all who call

I have two children now.

I remember this phase with my first surprisingly well, despite the fact that I was (unknowingly) in a fog of postpartum depression at the time. Thankfully, that’s under control this time, but the newborn stage is still as stretching and demanding as ever. I had almost forgotten how all-consuming it is to be everything to someone: to be their source of food, drink, warmth, hygiene, safety, comfort, even life itself.

There is a familiar loneliness—an inevitable isolation. Even those who have been in these shoes probably don’t quite remember what it was really like. And those who are in them right now are too consumed by them, as I am, to be really available to anyone else. Who can blame them?

And God—it’s hard not to feel like I’m failing Him when I can hear the voices of so many pastors from so many pulpits endlessly reminding us that we need to pray and read our Bibles and go to church, and I have barely gotten us all dressed and fed in a day, let alone done any of that.

But I was reminded lately that I come from a very knowledge-centric tradition of Christianity, and that knowledge is only one small piece of a real relationship. I feel safer in my head than I do in my gut or in my heart, but there is so much more. And if my relationship with God is measured only in how much I know, how much I read, how much I’ve learned, and how much I pray—is it a relationship at all? Or is it just the same old carnal striving to attain wisdom without really needing Him?

And is God cold toward how thin I’m spread? Does He watch me rinsing diapers, calming tantrums, juggling a fussy baby, and putting food on the table and think “How dare she slack off on what matters?” Or is it possible that the God who made me also knows me, knows that He made me highly sensitive to sensory stimuli, knows how frayed I am at the end of a day where it felt like someone was always screaming at me—and has compassion toward me?

There is one name of God that I hold especially dear: El-Roi, “the God who sees.” It’s the first time God is given a name in Scripture, and it is given to Him by a woman who is desperate, utterly at the end of herself, when she meets Him. He calls her by name and asks for her story. Then, instead of rebuking her, He guides her. Instead of judging her, He blesses her.

The psalmist says,

The LORD is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.

Psalm 145:18

It is the nearness of the Lord that I yearn for in these long, yet fleeting, days. I need Him to meet me at the end of myself, call me by name, and listen to my story. And so right now—when I don’t have the words or minutes to form paragraphs-long prayers covering adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, and all the other “requirements”—I am choosing instead to call.

In the tiniest of moments, there is still room to call upon the Lord. It takes no more than a breath and a few words: “You are the God who sees.” Sometimes this is a cry for help from the One who sees me in my frustration or my exhaustion; sometimes it’s a proclamation that even in the isolation, I am not alone. Every time I breathe this small and powerful prayer, I can picture my loving God looking down on me, seeing it all in its chaos, and offering me His presence, His compassion, His blessing.

For a moment, I am released from the inside of my head, where I keep my Bible scholarship and my endless questions and my spiritual to-do list. I’m washed in the power and presence of the Spirit of God, where there is freedom.

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:17-18

incomprehensible

Last week in Bible study we covered this rather-difficult-to-put-in-a-nutshell truth: God is incomprehensible.

Several times while I was reading the material, I caught myself thinking, Duh. Of course God is incomprehensible. This is obvious. Why do I need to read about it?

Oh, the irony of thinking Duh in response to the words “God is incomprehensible.” That reaction is exactly why I needed to read about it.

If you know me or are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have made it my life’s work not only to know God as He has revealed Himself in His Word, but also to make His Word accessible to others so they can know Him, too. But God is incomprehensible—and that makes this whole errand seem, at face value, rather foolish. I can know God in a measure sufficient to walk in relationship with Him and to whet my appetite to know Him more, but I will never know Him entirely, even with an eternity ahead of me to try (let alone in this life).

The more I meditated on God’s incomprehensibility over the last week or so, the more I noticed two internal reactions surfacing: first, frustration; then, humility.

Frustration that I have read the Bible front to back many times over, and still barely skimmed the top off its riches of wisdom. That I’ve studied under scholars, both formally and informally, and can’t even hold all of that information in my mind at once—when there is infinitely more out there to learn. That I—a person who finds great security in facts and knowledge, turning every anxiety into a deep-dive of research and logic to soothe my fears—will never know God fully. Not in this life and not in the next. Never.

I know Him enough to know that this isn’t a frightening truth. But it is a frustrating one. I can imagine myself sometime in eternity future, still trying to plumb the depths of His character, and the deeper I go the deeper He gets. I suppose it will be something like trying to travel to the edge of an ever-expanding universe.

But after the hot swell of frustration came that gentle friend, Humility.

The incomprehensibility of God has humbled me to the point of wondering how I have ever made any but the most basic and absolute claims about who God is and what He is like. How we could ever try to color Him inside any lines—denominational, political, cultural—or stuff Him inside any box? I keep thinking of the entire book of Job, in which Job and four secular philosophers wax eloquent on how God would definitely do this and never do that, and God’s response is, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

What if my denomination isn’t the one doing it “right”—it’s just doing it right in one small way, while the others do it right in other ways, together forming a kaleidoscope of glimpses of God’s glory? What if my political values aren’t “right”—they are just one valid way of looking at many complicated issues, and there is more than one way to love my neighbor with my vote? What if my cultural blinders keep me from seeing and accepting and celebrating how differently God might be working in people and places who are very much unlike me?

If I have learned anything by meditating on God’s incomprehensible nature, it’s that I know far less than I think I do about God. I don’t know which church He’d go to, which style of worship He’d choose, which candidate He would vote for, or whether He really still calls people to obedience through dreams and visions. What I do know is that He is good, and that He is King, and that all of us are probably wrong about a humbling portion of the rest of our most-cherished beliefs.

now I'm a mom

I just started going to a ladies’ study through the book None Like Him by Jen Wilkin, and the first chapter is all about the fact that God is infinite—necessitating the acknowledgement that I am not. One of the discussion questions was, “What God-given limitation or boundary do you most want to rebel against?”

I had a hard time with this question at first, not sure if the idea was to choose a commandment I find hardest to obey, or a scientific law I find annoying, or something else entirely. But as I’ve been mulling it over in the days since, I wonder if that’s actually the point of the question: We all have God-given limitations, and what incites rebellion in one of us might be very different from what incites rebellion in another. It’s not a right-answer question, it’s a personal question. A thinking question.

My thinking has pointed me in the direction of my daughter.

Clara is a God-given limitation on my life. Her presence has drawn lines and placed boundaries in places that were once wide-open—boundaries on the clock that delineate naptime and bedtime, boundaries that alter where I can go and when and for how long, boundaries on what I speak and eat and listen to and do, because she is always watching me. Because of her, there are new limits of time and energy on the projects I can take on, the ideas I can bring to fruition, the thoughts I can organize enough to write.

Adjusting to these new limitations has been hard in a way that can feel invisible and isolating. I am often frustrated or depressed to realize that I’m not, in fact, infinite—that I don’t have troves of energy to draw from at the end of a long day; that I need eight hours of sleep even though I “should” be spending that time doing something; that I can’t usually take on the available volunteer roles at my church, or the extra unfilled shifts at my work.

It bothers me when I hear parents say things like, “I wish I’d done ___ before I had kids” or “You’re so lucky you don’t have any kids and can do whatever you want!” I never want my child to feel like a ball and chain, or a reason I didn’t get to have the life I wanted. But the limitations are real, and hard—especially without much of a family or community support system nearby. I was always a creator and a thinker and a doer. Now I’m … a mom?

Yes. Now I’m a mom. And moms are some of the most creative, thoughtful doers in the world—they just tend to be unseen. You can’t hit “publish” on most of what we create, think, and do. Our children are our masterpiece, made by God but shaped and loved and prized by us, His assigned caretakers. We are doing the work of Adam and Eve in Paradise:

Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.

Genesis 2:15

The glorious garden courtyard of the Lord’s presence is no longer found in a place called Eden, but within every home and family that has been won to the Kingdom of Heaven. He dwells in us, in our children. What higher work is there for me in this moment than to “cultivate and keep” my Clara for the glory of my God?

That’s the wonder of God-given limitations: although to my small mind they often look like a bad thing at first glance, in reality they are guard-rails on my path, preventing me from wandering off toward lesser prizes than the crown of righteousness. It’s not that the only way to please God is by becoming a parent; rather, if we want to serve Him fully, we’ll need to submit to His desire and design for our lives—including the parts that appear to “hold us back”—no matter what our family situation, or lack thereof.

God is the infinite One. He intentionally created me to be finite. And sometimes being held back by my God-given limitations, while it can be frustrating or discouraging or downright painful, is exactly what I need.