My Single Anniversary

Today marks six years of being single. I'm sure it goes without saying, but this day brings some conflicting emotions. I wouldn't ordinarily keep track, but it happens to coincide with Halloween.  Six years ago, I made one of the most difficult decisions of my life and ended a six year relationship.

If you told me I would be single for the next six years, I might have hoped the world would come to an end first.  Just rapture me.  I can be pretty dramatic.  After all, my heartache is small in a world full of people suffering.

Still, this is one of the reasons why God doesn't give you a play-by-play of what comes next.  (Even though I oftentimes wish he would).  He gives you what you need for today, and he teaches us to trust him.

Honestly, I never would have chosen this.  In fact, I was aching to get married and have a family over six years ago, and I still am.  Looking back, however, I would not change it.  Sometimes God needs to get us alone to make us into who he created us to be.  Sometimes he uses our years of longing to draw us to himself.  And I wouldn't trade it because it is God's story that he is writing, and God writes great stories.

I used to listen to the band U2 a lot while I was growing up, and my favorite song of theirs is "All I Want is You."  Recently, I put that song on:

You say
You want
Diamonds on a ring of gold
You say
You want
Your story to remain untold
But all the promises we make
From the cradle to the grave
When all
I want
Is you.

And I'm always surprised when God speaks to me at times when I least expect it, but in that moment when the song began I knew something.  That in those words was something true that Jesus has been showing me all along.

As humans we are often filled with longing.  I know that for me, I have moments of peace and contentment and stretches of longing and waiting and wanting and fighting to be content in all circumstances.  And in the trusting and longing and waiting, Jesus continues to meet me.  I know that it is through my story that God will make himself and his love known to the people around me.  But what is so unbelievable, it is through this story that he has made so clear that He wants me.  He knows what I say I want, (so many things! and oftentimes "a diamond on a ring of gold" and the man to go with it), but he echoes and repeats that what he wants is me.  And in the end, he desires for me whatever will bring me back to him.

And I share that because maybe you don't know or maybe you have forgotten that He wants you.  At all and any cost, he wants you.  You might want a dozen things: happiness, freedom, love, acceptance, financial stability, healing, comfort, companionship, change, adventure, and maybe God is even one of those desires.  But he wants you.

I loved this song as a teenager because I dreamt of a day when despite all the things I want and want to be and fall short of, amidst all my racing thoughts and jumbled words and promises, someone might hold my shoulders and say, "I know.  I know all this about you.  And I want you."

In six years Jesus has continued to grab me by the shoulders and say just that.  Yes, I still desire to get married and believe that I am called to marriage, but the first and greatest love story of my life is and always will be when the God who created the universe called me his.  Jesus came to suffer and die, and he cried out from the cross with thirst because he wants us and loves us more than we can imagine.

I stood on the edge and peered into his love and I can't see the bottom.  That scares me a little.  It's not containable, it can't be outlined, it's not confine-able.  It's not even full knowable.  And me, well, I've always been a little afraid of very deep water.

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ."
Ephesians 3:17-18

Splinters and Nails

"Did you get a splinter?"
I waited for him to move his hand toward me, showing two splinters embedded into his palm.  He gingerly cradled his hand into his body as a giant tear rolled down his cheek.  He was two and a half with two splinters and very sad about it.

I sighed.  This little boy (let's call him Charlie) choked back a sob.

"I need to take the splinters out so you can feel better," I said calmly, concealing some tweezers, and I felt a little sad too.  He let out a wail with more tears and turned away from me.  Okay.  This was not going to be so easy.  I continued to coax, but he only cried louder and kept his body turned away from me.

Time to text his mom.  She suggested I start with asking Charlie to soak his hand in warm water.

It sounded good in theory.  Charlie looked at the bowl like it contained flesh-eating acid and wailed "No."  He moved further away, keeping his back to me, sobbing louder and holding his hand.  He kept shuffling until he was in a corner of the room

I was reminded of this time I got a piece of a finishing nail embedded in my toe.  I wish I could say that I responded more logically than a two year old, but that was not the case.  I had been working on a home improvement project barefoot (which I don't recommend) and walked into a nail.  If you thought that was a stupid move, I also tried to remove it myself with an X-Acto knife.  Then, finally to top off this string of illogical decisions, I convinced myself it did not actually break off in my foot, and so I ignored it.  Until it became infected.

Like I wrote in a recent post, spending time with two year olds has made me recognize how much they remind me of my relationship with God.

Sometimes when it comes to sin in my life I run to my Heavenly Father and ask him to take it out.  Other times, I am like a two year old with a splinter (or a stubborn adult with a nail in her foot).  I might try to "be good" on my own or simply ignore the problem altogether.

Unfortunately, without God working in my life, sin doesn't make its way out like a splinter sometimes does.  If I'm not following after Jesus, ignoring what is ugly in my life just makes the ugly thing worse, and the infection spreads.

Sometimes I want to think about how Jesus brings me peace and how God has a plan to redeem his  creation, but I forget that restoring what is broken means extracting what is evil or shameful or broken in us.  And I can't cradle it to my chest and turn from God.  I need to turn to him and trust him.  That is what repentance is all about, turning from sin and turning to Jesus because he alone has the power to heal us, to save us.

In case you were wondering how the splinter story ends...  Charlie's dad came home and took the splinters out because after all, good fathers take care of things like that.

"Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."  Philippians 1:6

"Repent then, and turn to God, so that your sins will be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord."  Acts 3:19

Avoiding God

I usually struggle to sit down and paint because it's very hard for me to truly create art without putting my whole self into the process.  Good art comes from a place of being fully open and immersed in making it, and sometimes I just don't want to be fully immersed in anything.  It's easy to live on the surface even of my own thoughts.

Speaking of living on the surface...

Some days I avoid God.

Which is crazy because he never leaves me so I'm pretty much holding hands with someone but refusing to make eye contact or have a conversation.  So ridiculous.

But I know that God knows me so completely and sometimes I just don't want to get really deep with someone who knows me that well.  Some days I want to do the, "Good morning.  Nice weather we're having." kind of dialogue.  Sometimes I just don't want him to point to the bandage on my heart and say, "I gotta clean that wound out."  Or for him to get a close look  at the sin and pride and selfishness and fear that is still in me and hear what he has to say about it.

Have you ever had the friend who skips the small talk and starts asking the really personal questions?  Or who knows you're about to cry and asks you about it?  Well, God is totally that friend.  Sometimes I just want to be left alone. 

But he wants to transform us. Sometimes I want to put off his work of transformation in me because sometimes it hurts and sometimes I am a puddle of tears and sometimes I don't want to see the ugly things I know are there.  Sometimes I've so carefully put myself together like a Jenga tower that I know one wrong move and I'll come undone.

He wants me to spend time with him.  He wants us to spend time with him.  To be still and know that he is God.  To listen in prayer as well as speak.  To rest in his presence.  When I anticipate a real conversation I'm not in the mood for, I have a tendency to fill the silence with nervous chatter.  Some days I fill the time with busy tasks.  And now that my life has slowed down, I've become so aware of how addicted to the noise of life I've become because I no longer "need" to be busy but I still choose it.

Even still, he waits for me.

Because love is patient.



"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."
Psalm 139:23-24

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

Matthew 11:28

"He says, 'Be still, and know that I am God;  I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.'"

Psalm 46:10

While Baking with a Two Year Old

I spend a lot of time with two-year olds for someone who isn't a mom.

One thing that has been very funny and interesting about spending so much time with two-year olds is how much they remind me of my relationship with God.  I cannot speak for everyone, but oftentimes my relationship with God resembles a two-year-old girl and her dad who loves her very much.

Have you ever baked cookies with a two year old?  It's adventurous or insane or a little bit of both.  Recently, I asked my niece Emma if she could help me make chocolate chip cookies.  Her excitement told me that this idea was totally worth whatever trouble I was signing up for.  She immediately began pushing a chair over by herself to stand at the counter.  She was eager to help and wanted to follow my directions.  She tried breaking the eggs but the first egg ended up missing the bowl and then she straight up dropped the entire egg shell in the cookie mixture.  She was just SO EXCITED that whenever I wasn't actively engaging her with a task she took initiative.  She tried scooping more sugar by herself into the mixing bowl or sticking her freshly-licked fingers back in the cookie dough.

I was constantly finding ways to include her while simultaneously cleaning up the mess and keeping her from falling off the chair.  She couldn't read the recipe or measure the ingredients.  It took twice as much time for us to make and made twice as much of a mess.  Still, when her mom tried the first cookie warm from the oven, Emma proudly proclaimed, "me and Auntie Eri made these."  And she was right, and I got to share a memory of my life with a little girl I love very much.

I had once described to a friend that I feel like living life for God probably looks more like a little kid baking with her dad.  (Even though I've never actually baked with my dad.). I explained how just like baking with a small child, God doesn't need us and could do it faster and with less of a mess but he wants to include us in his plan and enjoys it.  He will make sure that the cookies come out right.  We cannot mess up his plan even if we mess up.  Let's face it, we just aren't that powerful.

Recently, I heard a sermon that made a similar analogy of a toddler going to work with his dad who was a chief architect and builder of the most magnificent sky scraper ever seen.  The toddler brings his toy hammer and begins to hammer at the structure, and the father is overjoyed to have the child he loves spend the day with him.

It's easy to read metaphors like those and think that the point is what we do is pointless.  But the real point is: you are loved and valued by God like a loving parent values his or her own child.  He takes delight in you and wants to spend time with you.  He wants you to share in his plan to love people and draw them closer to himself.

He invites us in.
To spend time with him.
To join in his work.
To be his child.

"See what great love our Father has lavished on us that we should become children of God..."
-1 John 3:1

In a world where we strive to define our identity, God reminds us that he created us and  calls us his beloved children.