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

on coping with the Bible

I’ve just started the “Introduction to the Hebrew Bible” course from the BibleProject (it’s completely free, and extremely high quality in both content and production, if you are interested in taking it!), and I decided that as a verbal/written processor, my best bet for retaining what I learn in the course will be to write something about it as often as I can. So here’s a scribbling of thoughts from Session 1, titled, “What on earth is the Hebrew Bible?”

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I’ve been talking to an old friend and longtime spiritual mentor about various theological and Biblical questions lately, and one idea that he raised—and I keep thinking about—is that so much of pastoral ministry can often be spent “undoing” what adults were taught about God, Jesus, and/or the Bible as children. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that were not the case? What would it look like to teach children who God is and how to handle His Word in a way that wouldn’t need to be deconstructed later?

Tim Mackie echoed the sentiment in Session 1 of the class and I liked the way he put it: Christian children’s media is often the clearest revelation of the “coping strategies” we use to deal with our discomfort around the hard parts of the Bible. We rewrite Old Testament narratives as hero-villain stories or moralistic tales, or we turn the Bible into a theological encyclopedia, or we use it to proof-text doctrines we’ve already decided are correct, or we cherrypick the inspirational bits to put on calendars and coffee mugs—all to avoid dealing with the actual text as a whole.

Why? Because the text as a whole is incredibly complex, uncomfortable, difficult, and often not safe for work. Why would God choose to reveal Himself through a Bible like that?

But He does. And when we don’t accept that—and Him—on His terms, we inadvertently produce a lot of Christians who know Bible stories, understand morality, and can bend any passage into a personal application, but who don’t know God or understand His purpose for humanity.

Let me speak for myself: By all the typical metrics, I had the ideal upbringing to produce a Biblically-literate, faithful Christian adult. My parents are both born again, our family attended church very regularly and was extensively involved in church ministry, I went to Sunday school and AWANA every week from toddlerhood on, and I even chose to go to Bible school for a year after high school. I do not remember a time before I started following Jesus. And for all of this, I am so grateful (though still probably not half as grateful as I should be, since we all tend to take our upbringings for granted as “normal,” having known no different).

At the same time, I can look back and admit, with some embarrassment, that there were/are still some enormous gaps in my true knowledge of who God is and what He has done. Being able to pass the test isn’t always the same as understanding the material.

For example, four or five years ago I went through a dark and difficult period of time involving a lot of fear, loss, and grief. In that shadowy valley, I discovered for the first time that I had been leaning on the heresy of “prosperity theology”—and I didn’t even realize it until it gave way! I would have sworn up and down that I didn’t subscribe to any kind of prosperity doctrine, but the truth was, I had internalized years of learning Bible stories as moral tales, ultimately leading me to subconsciously believe that if I was a good enough Christian, God would protect me from pain.

The catastrophic loss of that core belief, even though it was one I had never formally acknowledged, utterly rocked my relationship with God for a time.

The good news is, I do see strides being made toward the creation of better Bible resources for children. Clara has a book that attempts to encompass the story of the Bible in a short, easy-to-grasp form, which is something I don’t remember having at her age—although it skips straight from the exodus to Bethlehem, which leaves out a whole lot of material that it would seem God considers important. Kevin DeYoung’s “The Biggest Story” Bible Storybook is thorough, beautifully illustrated, and fun to read, if a bit episodic in nature. I haven’t yet read his other book, The Biggest Story: How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden, but I’m hoping to give that one a try soon.

And as I contemplate the Herculean task of trying to teach my own child about God and the Bible, I can see why it’s so difficult. Kids are rather black-and-white thinkers, and it’s hard to imagine trying to teach them nuanced concepts that even adults struggle with. Even with all the caveats and disclaimers and shades of gray in the world, we tend to categorize information in pretty simple mental boxes—agree/disagree, safe/unsafe, good/bad, right/wrong.

The longer I study the Bible, the more inadequate those dichotomies seem. A mammoth collection of ancient, divinely-inspired texts that reveals a peephole view of God’s incomprehensible nature and His plan to rescue Creation just doesn’t fit into something as banal as “good/bad.”

And maybe that’s what it takes: Time, and repetitive, fearless exposure to the whole Bible. A ruthless rejection of the coping strategies we use to keep ourselves comfortable with (and protected from) the Word of God.

We all have to face the hard parts eventually. What if, instead of trying to turn the Bible into a safe book, we made our homes and churches into places that are safe to confront potentially threatening questions?

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.