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

the beginning and the end

My studies over the last few weeks and months have had me turning over the idea of “the beginning and the end” in a variety of ways. This is a familiar phrase from a few different Biblical passages, perhaps most famously the Book of Revelation, when Jesus claims this title for Himself:

“Behold, I am coming soon, and My reward is with Me, to give to each one according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Revelation 22:12-13

Interestingly, the last couple chapters of Revelation act as a mirrored bookend with Genesis 1-2—the beginning and the end of the story. They match, and they tell us so much about what comes in between. Genesis begins a conversation about who God is and how He intended Creation to work; Revelation then offers the final say on who God is and how He intends the New Creation to work. The middle is … messy, full of questions and contradictions and moments of uncertainty, where we watch humanity fail to carry out God’s intentions again and again.

It has me thinking about how we view the Bible generally: As the beginning of the conversation, or the end?

Most of the time, I’ve noticed, we use it as the end. To doubters, we hand verses. To questioners, we respond with verses. To people who would ask us to see something in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, we give verses.

We effortlessly throw verses at anyone who disagrees with us, makes us uncomfortable, or asks us to think about a different possibility—and not because we want to open the floor for discussion or better understanding, but to silence debate, stay in our comfort zones, and have the last word. The Bible becomes a clumsy battering club in our denominational disputes and culture wars, leaving little space for it to act as the precise, soul-piercing blade of the Spirit it claims to be.

And the more time I spend with the Bible, the less convinced I am that we are “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) when we use it in this way.

One of the things I love and hate about being a lifelong believer who grew up in church is that I “know” all the answers—the church answers, that is. This is helpful when it comes to constructing and corroborating doctrine, or avoiding blatant heresies, but it’s much less so when all those clean and pat church answers cloud my ability to recognize the complex and uncomfortable questions God is actually asking.

In other words—I’m well-trained in using the Bible as an end. But what about learning to let it be the beginning?

What happens when we let the Bible speak on its own terms, unfettered by our pre-determined bounds of doctrine? What happens when we let God tell us who He is, uncontained by our neat boxes of divine attributes? What would we learn about who He is, what He is doing, and how He wants us to reflect Him if we stopped trying to tell Him—and everyone else—who He is allowed to be and what He is allowed to ask of us?

Of course, I know there is a vitally important place for right doctrine. It matters that we relate to Yahweh rightly, and we know a lot about how to do that (and how not to do it) from the Scriptures. But an honest reading of the Bible won’t let us hold our “right answers” very tightly. It will challenge them and question them and throw them into turmoil at nearly every turn. It will demand of us to think and feel and undo and rebuild. It will constantly force our conversation-ending verse-wielding back into a place of humility and uncertainty, where there is room for an incomprehensible God and His creative work.

The Bible is an end: It has the authority to define God and tell us His story. It has the true answers we are looking for. But if that’s all it is—if the conversation has no beginning—then we will miss the messy riches of the middle, the parts where we have to wrestle with God and leave marked by the encounter to receive the blessing. We miss the questions it would ask of us. We miss the lifelong journey of discovery and delight it promises, because we were too mired down in making sure we “knew it all.”

I’m noticing that the more I learn, the less I know. As God increases in my perception, I decrease. Every new discovery or epiphany simply expands the universe of what I don’t understand. With every answer comes a thousand more questions.

This, I think, is as it should be.

life lately

Mulling over the fact that it’s mid-November, and there are only six weeks left of another year—why does time seem to make less and less sense the more it goes by? I perpetually feel like my body is dragging my brain a month or two behind it, so lost in thought that it doesn’t comprehend the act of turning the calendar even though it’s my own hand doing it. Wasn’t it just September?

Anyway, I’ll spare you all my endless ability to marvel at the passage of time. I wanted to write something light today—something like a snapshot of my current life, what I’m doing and learning and thinking about.

Doing

• Primarily, spending a lot of time with Clara. She is two years old now and the sweetest and silliest person I know. She is speaking in full sentences, but there are still times when I’m the only one who understands them, and I’m going to be sad when that’s not the case anymore. She is inseparable from Alfie, Pooh, Percy, and Bunny-Llama (her four favorite stuffed animals) and one of our favorite things to do together is sit in the rocking chair singing hymns before bed. “Mo see sah?”

• Working out with Sydney Cummings and my sisters-in-law, via YouTube and group text. We commiserate on our pain as well as celebrate our progress. I’ve always loved working out, but I’m especially loving Sydney’s challenges and seeing myself get stronger and stronger. Clara looks forward to it every day, too!

• Going through the prerequisites to become a “member” at my church. Between you and me, I find the entire concept of church membership rather strange and possibly superfluous, but I suppose it’s the best system we have at the moment and so I’m trying to get over myself so that I can become more involved in and accountable to my church body.

Learning

• You all already know I’m taking Intro to the Hebrew Bible from BibleProject, if you’ve read my recent posts. I’m about 60% of the way through and totally enthralled. If you have even the tiniest interest in the subject, you should try this class. (They also have shorter ones on different topics!)

• I’m also learning everything there is to know about baby and toddler sleep, because why not? I had no idea how my perception of sleep would change when Clara was born—at first, it was the biggest stressor of them all, but now it’s one of my greatest fascinations. Did you know there is an enormous amount of science around how we sleep, even as babies? That there is actually a TON you can do to improve sleep quality—your own as well as your kids’? It’s so cool. I’m currently getting certified as a pediatric sleep specialist because that’s how interested I am in the topic. Yes, my enneagram 5 is showing.

• And one of my weekly(ish) highlights is learning dressage at my horseback riding lessons, which I’ve now been taking for a full year. Even though the progress seems slow at times, I can look back at where I was a year ago and see how much stronger my legs and core are, and how much better my seat has gotten. Many thanks to Pilot, Whiskey, K-Bar, and Halo for their patience with me. ;)

Thinking

• Is the risk of stifling God’s work in the world worth taking Paul’s admonitions about women in the church as changeless commandments for all times and all places? I’ve been reading a lot about what the New Testament teaches about the sexes (and how it aligns with the greater story of the Bible) and I’m starting to worry that we have, as it were, strained out a gnat only to swallow a camel. After all, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)—until you are a woman who wants to teach the Bible, and then the most important (and disqualifying) factor about you is that you are female? I do understand the idea of “equal in value, separate in role,” but even so, we have enough history with “separate but equal” in this country to acknowledge that the philosophy does not actually lead to equality in a practical sense. Even if Paul was referring to all women for all time and in all places (debatable), does God care more that men should never hear the Word of God taught by a woman, or that women should be treated as equal image-bearers and Kingdom ambassadors by men? Are we capturing the spirit of the rule or only following its letter? Are we being Christlike or Pharisee-like?

• It’s a little unnerving, but also encouraging, to consider how I’ve grown as a believer over the past 10 years since I was first in Bible school. Unnerving, because so many of the black-and-white beliefs I held then have shifted or been shaded in with detail; this can make me feel like a heretic at times, until I remember that it’s not heresy to allow the Word of God to correct and reprove the errors in my thinking, even when those errors were taught from a pulpit. But it’s encouraging, too, because even when I’m afraid of being rejected by those who don’t agree with me, I have seen that God is still faithfully walking with me, sharpening me, and molding me into something a little bit more representative of His image. It’s He, not any particular denomination or theological camp, that I am required to follow.