up in the hospice and sits there quietly day after day.

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39

“I’m lonely,” she says. She had just started dating at the time.

Doesn’t Buzzfeed say romance is the cure to feeling alone?

Or friendship?

I remember curling up in my bed in the house I shared with four other girls on Adelaide. Hearing them laugh together, I turned my face to the wall, feeling claustrophobic. Why did the weight of loneliness press against me even when I lived with my best friends?

No one understands me.

It’s the reigning lie of isolation.

I am lonely one night when I stay up too late to scroll through the stages of his happiness. I can’t will myself to double tap on his success, so I remain an anonymous on-looker.

They have it better.

That is what the world shows us and that is what I show the world. We all chip in tools to build the wall.

I’m lonely one night when I call her, seeking connection. She’s busy and distracted–maybe lonely too.

The pursuit of connection is not worth the risk of rejection.

So, I turn to myself for support, to all the things I can do to be self-sustainable. I sign up for races, for retreats, for courses. I make travel plans.

But even I am a lousy cure for loneliness.

It’s when I step outside in the evening and my running shoes find a rhythm against the sidewalk that I feel loneliness evaporate in the evening light.

The victory is yours.

You alone are worthy.

The worship songs come full blast through my earbuds and I want to lift my hands right there in the middle of the sidewalk.

Because loneliness is not broken by a change in situation, but with the choice to worship.

With the simple choice to step outside and say the truth out loud.

You are greater.

 

 

 

“Sometimes, I’m scared that God doesn’t love me because I’m a woman.”

As soon as I say it, I want to cry. Maybe because I really do feel it sometimes. Maybe because I know it’s a lie. But I still struggle with doubts that the sum and the total of all God’s promises are for me directly–for me, a woman.

She voices the same fear to me one day. It’s almost harder to know I’m not alone.

Suddenly, I’m waking up at 6 AM every morning, devouring the pages of the Bible like I haven’t seen food in years. “Please Lord, show me your love for women.”

What I find is that the sum and total of all God’s promises are not only for women, but often delivered through women.

Like Rahab whose faith grips me, the way she waited hopefully for an enemy nation to rescue her from her own people, they way her faith delivered her family from death. And how God brings the Messiah through her line.

Or Esther, a woman who dared to challenge the powerful, evil men of her time, who God used to save her people from genocide so His promises to Israel could be fulfilled.

And Abigail, a powerful, smart woman who stood before King David and negotiated for her husband’s life.

To say nothing of Sarah, the birth mother of a nation; Deborah, the prophetess of Israel; Abigail, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary, Anna and Lydia.

Even the R-rated passages that show the mistreatment of women, the one in Judges that makes me nauseous. Doesn’t it show that the mistreatment and oppression of women is a sign of the darkest times in a nation’s history?

And then there’s Jesus. Our example. A man who treated women as equals. A man who defied cultural expectations, who talked theology with the Samaritan woman at the well and broke the taboos. A man who befriended women. Who revealed his risen self to women first.

In a world that has crushed women, the cross has made them whole.

Has freed them from sin, has empowered them to defy shame. Women are called to come boldly before the throne of God.

To live whole, fulfilled lives, despite our relationship status or our job title.

All because God loves women and gave Himself up for them.

“It’s been a week of vulnerability,” I tell her as we walk beside the frozen river.

We’re the same. Me and her. We struggle to be honest with the people we love–and even with ourselves.

Like how I struggled to tell him how I really felt about those things he said, those subtle comments that sink deep in the soul. Two hours of back-and-forth at the kitchen island in my parent’s farmhouse, where we’d talked about my frenemies during high school and my professors during university. “I think we’re on the same page, Kate.”

Why do I wait so long to tell the truth?

Or with the three of us. It had always been us three. Until they got married the same year, and then the baby showers and the journey of motherhood. And it only took a year to tell them that, hey, sometimes it’s hard not sharing the journey. “It’s not the same without you, Kate.”

Oversharing is my greatest fear.

But undersharing is my biggest loss.

“You’re even keel, aren’t you Kate. Things don’t seem to faze you,” she said to me often. And at first, I took pride in that.

Until my Dad tells me he has to read my blog to know what I’m thinking.

And my Mom tells me she can’t tell where I’m at.

Sometimes it’s worth doing the work to dig out your own true thoughts.

And putting them out there to be challenged by that person who’s loved you since you were an idea.

Joy springs from the discomfort of letting yourself be heard and listening to the things you hate to hear about yourself from the people you love.

Strength is built with vulnerability.

Like He put Himself in the position of the condemned and took the full force of rejection.

Exposed. Naked. Rejected.

All my greatest fears.

Because He faced them, I can have the strength to be vulnerable, the audacity to claim purity before the throne of God. To stand before Holiness and know I am accepted.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21