Link Love

The Real Problem with Female Masturbation I'm linking to this because I'm so grateful these subjects are being talked about more and more. I spoke at an event a few weeks ago and was astonished to find that most of the followup conversations I had with the women there were on sexual issues that they had never been taught about. It shouldn't have shocked me, but it did. Friends, leaders, women—we MUST create space for these conversations. We must shush the prude in us that doesn't want to say those words aloud and bend down in the dirt with our sisters to give them the living water. Nathan Bingham and Mathew Sims both had great articles up this week on whether it's a sin to retweet or share a compliment on social media.

There has never been a time in my memory when I have not wrestled with depression and condemnation. I am less prone to worry, anxiety, and panic than I ever was, but Simon and Garfunkel's Hello, darkness, my old friend, is a common refrain in my life. Zach Lee is one of the pastors at my church and for as long as he's been there, he's been honest about his struggles in this area. I'm grateful for his words here and hope they encourage you if you share the weakness.

If you were on Twitter at all this week #ERLCsummit was trending. I was a bit surprised as it was the hashtag from a small conservative conference meant to train Southern Baptist pastors and leaders in ministry. I watched many of the talks on the live-stream because they were on sex, homosexuality, pornography, and marriage—and I think we're in times when it's more important than ever to be thinking biblically about these issues instead of culturally. The reason the hashtag was trending so high, though, was because of the backlash it was receiving from the self-described progressive Christians. While I do think there was some unfortunate phrasing and less than apt metaphors made by some of the speakers, I was grieved by the reactions of some progressives. That said, I appreciated Wesley Hill's response as well as Chelsea Vicari's Women, Sexuality and the Southern Baptist's ERLC Summit. Every time a Twitter-storm happens on these issues, I'm reminded of what a great—and limited—tool Twitter is. And I'm freshly aware of our need to be in season and out, to live life face to face with real struggles and strugglers. 140 characters is not enough to disciple someone in truth.

Some time ago someone asked me, "Do you even want to be married?" My response surprised me: "No. I mean, I want to love Jesus. If living single with those girls in that house makes me love Jesus more than being married, no, I don't want to be married." I've thought about it so many times since then because the truth is, I DO want to be married and I DO think marriage would be good and hard in the right ways. But the deeper truth is that today I DO love my singleness because it is a gift from the Lord and I honestly see it as such. I appreciate Ben Stuart's thoughts here.

A Month from My Wedding Day

A month ago today was to be my wedding day.

I was never the girl pouring over scrapbooks of wedding ideals or scrawling my crush's names in margins on notebooks, I am far too pragmatic for such things. I wore a ring and I planned a wedding.

But today I am not wearing a ring and passed through March 16 with one long sigh and then sleep.

I suppose sometime the shame will lift, the feeling of failure will abate, the questions I ask of God and myself will be quelled. But for today they hang heavy, shrouding all of me. I am strangely okay with the hiddenness of today—though I long for the joy that comes in the morning.

He must increase, I must decrease.

. . .

Sayable has always been a place of vulnerability and transparency. If you know me in flesh, you know I am no over-sharer—quite the opposite, I must be mined for information. But here, on Sayable, I have no shame, or haven't. The whole point of Sayable is to say; yet the past months have been a time of shame, fear, questions, and quiet, and this has bled into all my writing, especially here.

Some say, "No need to go public," and some argue, "No one needs to know anyway!" But this past week I read yet another account of a man fallen from ministry and think to myself, "If we cared less about what people thought, and more about ministering through our weaknesses, I wonder if we'd ever get so high we had a place to fall from?"

The thing about ministering through weakness is you have to go straight through it, diving, like the poet Adrienne Rich said, into the wreck. But diving through and into is painful and revealing and I'm afraid I may still fall in the meantime.

There is no great theology to be found in the todaying of my life. It is the punctualness of my inner clock, waking to the same shame and sadness, the fear that because God is enough, all I ever get will be God—and will He be enough? Really enough? I know He will be, but if I don't ask the question, I won't remember the answer four-hundred times a day, and I need to remember the answer.

What is diving if not one long fall? Knowing I am caught and held, amidst the wreckage, among the damage, to find the treasure.

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. Adrienne Rich

Righteousness and Peace

I was reading Psalm 85 this morning and it spoke of how righteousness and peace kiss each other and I thought, "How beautiful." Under the reign of God, justice and peace join together, are for one another, perfectly complementing one another. There is no hierarchy of one over the other. They simply are, and then they meet, and they join in intimacy.

God, help there be more evidence of that in my life.

Keeping Your Heart and Giving it Away

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Proverbs 4:23

It's a misquoted, misused, and abused little proverb that has given a lot of people a lot of heartache. Here's all it means:

Life happens, it springs forth out of you and me and everyone we know. Life is beautiful and messy and complicated and confusing and joyful. And it can be all those things without all those things being wrong or evil.

So keep your heart, know it, put it daily before the Lord, because you will create beauty with it, you will mess things up with it, and you will complicate life with it. But our hearts are not eternal and these angsts of life are not either.

When you guard your heart, guard its greatest treasure, Jesus alone. And trust that He is doing all the guarding necessary too.

Completion

I'm trying to be careful to not write much about my relationship with a good man. I know the seeping envy that hearing too much of that talk can do to hearts. I am my brother's keeper, and my sister's, and I want to steward well. The truth is this fall has been one of shaping, shifting, breaking, filling, hurting, misunderstanding, loving, trusting, and hoping. I have a feeling marriage is all of those same things, only fuller and harder.

My hands have been so filled with good things over the years that I have found it difficult to open them and choose another good thing. Paul said singleness was better and that soothed me for a long time, pacifying my desire for a partnership and love. It soothed me so well that I found such deep substance in my singleness after my cries wore off. Not always perfectly—there were still times I longed for someone, anyone really, to be mine. But most of my time I enjoyed my freedom to think, be, say, do whatever I felt full license from the Holy Spirit to do. I felt full.

Fullness is good until you find yourself trying to fit just one more thing, especially if it is of particular importance to fit in, like a boyfriend or fiancee or husband sort of importance. Then that nasty full feeling makes you feel your selfishness and gluttony in sickening ways. You come face to face with how very much you've been building a kingdom that looks like Christ's, but using your own cook and cleaner and interior designer. His kingdom, my throne.

Last week in a meeting with a couple who've taken us under their wing and love, I was asked, "What do you want? Deep down, what do you want?"

The answer I gave was cushioned and caveated by "When I let myself," and "But I don't think it's possible," but deep down what I want is just a life of simplicity. One where I am not standing behind a blog façade, where I greet my neighbors over the fence, and can peaches and keep my front door open and unlocked. That is what I want.

The next question he asked was: "Why can't you just do that?"

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All this week I've been paying very close attention to what I want, really want, and here's why: because I know and trust the Holy Spirit within me, I know that my deepest wants and desires bring Him joy, and if they bring Him joy, they bring me joy.

There are so many things on the surface that compete for my joy, things that pacify me, or tide me over, but the truth is God created me for His glory, so something about what I love naturally brings him joy.

I know this is meandering and may not make much sense, but I want to help myself and you understand that what we want deep down is not marriage or love or partnership or singleness. Those things are good, but they all come with a price. What we want deep down is for our joy to be full—and Christ wants that too, He said so. What brings us joy and completes that joy is to remain in His love.

I have not remained in His love in recent years. I have known His love theologically, but there has still been a part of me that has eschewed His love and groped instead for the cross—and not His cross, but mine. The cross I thought He was asking me to bear by being single or ministering beyond my capacity or choosing a life I didn't necessarily want, but thought He wanted from me.

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Life is simpler here at home. Oh, there are complex things here, but the life people live is simple, robust and yet unencumbered by so much of what I have found myself surrounded by in recent years. Here I remember who I am in the deepest parts of me and I am loved and my joy is made full.

It is joy that fills us to complete, not duty, calling, or the expectations of others.

What do you want?

Live and Let Love

The thing about dying, I have heard, is your life passes before your eyes. All the choices you have made and all the ones made for you, a clear succession of days, weeks, months, and moments—encapsulated in a second. A rush of every fear, joy, hope, and terror you've ever felt. The thing about singleness is that the best way to live it is to live it hard, to die, yes, but to live, really live. The unmarried person is concerned with how to please the Lord and the Lord is the shepherd of the widest pasture known. The thing about marriage, I've heard, is the best way to live it is to die a thousand deaths, over and over and over. To lay every dream, desire, and fortune at the feet of a tangible other—an other who has dreams, desires, and fortunes of his own. It is an invitation to come and die.

In all my years of singleness I saw the portion before me, wide open pastures of expectation and anticipation; sometimes riddled with fear of the unknown and sometimes full of risk and reward and sometimes frustration at what seemed to never be. I teetered on the edge so many times because one wrong move seemed to set the course for my life. Come live, my Savior said, come to me and trust me: LIVE. Open wide your heart, your abandon, your treasures, your lot, and live. Come live with me and be my love, like the poet said.

In only a few months of anothering, I see only the portion behind me. My life passing before my eyes, all my fears, regrets, joys, expectations, and I see God bidding me to come and die. I uncurl my fingers from the gold of what I have built and what I have trusted in, what works for me, and what dreams have come. Come die with me and be my love, the vows could say.

Why are you writing this on Sayable, you are asking me, I know. Keep this stuff between you two. Tell us only the joys and hopes, the good things we dream of our futures. But I cannot, my friends, because I promised you Sayable would be about the gospel and this is the gospeling done in me today. Today, this week, the gospel has asked that I lay down me, all of me, every part of me I have crafted and found pleasure in, the parts I have imagine that God Himself finds pleasure in—I lay it down.

Here is a small comfort: I imagine in those moments before dying, when your life is passing before your eyes, how much life can fit in a moment? It may feel a lifetime, but a moment is so small. What you realize you are losing is so minute, so temporal, and I find solace in that tonight. My rights? My dreams? My preferences? Mere vapors, here today, gone before tomorrow.

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Luke 9:23-24

The Love of Laundry

I used to dream of canning peaches and hanging laundry on lines, letting it billow in the northern breeze. I was set on a life of simplicity, kneading bread dough by hand, peeling apples at a wooden table marked and scarred by time and use. Reading storybooks aloud to calico-clad babies and lighting candles every night on the dinner table. This was the life of which I dreamed and felt within my grasp. It never materialized and I felt the ache of that deep in my gut years over and over. Sand slips more easily through fingers than through an hourglass and it is so very hard to hold time for long. I signed leases and moved houses and states and tables. I forgot those dreams or buried them beneath convenience and the fear of missing out on real life while I waited for dream life to happen.

I spent years placing my hand over the ache of want, stilling my heart of its desires, trying to live well in today. Aren't we such foolish creatures? To think we can capture a vapor and own it for any measure of time?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

No bridal showers would bring me the things that made a home so I dove deep into thrift stores and bargain bins, my home made of second-hands and hand-me-downs. It feels lived in but I wonder how well I have lived in it? Someone else marred my table-top, someone else chipped my favorite bowl, someone else created my art.

But this is the life I love. This reusable life. It reminds me life is a vapor and time is short and things are falling apart and I am too.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Richard Wilbur wrote,

The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, "Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

I have never forgotten that poem or the autumn day in college when I first read it. Love Calls Us to the Things of This World and it means we must love the vapor too because it is the stuff of life—the laundry, the rising steam, the clear dances done only in the sight of heaven. We love the marred table and the calico clothes and the lit candles because these are not the meaning of life, but they help us remember the work, the dirt, the mess, the grit of life.

Convenience is not our friend, my brother and my sister, ease is not our aim.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A threshold waits in front of me, a coming home of sorts. Marriage and life with a man so wholly different than me and so wholly loving to me, it makes me wonder how you start fresh with so many years behind you. So many scars and mars, chips and cracks—how do you make new with so much old?

I don't have an answer to that friends, but I know love does call me to the things of this world. It is an angst I wrestle with daily in these months. How to be distracted, my attentions divided by good things? Without love I am a clanging symbol, a noisy gong. And love is work. All of love is work. Beautiful work, like canned peaches and billowing laundry, rising steam, lit candles, but still work.

Let there be nothing on earth but the work of love, even if some days it looks only like laundry.

A Profound Mystery

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Ephesians 5:31-33

You don't reach the ripe old age of 30 without having worn sixteen bridesmaid dresses to sixteen weddings. (Actually, seventeen, I wore the black one in two weddings.) Standing beside seventeen women as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the guy facing them, as well as walking through countless relationships with nearly all of my friends, you learn a thing or two.

This morning, as yet another friend and I were talking about how to handle a situation with a guy she recently started dating, it occurred to me that there would be much more clarity in dating relationships if we really took the "profound mystery of Christ & the Church" seriously. That illustration is about marriage, yet, but shouldn't that be the aim of dating?

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Christ pursues us from the foundation of the earth. He doesn't wait until it is less risky or for us to show interest in Him. Because of this, the Church knows Christ's love for us is true and will not be depleted when the going gets rough.

Men, do not wait for a riskless situation, pursue anyway. Women, don't make it difficult for him to pursue you.

Christ never wavered in His sacrificial offering. He wept in the garden, but did what His Father asked Him to do. Because of this, the Church trusts that Christ's word is true and trustworthy. There is no question or doubt about His intentions.

Men, state your intentions, simple though they may be, right up front. Women, trust a man who does this and believe him without second guessing.

Christ spreads wide the arms of love. He doesn't withhold until we are lovable, understandable, or beautiful. Because of this, we can take our unloveliness to Christ with confidence. He sees past our blemishes and we are lovely because He loves us. We love Him because He first loved us.

Men, look past culture's demands for a perfect wife, love what the world calls unlovely. Women, you become lovely because you are loved first by Christ—rest in that loveliness.

Christ intercedes on our behalf. He does not stop going to the Father in our defense and for our petitions. Because of this, we know Christ will fight for us. He will not allow anything to break us beyond His capable sight, so we trust Him.

Men, don't give up on a woman because she is difficult to understand; seek the Holy Spirit for understanding. Women, be clear about what you need or how you feel, without making it difficult for him to meet your needs—trust him and the Lord's work in him.

Christ reminds us of our sufficiency in Him. He doesn't make us wonder if we are enough or too much. Because of this, the Church can trust that every difficult and beautiful thing will be used for the fruition of His kingdom—nothing is wasted, nothing is too much, nothing is not enough.

Men, find your sufficiency in Christ, not your girl's approval, respect, or admiration of you. Women, trust your "not enoughness" and "too muchness" to the finished work of the Cross, and know that in your weaknesses He is made great.

It is a profound mystery, I think, Christ and the Church, marriage, all of it. But I think it could be a little more profound here on earth if we really took Paul's illustration to heart.

This is Not a Blog

I received many requests to make this blog into a typographic poster. I didn't have time to give it some real artistic flair, but if you're interested, these are free to download. Just click on them and the pdf will open print-ready. If you print them, they are sized at 24/36" and I would recommend getting them printed on 100# text weight or 80# cover weight paper (your printer will know what that means). These are free, please don't alter or sell them in any way. Spread the love!

What Love Is This?

Love is patient: it waits, it stills, it quiets before speaking.

With patience a ruler may be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone. Proverbs 25:15

Love is kind: it coats its words in gentleness, extending the hand of graciousness to every person, deservedly or not.

Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body. Proverbs 16:24

Love does not envy: it finds contentment in today, rejoices with others who have what it wants for itself.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. I Timothy 6:6

Love does not boast: it brings nothing but the cross, it is built of humility and the knowledge that it is only a steward.

As it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” I Corinthians 1:31

Love is not arrogant: it assumes the best of everyone, deserved or not, never stops learning & is patient while others learn too.

I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think. Romans 12:3

Love is not rude: love holds its tongue when there is an opportunity to best or beat another with words.

When words are many, transgression is not lacking, but whoever restrains his lips is prudent. Proverbs 10:19

Love doesn't insist on its own way: it shows the best way is the way to the cross through the cross.

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6

Love is not irritable: it doesn't get annoyed, pissed, frustrated, or angry. It is not "owed" anything.

Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools. Ecclesiastes 7:9

Love is not resentful: it keeps no record of wrongs, when disappointed by someone, it forgives quickly, generously.

If one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Colossians 3:13

Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing: it weeps at the sight of brokenness, dissension, disunity, and gossip.

You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor: I am the Lord. Leviticus 19:16

Love rejoices with the truth: it drops everything and sells everything to find truth instead of relying on what meets the eye.

The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. Matthew 13:45-46

Love bears all things: it upholds the weight others can't hold, defending the defenseless and turning the other cheek.

But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. Matthew 5:39

Love believes all things: it errs on the side of trust, not in man, but in God.

And those who know your name put their trust in you. Psalm 9:10

Love hopes all things: it never stops hoping for the resolution and reconciliation of all things under heaven.

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. II Corinthians 5:18

Love endures all things: it holds up for the sake of the gospel, enduring persecution, gossip, slander, & injustice.

May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus. Romans 15:5

Love never ends: it wakes up every day determined to do it all over again.

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul. Psalm 143:8

This is a series of tweets I wrote today based from I Corinthians 13. Mostly I was preaching to myself, but thought they might encourage some others. 

OIL, WATER, and the LIES we tell ourselves

I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet. Sara Groves

Here’s what happened:

A friend told me something and I believed her. I do that. I’m a believing, trusting sort of person. The thing is, what she told me was only half true. Not half true to her—she told me the truth as best as she could, but it was only half of the whole truth. I didn’t know the other parties involved, so what could I do? I believed her. This is what friends do.

But the water has sunk to the bottom and the oil has risen to the top and with it all the floating particles that are still coated with enough water that I can’t look into that cup without seeing more of the whole story.

And my heart is sick.

Because her true-to-her story was only half of the story and now I know the other half, and the other half is my friend too, and when you love oil and water, even if they hate each other, what can you do? You believe them both with as much grace as you can muster. This is what good friends do.

But at some point the whole thing gets shaken up again and it takes a while for things to settle and while it’s still shaken you feel sicker and sicker still because there are always three sides to every story, hers, his, and the horrible, awful, honest truth. With a choice so divided, what can you do? You choose truth. This is what the truest friend does.

To choose truth, though, means to lose other things, namely trust.

Today trust was lost and I mourn that. I mourn it so hard and so deeply because I have been lied to, though neither of them did the lying.

I was the one lying all along. And that is the most heartbreaking of it all.

Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.”

I’m stuck on that today because I didn’t live quietly and I listened to the lies. But the lies were of my own making and they said something like this: You are big enough to handle the heartbreaking details of someone’s life all by yourself. You are big enough to have an opinion on lives that aren’t your own. You are big enough to discern truth from lies and from opinions and cries.

The truth is that I am not a part of the problem or the solution here; I am only a particle that floated to the top of his story, coated in the residue of her story. Just one small particle.

And if God did not give me the grace to handle this (at least without some amount of bellyaching), then it is probably best for me to simply bow out.

BROKEN HEARTS and 17 HOURS

Did I ever tell you about the time I listened to the same ten songs on repeat for 17 hours?

You either have to be crazy to do this or completely indifferent, and I might have been both at the same time.

Here's what I know though: it takes 17 hours to get over a broken heart if the soundtrack is right.

The drive was a familiar one, I'd done it countless times during my years living in Tennessee. I would say I could do it in my sleep, but in fact I probably did do it near sleep sometimes.

I had it timed to perfection, stopping at all the same gas stations, breathing more easily when I crossed under Halfway Blvd (because it meant it was my halfway point too), knowing how many cups of coffee it took (four grande Starbucks espresso-blend) and at which point I would feel nearest to tears of exhaustion there and back.

This drive and I, we were tight. After the second time I did it, I began to look forward to it. It meant 17 hours of uninterrupted quiet. 17 hours alone. 17 hours of audio books or not. It meant 17 hours to reflect over the past few weeks and the few weeks to come. I began to treasure the drive.

But never was it as healing as it was that trip in January. I left the cold north, crossing borders and mountains, passing giant roadside crosses that signify Bible-Belt territory, back down south where my heart felt its brokenness more tenderly. Back to where everything reminded me that something hadn't worked. Back to where I felt the sting of failure more than I'd ever felt it before. How little I knew about failure at 25 though. (How little I still know.)

I put that cd in and one after another those 10 tracks worked out the kinks in my heart. They massaged the knots and tightened loose screws, they identified fears and roots of fears, they told me to pick up my head, that the end of something good didn't mean the end of everything good.

It was the first time that I took Exit 25 off I75 south that there weren't tears of angst and exhaustion, but tears of healing and finishing.

17 hours is what it takes to heal my broken heart if the soundtrack is right.

(aerography)

DAY JOB

This is my day job.

This is also my dream job. As in, if you had asked me what I was hoping to do when I was sloughing my way through a double major and four minors in college, I would have neatly packaged a non-existing job description and it would have looked nearly identical to what I spend my days doing now. 

I love doing what I do so much that I keep tacking on more and more of it through freelancing, until, like I wrote in an email this week, "My right brain gets kicked into a shriveled wad."

So that's where I am right now.

The creative part of me, the part that dreams up designs and implements them, the part of me that loves paper and tactile art, the part of me that words fall out of more quickly than I can piece them together—that very big part of me—it's weary.

Especially because as much as I'd like to only work out of my right brain, there are left brained tasks to be done, taxes, administrative work, my email inbox (gah), printing orders, etc.

I've been thinking about Augustine's disordered loves the past few weeks, partly because I know my love is disordered and a mess, but mostly because I cannot solve or resolve anything.

It's not my job. Not even my day job.

SLEEPING ALONE

I wake slowly, face-down, stretching my legs, cupping my toes over the end of the bed, feeling my calf muscles pull and retract. My head is lying flat, on 400 thread count white sheets. I am facing left, the breeze from my open window setting across my face, the window's linen blind pulsing steadily in the same breeze.

I spread my right arm out feeling the empty space in my bed. My heart sinks.

There has never been anyone in this space, but I still feel the void all the same. My bed has never been shared, I have never been cuddled too tightly, or felt the aching space of an evening argument which keeps two hearts and bodies apart. I have never had to fight anyone for the covers and when I am cold, I am cold alone.

I stretch my left arm out, toward the window, rest my hand on the screen. My heart breaks a little more every day. It breaks itself and heals itself, and it does it all under the watchful, loving eye of God, so I am not alone, though I feel alone.

I used to worry I would not be married by 24. Then I worried I would not be married by 29. Now I worry I will never come to terms with always being alone. It is a hard thing to share one's bed with no one and it is a hard thing to wake every morning feeling more undesirable than the night before.

Friends think they are consoling when they say marriage is hard work (who among us thinks it is not?) or when they complain that she steals all the covers or he snores or she likes to cuddle and he only like sex. They think this is consoling.

But it is not.

Because the night comes slowly, every blessed day, like the poet, Richard Wilbur, said, a punctual rape, same in, same out; but morning comes quickly and I spread my arm across this empty space feeling aloneness more than ever before.

Fabs Harford wrote about Fasting from Intimacy and this resonates in me because there is no monster inside of me more ravenous than the one who craves intimacy. I lean across the table in loud restaurants and ask hard questions. I hug tightly without discretion or discrimination. I touch the hands and shoulders of people I love, and sometimes barely know. I lean in. I do this because I am starving for intimacy and I am unafraid of that monster. I know he can kill me. But I know I will starve without his hunger.

Singleness is a beautiful thing and when I take account of the past decade I see a faithfulness to its beauty in my life in a way that only comes from grace, but I also see a succession of tiny funerals every step of the way. A cemetery full of them. Adventures I have had alone. Mornings I have woken alone. Moments I have reveled in alone. Each one bringing joy in its experience and mourning in its completion.

Life is meant to be shared and marriage is not the only way to share life, I know this, but the mystery of two flesh becoming one is a mingling that cannot be known by me, with my bed all to myself, 400 thread count sheets, open window, and quiet morning. And I mourn this.

Tim Keller preached a sermon called Jesus, Lord of the Wine, and he teaches how Christ is the Lord of the wedding feast, how His first miracle was in a wedding, turning water into wine and how this is a sign to us that He is for our joy. And not just our eventual joy, as the old Calvinists would have us believe, but for our present joy, our joy here on earth, in empty beds, empty hearts, and single flesh.

I meditate on this morning before I break my night's fast.

The hunger in my belly a reminder that there is a feast before me, whether it is the feast I envision for my life or not, it is a feast that brings joy somehow and in some way. And there are mornings when it will be hard, like this one. There will be nights when my fast from intimacy is painful and I shake my fist at God, or ignore Him altogether.

But He is for my joy and joy is there too, in the song of birds outside my window, the Roman blind shivering in the breeze, and the 400 thread count sheets, covers all to myself. There is joy there—a small, but ebbing joy.

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THE ORIGINAL LOVE

You might have noticed a curious absence from my story last week. Or you might not have noticed at all (Narcissism is one of my greatest qualities, so I'm always concerned with you being concerned with me.). The absence was this: the Love of God for me.

And it was no mistake that kept it out. That was intentional.

Perhaps it was because I was so intolerable as a child and teen, or perhaps it was because being tolerable wasn't even enough, but I spent much of my time sent to my room or grounded or put away from people and things I loved. I grew to equate me being a disappointment with distance from those from whom I wanted love most.

If you are grown now, you know that feeling like a disappointment is a nagging itch that won't be scratched (or perhaps your greatest quality is ego, in which case I will pray for us both). I think that failure, or even fear of failure, is the mercenary messenger sent to grind us into harder work or hope for heaven. Either one will do. If I fail you, it is only a short reminder to you that I am still human, but it is a long reminder in a slew of reminders to me that I have been sent to my room with no dinner.

This morning I worked from home, finishing a project that's been good for me in the work-with-your-hands sort of way. From original sketches to scanned images to vector files to letterpress machinery to my kitchen table this morning for the final brushes of watercolor before mounting on mats—it has been a labor of love, but labor nonetheless. Piles of prints with Psalm 18:19 on them, "He rescued me because He delights in me."

Half are being hung on the walls of girls we've rescued from the red-light district in India and the other half are our gift to donors who helped rescue them.

It is very easy for me to believe that those girls have been rescued because God delights in them.

It is also very easy for me to believe that our donors who have sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears to rescue, are delighted in by God.

My roommate drinks her tea this morning while I am bent over the cards with my paintbrush. "Don't forget that that's about you too" she says and taps the prints. And I look up at her because it never occurs to me that God delights in me.

He saved me, yes.
He chose me, yes.
He sanctifies me, yes.
He teaches me, yes.
He pursues me, yes.

But delights in me?

Draws me near to him?

Loves being around me?

Surely not.

I'm still very good at lining up my disappointing behavior and coming up with reasons why I ought to be grounded for life, yet all the while He's saying, "Come close, come near, be near."

I write to a friend the other day that the beauty of progressive sanctification is that "there isn't a part of yesterday's me that doesn't contribute to today's me. My hordes of sin, my mistakes aplenty and the proof of them only show that there's work to be done."

It seems to me that the best place for that work to be done is close to my Maker, the artist who crafted me from the original sketches and who will finish me to completion.

Note: If you are a parent, draw your kids close to you in times of disappointment. You will fight it. They may fight it. But I know of no other way to show them the length of God's love from a young age than to draw them close. Love them nearer to you and so nearer to Christ's love.