the God who dwells in darkness

You’ve probably heard: I’m from the city, and right now I live in the deep suburbs. (Four more weeks and counting down, not like I’m counting down.)

So one thing I’ve realized about the suburbs: it’s dark out here.

We don’t have that problem in the city. In the urban center, if we’re talking about light, we’re probably talking about light pollution or switching our lamps to more energy-efficient bulbs.

But out here, I sometimes have to walk home after sundown, and then I notice the lack of light. There are like six street lamps on my whole route, and mostly I try to cross the dark space between one and the next as quickly as I can. The dark is unnerving. I’m used to seeing, and it’s uncomfortable when I can’t.

And I’ve been thinking about darkness. On one level, sure: I don’t want to get mugged. But on another level, maybe our concepts of darkness-bad and light-good are a little insufficient. Maybe they don’t account for the whole story.

In the Bible, when the Lord called Solomon to build the temple and the time came to dedicate it in front of all the people, the place for God was filled with a dark cloud. Not a mist, not a Disney magic glitter, not even lightning or weird tongues as of fire: a darkness so dense that the priests couldn’t go through with their offerings. This passage tells the story:

 “And they brought up the ark of the Lord, the tent of meeting, and all the holy vessels that were in the tent; the priests and the Levites brought them up. And King Solomon and all the congregation of Israel, who had assembled before him, were with him before the ark, sacrificing so many sheep and oxen that they could not be counted or numbered. Then the priests brought the ark of the covenant of the Lord to its place in the inner sanctuary of the house, in the Most Holy Place . . . and a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said, ‘the Lord has said that He would dwell in thick darkness . . . blessed be the Lord, who with his hands has fulfilled what he promised.”

All these years, the people of God had been preparing to have this place to minister. All these years, they’d been conducting their sacrifices in a tent, or not at all, trusting that one day they would have a temple that did justice to their God and what He had done for them. A place that would show the world that here was a God worthy of worship. Now the day of dedication is here. They get to go in to the finished temple, hauling in all their artifacts, making a crazy mess and burning animals like there’s no tomorrow.

And then God shows up.

And God interrupts all the activity. Suddenly, the temple is filled with a cloud. The priests can’t even see to stand and go through with their offerings. The actual presence of God forces them out, sends them away to wait and to pray, to celebrate, to marvel at the physical realization of the Lord fulfilling his long-time promise to be a God who dwells among His people.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me the presence of God descending in deep cloud sounds a little scary. We have this idea, in our post-enlightenment (pun unintended but important) age of information and technology and all things according to plan, that if we’re with God and God is with us, we’ll be able to see. We even know the Bible verses to back it up, because the Lord is my light and my salvation. The lamp to my feet, and in Him is no darkness, and awake sleeper and rise from the dead and Christ will give you light.

Now, the people of Israel had a lot of problems, but one thing it seems they got right. On temple dedication day, they recognized the coming of God even when it looked like darkness. They recognized it, because this was how God had come to their forefathers.

The book of Exodus tells us this part:

Now when the people saw the thunder and the lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, they were afraid. And they trembled and stood far off, and they said to Moses, “you speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not fear. For the Lord has come to test you, that the fear of Him may be before you, that you may not sin.” The people stood far off while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.

The thick darkness, where God was.

In order to encounter God, to gain spiritual sight, Moses had to physically follow, and voluntarily step up into the space where he could not see.

Meanwhile we’re over here sending people on “vision trips,” and praying for “clarity” in each other’s conundrums. And that’s good, but the danger in all those sight words is that they imply that if we’re really following God, we’ll be able to see and step forward confidently. And yet, sometimes God shows up and things don’t look bright and illuminated. Sometimes we’re plunging ahead with our plans, and God comes and shuts down our whole operation with straight up fog. Sometimes, on the way to light, we have to learn to follow a God who dwells in darkness.

Maybe the darkness is where it matters that He is our light.

Think about how God led the people of Israel in the desert. During the day, He clothed himself in cloud, and in the night He gave them blazing firelight.

Why the variation? Why not just a fire all the time?

Well, think about it this way. When you’re walking in the daylight, you don’t look for a lamp. When the sun is beaming down on the desert, why would you seek a fire?

If God came to the bright places where we feel confidence and clarity, where we feel like we can see and we can walk forward and we’ve got it under control, and God looked like just another light, we might not care.

So in the places where we start trusting our own sight, God sometimes shows up wrapped in cloud. He gets our attention by being the source not of lucid information but of mystery. When things are kind of making sense, when life is kind of routine and fitting together, God is really good at showing up with something that doesn’t fit quite as easily. A disruption, an invasion, or an invitation into a place where we can’t see anymore, and where our own judgement isn’t quite as sure. And God hangs out there until we agree to not be scared off by this place where we can’t see, or where we trust His sight more than ours. Where we can lean in like Moses, acknowledging that even here—especially here—He is present.

And in that darkness, when I acknowledge that the path is dim, that’s when I want a lamp. It’s always that way, right? When I’m confused is when I seek wisdom. When I’m hurting, comfort matters. When I’m facing my own brokenness, I remember the depth of grace.

When I realize that I would otherwise be lost in the dark, I appreciate that God is my light and my salvation. Because it’s true that in God is no darkness. But sometimes, in the darkness, there is God.

See, when the glory of God came down to the mountain in a cloud, it wasn’t just cloud for cloud’s sake. It was cloud surrounding the blazing glory of the living God. Light so permeating it set Moses’ face to shining. But to get to the glory, Moses had to agree to enter the cloud. He had to trust the presence of God more than his own perception.

To step forward, and meet the God who dwells in darkness.

boys don’t like smart girls (and other things to un-tell my high school self)

When I was in high school and tied as smartest kid in my homeschool co-op class, my mom warned me that I should probably tone it down, probably tread carefully, because you know, “guys don’t really like it when girls show that they’re smarter than them.”

Now, I love my mom. We may not see eye-to-eye a lot of times, but really I think she’s done a pretty solid job at this whole motherhood thing—especially given this daughter. If she’s maybe given some misguided input over the years, it’s a convicting reminder that if I’m ever a mother, I’ll do that too. There’s grace for that.

So I love my mom, but this time I was furious. Furious at the implication that my main object should be pleasing boys. I mean, it was up there on the list. But this is me, remember? You know, the one who has just been growing brave enough to make actual friends with guys, like, recently? If I needed advice, which I did, it wasn’t advice on how to be more guarded.

Deeper than furious, though, when I heard that line I was hurt. It cut deep to hear that this one area where I found confidence and security was also a Dangerous Bad Thing. Smart was the thing I was good at. My sister was good at sports and good at music, good at being funny and kind . . . but me, I was mainly good at being smart. Or at least it felt that way. Here was the area where I actually felt I did well, and now I was made to fear that even when I was succeeding, I was actually failing. Made to worry that I was doing it wrong, and wondering what in the world doing it right would look like. Nervous that this strong part of me would scare people away, when underneath that fake strong was a lonely kid who didn’t know how to begin letting people in, and wasn’t even sure she wanted to. So she made up for it, by showing up strong and showing up smart.

So where did that advice leave her? Her, who is actually me?

It left me assessing my walls and building them higher. Besides evaluating people against my particular profile of godliness (different problem, I had a lot, we can talk about them another time), I faithfully assessed whether they were smart enough to handle my brains. If boys were this wimpy, and if I was ever going to get married, I would just have to find someone to fall in love with me who was smart enough to not be scared. 16-year-old Krystiana might not have known much about being friends, but you’d better believe she had an exemplary homeschool-girl list of all the qualities required for a man after her heart, and “must be smarter than me” was right up top.

Yikes.

So there are maybe lots of things wrong with the “boys don’t like smart girls” situation, but a couple stand out in particular.

The first is that it is the opposite of empowering to warn people that the things they’re good at are scary. It’s crippling. It doesn’t help. As in my ramble on learning to be a body, I think what our generation needs is not just more warning against what is bad. Eventually, those warnings stop sticking. They irk us and we shake them off, and we sit there not much better than we started.

What we need is help leaning into what is good. Exhortation not just to shut down the bad stuff, but to cultivate what is beautiful and true in its place. To be told, “here is an area where you are strong: take it and live into it with joy, with humility, and with confidence.”

Even so, that’s not all the story. Empowerment isn’t a formula, and self-confidence is not the same as strength.

Believe me, I appreciate when people remind me what I’m good at. It encourages me, and makes me want to do even better (the opposite of the “you know, boys don’t really like it…” spiel). Furthermore, in this bumpy journey from being a tight-hearted insecure little girl to being a woman growing toward wholeness, I’m learning how my confidence makes me both able and responsible to inspire confidence in others. When I work from a place of security, I’m free to adapt, to listen, and to show up to remind you that I’m here for you. Remind you that when you’re doing well, I’m thrilled. That when you’re chasing this adventure or growing into that role, I’m on your team and I think we can win. Because you delight me. Because my success isn’t threatened by yours, and we’re stronger together in image-of-God strength.

But the thing is, your strength doesn’t come from you, and mine doesn’t come from me. We, together, boys and girls and just people, are in desperate need of the reminder that our strength is found in Jesus. That we are wretched, and that the ground we stand on is made of grace.

We are made to glorify God, and given abilities and callings to follow not in our own ability, but in His faithfulness. Which is why, although I delight when you’re thriving, it doesn’t shake my love when you’re not. And it’s why, although I dread (DREAD) letting you down, failing you isn’t going to break my wholeness. Because you and me, our identity isn’t in how confident we look or how well we can perform or even how faithfully we show up for each other. Our identity is rooted so much deeper than that, in unshakable gospel grace.

Those are the messages we need to be telling each other. Not “be careful about this thing you’re good at, because you could take it too far and people won’t like it and especially boys.”

Rather, “You are good at this good thing. You are strong here. Lean into this, chase it, live it to its redemption potential, soli Deo gloria.”

But under that, and after it, and maybe before it and all the way around, speaks the other truth.

The truth that, friend, your identity is not in this good thing. Not in your brains, or in your talent, or in your calling, or in the cause you stand for with all the passion you’ve got. Because some days, all those things are going to fail. Plans are going to change. You are going to let yourself down. Maybe you will let me down too. In fact, you probably will. And if those are the source of your confidence, your confidence is going to break. Because alone you are still finite, and impossibly broken. And it is grace that your identity is not in yourself.

By grace, your identity is in the love of God, incarnate in flesh and blood, lived out to death and back for you. That is what tells you who you are. It outlives your failure, because it’s already conquered death. It runs deeper than your strength or weakness, because it created them. It knows your frame, and remembers that you are dust. It makes you free.

Free to fall short, and free to keep going. Free from the control of the lies that used to hold you. Free to aim toward holiness, in the power of redemption. Free to open up and let people in, because we dwell in this grace collectively, and it is deep enough for all our failures of love or of conscience, and it shows up in us better together.

So, dear 16-year-old Krystiana, that’s what I wish you could have heard.

That, and that it’s cool that you’re smart. It’s cool that you’re a reader of books, that you’ll win awards in college for your parents to keep on the dining room shelf and never look at, and that you’ll go to grad school. But honestly, there are things about you that are cooler, and more important. And when you do go to grad school, surrounded by people showing off their smarts, you’ll realize that being intellectual is not a character virtue or a mark of quality. (And the realization will make you want to run away, but you will not, because you are learning so slowly to stay, and to be where your feet are.)

By the way, you’ll also stop caring whether you marry a boy who is smarter than you and fits your homeschool-girl list, which is great because that list sucked. You’ll care about different things. And anyway, whether you marry anyone at all is still tbd, so don’t sweat it too much.

In the meantime, it would help if you started looking at people with a little more charity, you know? A little more grace. Not just boys, and not just in regard to your smarts. That specific tip wasn’t actually helpful. But just as a general posture, you know, it would help. It would help for you to practice making more of others and a lot less of yourself. Reeeally would have made things easier on me over here if you’d been working on it a little longer. I’m feeling kind of behind the curve on this one.

But if not, hey. There’s grace here too.

Here’s to finding it and learning to live in it together. Past-me and present-me, and you my friend reading this with all your past and present too.

There’s room in this grace. It is deep. Let’s keep living here.

Sincerely,

Krystiana, broken, on the way to wholeness.

on home, hospitality, and pasta for one: notes from the middle of here

If there was a Nobel Prize in hospitality, my mother would have one.

She’s the one with a guest book next to the spare bed, filled with sprawling notes from visitors who pause to say thanks for the grace they’ve felt in this scratched-up house in the city. She has a recipe book full of grease stains and little papers that flutter out when you open it, and the thing doesn’t make a particle of sense to anyone—but in her hands, it’s a treasure map, with a key in the corner of her brain. She knows exactly where to point her daughter when it’s time for the chocolate roll cake on Christmas Eve with friends, and where to find the recipe for the olive pesto when another guest calls up asking for it after a party. Hers is the penciled list on the side of the refrigerator, tracking inexpensive ways to feed the swarm of noisy college students who show up every week to eat a lot of tacos, talk theology from seats packed into the living room three rows deep, strum guitars until the wee hours of the night, and sometimes remember to wash the dishes. Maybe.

You get the idea.

This is the house I grew up in. It’s no wonder that when we talk about what we’ve learned from our parents and what we want to emulate, “hospitality” comes near the top of my list. (It’s the happy medium answer between “live in not a first-world country,” which is difficult to force, and “hundreds of books” which at this point who’s doubting?) I’ve written before on how my philosophy of hosting differs from my mother’s— she’s for menu plans, reupholstering the chairs, and dessert already made before the guests arrive; I’m for collaborative breakfasts, unexpected 2am tea parties, and any reason ever to sit on the floor. But maybe those differences mostly boil down to the difference of thirty years, and anyway she’s the reason I’ve ever thought about it.

Not a bad situation for the frontier of adulthood, right? Right. I agree.

At the moment, however, it’s also causing no small angst.

You see, when I moved away for this year of grad school, I knew I was leaving family and I knew I was leaving friends. Somehow it didn’t quite occur to me that I was also leaving the lifestyle of everyday hospitality. Before moving, there was a brief period when I looked up apartments around my new campus, envisioning homework parties, and lingering nights of talk, and laughter while we wash the dishes, and all those things that are my favorite about people in my home. In reality, though, that’s not the place where I ended up for this year. Through a surprise of grace and Parents Who Know People, where I ended up is renting one bedroom in someone else’s house, and an hour and a half commute from my campus by trains plus feet. Calling that grace isn’t tongue-in-cheek—this is grace. I’m saving money, getting to connect with a broader group of people than I would at school alone, and learning a lot about myself into the bargain.

One of the things I’m learning, though, is how much my soul misses the messy hospitality of home. I can’t invite people over for evening homework parties here. My bedroom shares a wall with someone who goes to sleep at 10pm and gets up at 5:30. I can’t ask friends from school to stop by for breakfast—that’s an invitation for my friends to spend three hours on public transit, and for my landlady to feel like she’d better clean the floor and light candles and do something about the dogs. Aside from the three friends who have visited for weekends (during which times my housemates have been super gracious about the late night laughter and the extra dishes), and the few more who have dropped me off or picked me up, no one who knows me has even seen this space.

I think that’s what makes it hard for me to view this as a settled place, as anything other than an in-between. Whatever exactly home means (and you’d better believe I mostly don’t know yet), it seems to me home is where you can welcome people. Somewhere in the perpetual tension between displacement and belonging and both being holy, there’s the truth that part of our Christian self is found in mirroring the love of Christ—and part of that love is in the practice of welcoming, speaking truth, and letting people know that they are known. Have a seat, I’m glad you’ve come, there’s more than enough for us all. It’s in the fabric of church as relational, the institute of communion, and the command to welcome the stranger and share our food with the hungry. When we practice hospitality, we imitate the Divine. We show each other what it feels like to be wanted and welcomed. We get the privilege of showing gracious, messy, openness to others, because that is what God has shown to us.

Living in a place where hospitality is stunted throws a serious blow to my security in those ideas. They become just that . . . ideas. Gospel grace starts looking hazy when I don’t have those hands-and-feet rhythms built into my life to remind me of it. When I don’t have to start the pasta without really knowing how many people there will be, but trusting that this will be enough and that anyway grace is enough.  When I make pasta here, carrying it to my room to free up the kitchen, I know how many there will be: there will be me.

All this isn’t fun, it isn’t comfortable, and I’m hard pressed to say even how it’s useful or sanctifying. I don’t feel sanctified, I feel stifled. There’s a lot of restless something inside me these days, that wants to get out but doesn’t know how, and I’m afraid that if it’s stuck there for too long it might get stale. And I don’t know if my faith can afford that.

What does hospitality look like when my home isn’t really home?

The day after I started jotting notes toward this post, my friend Daniel told me, unprompted and via text message, that “you know, sharing food with people is a way to show compassion.” And when I read it I wanted to smile a little, but also a little to throw the phone across the room and not respond because I KNOW BROTHER YOU’RE TELLING ME?

But, compassion. Maybe that’s what matters, under all the parts I love about the welcoming and the food and the washing of dishes together. It’s compassion that looks at another human being and says “Hey. I feel your humanity.” Compassion can’t be put on hold for a year because wait sorry I’m busy reading for my thesis and this kitchen isn’t mine. Maybe that’s part of why things like How To Talk To Dirty People have come to the surface this year more than lots of times. There’s room for them to bob to the top, in the space that used to be taken up with the living room laughter and who brings what for breakfast.

I still don’t know what that does to the part about home and this restlessness with in-between. Maybe it’s easier these days for me to give my trail mix to the person sleeping in the train station, because hey man I’m not sure where my home is either. That’s something, I guess.  But I want it to be easier than it is to say “right, so this year is one of the chapters on displacement, and how it’s okay to not belong, because my permanent home is Jesus.” This isn’t new, but also I don’t remember it being this hard when I was three and didn’t know what side of the ocean I belonged on because #MK. Either that or three-year-old me just got it. Maybe she knew what was up.

And then I think how in three and a half months this particular segment of in-between will be over, and I’ll most likely be back in the city that’s become the easy answer for where’s home. It’s become easy also to romanticize that mythical potentiality, and then that scares me too. I don’t want to get there and think “well that was a bust” because sure, I read like a million books and wrote a thesis and even made friends and had good times, but I also spent the whole year restless and not sure how or where or to what degree to put down roots. And I don’t even have to test it out to know that “Chicago was hard because I couldn’t have people over for dinner” isn’t a super compelling explanation, and it certainly won’t ensure that once I’m back everything will be peachy.

I don’t know the end of this story. I haven’t gotten far enough yet to consider this mess and say “ah look: narrative.”

Maybe one day. Ask me in a year or ten.

Until then, I’ll be mostly here. Not quite rooted. Not quite home. Trying, and failing, and learning things about grace.

But along the way, if you’d like some of my pasta, I think there’s enough for both of us.

from deep in grace,

k

a soul and a body, episode 2: an unhygienic love

The other night, I did my homework in a coffee shop downtown and man, it was awful.

I mean, the chai was fine. The table and chairs were fine. I think they were even playing nice music. But it’s not a fun place to hang out.

Why?

Well, it smells bad.

Apparently this particular spot is a hangout for a number of people who likely aren’t welcome other places. They don’t look nice. I’d guess there’s some drug history (history, as in maybe the events of this morning). A lot of them don’t have houses to go home to at the end of the night. But they hang out here, and you’d better believe the air attacks you with body odor and weed and pee and maybe that other thing I’m not sure about.

I sat at my computer and tried not to breathe through my nose. Tried to avoid the piercing stare of that man at the next table, with tattoos on his face and clothes that hadn’t been washed maybe ever. But when I finished my homework and left, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the smells around me had seeped into my clothes. I sat on the train catching ghost whiffs of sour unwashed human, and wondered if the people in the next seat could smell it on me. When I got home, I took a shower, threw my clothes in the laundry, and lit sweet-smelling candles like this room hadn’t heard about lamps.

But after all those things, I did some thinking.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being a body. (You know that, I’ve written about it.) And really I haven’t figured it out. I begin to think I’ve got it, sometimes. That I’m getting better at being this body that gets sick and dirty and hungry and needy, better at understanding the goodness and the worship of it. And then something like this happens that is both bodily (oh hey nose) and relational (from other human people), and I realize WAIT NO. I haven’t got this at all.

It turns out that even when I think I’m okay, mostly I’m okay within the bounds of control. When the unpleasant things are contextualized. Dirty smelly people coming to my Indy church for food and clothing, discomfort in my body because I ate goat at a restaurant in this town in Ethiopia, an awkward bout with head lice after sharing close quarters and long days with kids I love—I can list plenty of annoying bodily experiences that still felt more okay, because I signed up for them. Or at least I signed up for the territory they came with.

When I’m uncomfortable is when that kind of bodily experience invades the parts of my life where I didn’t invite it. I went to that coffee shop downtown the other night to use the internet for my clean and pretentious homework, thanks, because it was close and it showed up on the map. I didn’t know I was going to have to hang out with you, smelly face-tattoo guy. You give me the creeps, and I’m pretty sure that’s legit.

And yet, Jesus.

Do I really think Jesus selectively filtered out the dirty parts, when he became a body out of love for us?

People, Jesus was a homeless person.

Somehow I forget about that. As if Jesus’s compassion for the crazy people was a really neat day job, but probably when he was done shaking hands with prostitutes and guys with leprosy, he could go home and shower and read theology and manage his social media, #thatMessiahlife you know . . .

Except, no. No, it wasn’t. No, he couldn’t. When Jesus chose incarnation, he chose it hardcore. He took on the lowest and the grittiest parts of humanity, so that we would have a Savior who knows the same aches and temptations and dirty smells as us. More than most of us. More than me for sure.

Even deeper, I think our God took our humanity to set an example for our worship.

Did you know that the root word of “human” is the same as “humility”? Jesus took on our humanity to show us humility. (See Paul on this.) And humility is where worship happens. When we accept our humanness, as Jesus did, we’re accepting what kind of people we are before God. We have to look head-on at this dirt and sin and need, and then look at the grace that makes it not matter. We have to sit in that realization long enough to let it inspire worship deep in us.

But when we grow uncomfortable with parts of being human, and talk ourselves out of the need for that honesty and awe, we also talk ourselves out of a responsibility toward the inconvenient dirty people around us. Surely God doesn’t want me rubbing up against dirty. That’s unhygienic. Unsafe. I mean, maybe it’s appropriate during missions trips and outreach projects, but I do those, so that’s enough, right? Surely we don’t have to make spontaneous room in our lives for people who sti—

When you love the least of these.

That’s what Jesus said about love that loves Him.

Somewhere in my cool intellectual theology, I forget sometimes that Jesus tended to identify himself a lot more with the social least (the crazy-eyed homeless man downtown) than he identified himself with the doing okay middle-class religious person (hi, that’s me).

Really, is my memory so poor?

Is my gospel so cheap.

Is my faith so sterile that I just hang around the edges of holiness, avoiding the messy middle where I have to remember the parts of being a human that shout loud my need for Jesus. Where I have to look at the creepy person and admit, “hey, you and me, we share the same image of God. We’re broken and needy of grace, the same. And the same Jesus loves us all the way to the end.” Those parts where I’ll really have to remember all that Jesus took on and then gave up, for the love of me and this homeless guy.

Friend, I don’t want a faith marked by cheap worship. I don’t want to love within the lines of hygienic. I want a worship that springs from deep and that means its words, because I am human and God is God. I want a love that loves deeply and freely, when it’s very not convenient and when it kind of smells bad. And that’s maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever claimed—scary enough that I’m nervous writing this, because now you get to hold me to what I say. And as of now, I’ve got an awfully long, uncomfortable way to go. A lot that’s scary. A lot of room for failure.

But maybe Jesus calls us for exactly that long and uncomfortable way. Maybe that’s exactly where he promises to hang out with us.

So anyway, that’s what I’m praying these days.

Savior, grow in us deep worship. Shape humility in our humanity. Stretch wide the reach of our love.

Because you first loved us.

those who hunger and thirst

Sometimes, I remember that I go to a really beautiful school. The kind with stone buildings that glow in the sunlight, trees that sing of autumn, and an unassuming little chapel hanging out just a few steps from my academic home base. And when it’s a cold Monday morning, and home base hasn’t opened yet, sometimes sneaking into the empty chapel, rich with quiet and filtered sunlight, is just the right thing to do.

It’s a good place to breathe.

A good place to step softly and look slowly. To read the words carved in the wall, even if you’ve heard them a thousand times, and take an extra minute to let them nestle deep.

Woven underneath the windows, all around the room, are a string of words from Jesus – the “blessed are” lines.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Those are the ones that stuck, this morning.

It’s not “blessed are those who are righteous.” It’s blessed are those who hunger and thirst. Those who are empty, who ache, who know their need.

I’m not so good at that, but also that isn’t news.

But then, from the words under the windows, something written inside the glass of the window caught me eye: the word “thankful.” Coming right from “hunger and thirst,” “thankful” is a little jarring. A little out of place. I’m not in the habit of feeling thankful while I’m still thinking about being hungry.

But there the words were, just a few feet above the ones about need. “Enter into His gates with thanksgiving,” they said, “and into His courts with praise. Be thankful to Him, and bless His name.”

Paired with the words about how blessed are the broken people, these words about thanks sound a little different. They come from different parts of the Bible, hundreds of years apart . . . but what if “be thankful to Him and bless His name” was spoken to the same people who hunger and thirst? What if “enter with thanksgiving” is a welcome to those who mourn?

The words sink a little deeper.

As children of the God who knows the stars by name and yet knows us into the bargain, we’re told we are blessed for hungering and thirsting after righteousness. When we’re restless in the broken, unsatisfied in the empty, and aware of our failure – then, He promises to fill us. Not just with righteousness as a quality for us to possess, I think, but with Himself. When we ache for righteousness, for wholeness, we ache for God. And in that aching, we’re called to give thanks. Because when the psalmist says “enter His gates,” that isn’t just for the already righteous. That’d be a pretty slim crowd. “Enter His gates” is for the needy.

In the already, not yet of the gospel, we can come into God’s presence needy. In the tension between redemption and fullness, we can hunger for what we do not yet have, while thankful that He has already done all.

Already, and not yet. Hunger and thanks. Worship in longing.Sometimes, God catches you by surprise, with the gospel carved in windows on a chilly Monday morning.

He’s good that way.

The In-Betweens, or A Very Boring Story

 When my parents moved from Tarnow, Poland to Indianapolis with two toddlers and some crates of books, it wasn’t supposed to be forever. It was for a year, they said, while they figured out where to go next. Of course there would be a next. Just like there had been a place before Poland, there would be a place after, and probably it would be a different country. They were missionaries, after all. That was the job they’d been called to do. This Indy thing was just an in-between.

Well, that in-between started eighteen years ago next week.

A little while in, God changed my parents’ plans, and what was transitory became most of a career. At the beginning, though, it didn’t make a lot of sense. After all, these were the people suited to living in not America. They liked languages, went to the sketchy post-Soviet Polish hospital to have a baby because that’s what everyone did, and were okay raising a family in a 500-square-foot apartment on the seventh floor of a building whose elevator worked sometimes. (They’d even given their children names that would translate conveniently between languages, except, oh wait, nobody in America can pronounce them.) And now they were living in this city of big houses and shiny cars and a church on every other street corner already . . . and God was behind it?

“Former missionaries settle in Midwest, work with inner-city church with a leaky roof” is not a story that will earn speaking gigs or leave anyone on the edge of their seat waiting to hear what happens next.

But it is a story of faithfulness. It’s a story of investing every day in the in-betweens, because those are what life is made of.

In her article “Why I am Still a Christian,” Lauren Winner (geez, two Lauren Winner references in a row? I need to diversify.) points out how, even as Christians, we like telling our stories, but mostly we like telling the exciting parts. “How did you come to know God?” we ask. “How has Jesus changed your life?”

Those stories matter. Fair enough. But sometimes they’re a little distant from the everyday. “I think,” Winner says, “that as interesting as the stories of our Christian beginnings are, it would be grand and fabulous if the Church would more fully develop the skill of telling—as passionately—the stories of the middle of our faith lives . . .Why are you a Christian this week? Why are you still a Christian? Why are you a Christian today?”

In reality, most of life isn’t crisis and adventure and epiphany. It isn’t all falling in love or mountaintop views. Sometimes it’s more like keeping on loving when loving is hard.  Stepping the next step and breathing the next breath, even when we can’t see if we’re climbing the right mountain at all.

Before I moved to Chicago for school, that plan felt like a goal. A temporary goal, maybe, but at least one with a name and a start date and a general shape. Now it feels more like an in-between. And on the tired Tuesday when a friend shares a vision that is not yet and may never be, but which already swells my heart with longing, it’s hard to focus on this week where the most exciting things I’ve done are write a paper about The Picture of Dorian Gray and spill hot chocolate down my shirt. When I miss the Indy life where I felt needed, grounded, and stretched, it’s hard to feel passionate about this one, where the most I’ve done for other people lately is read some writing, clean up some dog poop, and say “thank you” to the train conductor.

But maybe growth doesn’t happen based on how much we feel needed, or how important this work looks up close. Maybe growth is more in the building blocks of in-between.

My friend Connor is living in Africa right now, which is exactly the kind of story that does get an audience, and the reason his blog gets 6x the readership of mine, not like I’m bitter. (But really, I’m not.) On the surface, that story sounds exciting, and it is. It also had a lot of in-between leading up to it. Before I came to Chicago and he went to Kenya, we were talking about that—about maintaining passion in the waiting, dwelling well on the tenuous brink of adventure, and letting the middle days matter too. Well, now those adventures are in full swing, and yet somehow we’re still talking about the in-betweens. It turns out, even in grad school, where people tell you “oh, this is going to be the craziest, stretching-est, whirlwind-est year,” there are days that feel neither crazy nor whirlwindy nor particularly stretching. Even in Africa, where supposedly you’ve gone to be part of something that matters and have your life changed, there are moments that don’t feel like much of anything.

And maybe those moments matter. Maybe there’s depth in the in-betweens, in the seconds that don’t make great stories, but where we get to look the unexciting in the face and ask “why am I doing this, today?” Not “why did I want to do this before?” because that answer might have changed, or not turned out how you thought it would. After all, the reasons we first chose to follow Jesus have probably changed too. But we’re still here. And there’s a lot of story between then and now. And a lot of it is boring.

And maybe the boring is important too. Maybe serving God isn’t about the big adventures. Maybe it’s more about joy and passion and faithfulness in the work of this morning, even when that work is temporary, or doesn’t feel important, or isn’t what we thought it’d be.

So now, as much as I like “how has God changed your life?” I’m learning to also like “why are you a Christian on this cloudy Thursday morning?”. As much as I like adventures or even just plans that make sense, I’m working on investing in the quiet, and the unexciting, and the in-betweens. The quiet, where you have space to pay attention. The unexciting, where you grow when you’re not looking. The in-betweens, where God is.

because even my Jesus wept

  As girls go, I’m not a big crier. I shed tears (non-laughter ones) a handful of times a year, maybe. I don’t like crying. I don’t like the things that make me cry – and they’re pretty predictable. If I’m in tears, one of two things is almost surely going on. I’m either at my very most angry, or I’ve just realized my own failure and need for grace. Sometimes it’s all of that at once, in a big frustrated mess. And I don’t like any of it. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel small.

To be honest, though, it’s not just crying I’m uncomfortable with. It’s feelings in general. In the Myers-Briggs system (I know; not an infallible gauge), I’m a pretty strong T-for-Thinking as opposed to F-for-Feeling. I like decisions based on facts, I like logical explanations, and if I’m ever sensitive and tactful you can bet it’s more Jesus than me. The fact that I sometimes have tangled feelings frustrates me. (The fact that I just uprooted, transplanted, and have been having more feelings than normal is like half my self is revolting against the other half.)

If emotions are going to be a thing, I want them to make sense. If I’m going to be angry, I want it to be justified – a response to sin or injustice. But sometimes it’s just because my grocery bag broke or someone isn’t leaving me alone already. When I’m glad, I want it to be deep-welling and full of life, but sometimes I actually just feel glad because I drank coffee. I dislike films or books that aim to create emotion – fear, or sadness, or untruthful romantic euphoria – over something that isn’t even real life. When my affections are tangled in other people, I want that to be holy, generative, and consistent, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s just a crush. Sometimes it just means I’m not an island. Sometimes it means I’m a human.

In fact, my capacity for all of these feelings is part of being a human. And, more importantly, a human made to resemble God.

Have you ever thought about that?

There are some things about the character of God that remain a little opaque throughout the Bible. But one thing consistently revealed is that God feels emotion.

The Bible shows us how God can become angry: “ . . . that My wrath may burn hot against them,” Exodus 32:10.

It tells us He delights in righteousness: “then You will delight in right sacrifices,” Psalm 51:19.

From the accounts of Jesus’ life, we know that He felt sympathy (“. . . He was moved with compassion for them,” Mark 6:34), and anxiety (“he began to be sorrowful and troubled,” Matthew 26:37) and even that He shed tears (“Jesus wept,” John 11:35).

G. K. Chesterton had a theory that the gaps in our narratives of Jesus’ life were His moments of laughter and revelry. That’s speculation, obviously, but considering how much God encourages rejoicing, it would not seem inconsistent.

The difference in emotional capacity between me and God is not that I’m sometimes tangled and unpredictable while God is stoic. The difference between God’s feelings and mine is that God is holy. God has an unchanging and unified goodness, and His emotional responses fit in with that whole.

So what does that mean?

It means that I need to stop looking at my feelings as bad. To quit hating on myself worse when I realize I’m feeling lonely, and not back away from vulnerable displays of joy. To quit demanding explanations for every emotion, and wishing for them to be more reliable than they are.

My emotions aren’t something I can get rid of. I can’t send them away and slam the door, just because they make me uncomfortable. Rather my emotional self is part of my image-of-God humanity. It becomes more what it was meant to be, more unified with my whole self, as I grow deeper in Jesus. I want to rejoice in what brings God joy, and I want to grieve what makes God angry, and I want to look at people with the same compassionate love that Jesus showed. But I can’t make my emotions look more like God’s by analyzing every feeling and giving myself a talking-to when I don’t measure up.

I can’t pursue emotional well-being as an end in itself. What I can pursue is God. I can treat things that confuse me as reason to look to Him. I can look on myself with grace, because it is with grace that He has looked on me. I can aim, not for a sterile and logically organized self, but for wholeness.

And He is the one who makes my self whole. He is the God whose character I can trust without limits. And He is the Jesus who knew when to weep.

twenty twenty: september’s beautiful things

 Reading through this past month of little beautiful things feels surreal. It’s the plank bridging two lives that feel years apart instead of weeks. They’ve been good weeks though. Deeply good. But I’m bad at summing-up narrative, so although eventually I ought to write a “here’s my everyday” post, you’ll just have to trust me.

For now, here are a few of the things that have caused me to delight this month.

1. a little notebook, bright yellow.
2. a coffee shop in a real-people-doing-real-life part of town.
3. Naomi’s vigorous-to-aching compassion.
4. watching people I love connect in their deep delight, the work where they see God, even when that delight is not mine. finding worship even in the listening-in.
5. the best of conversations until 5am on that last night in Indy. the tension between closeness and separation. loving and leaving. delighting without clinging.
6. letters, hugs, and praying-for-you text messages, shoring up my moving-day crazy and reminding me just how rich in relationship this life of mine is.
7. rosy sunset light through my west window, on that first evening and lots of evenings since.
8. a yellow mug.
9. how church allows for coming together and feeling alive, with the weirdest of people.
10. three — count ’em, THREE — bookstores between classroom and train station.
11. listening to Josh Garrels on the bus through the dark-sky wide-space Indiana night. (There’s a collection in my head of crazy transcendent moments like these, ones that came by surprise but inexplicably filled my whole self with an exquisite, aching life. And that’s all there is to say about it.)
12. hummus with Lynnette straight from the bus in the middle of the night. a gulp of vigorous communion.
13. climbing my first Chicago tree.
14. “watch and pray.”
15. a slender silver leaf necklace.
16. the best accidental conversations in the MAPH lounge instead of homework. settling in to new rhythms of relating, and finding that they are good.
17. children’s books and chocolate cereal.
18. chilly mornings when you do not have to get out of bed. people, that is where luxury lives.
19. the best walking/working/living shoes at Salvation Army for $3.76.
20. when classroom ideas intersect with out-of-classroom ideas, and things that matter don’t matter just in one place. slowly, haltingly, learning how to live this life in wholeness and in holiness.

but Christ is all

  It’s not news to anyone who knows me, but I love systems. Order and structure and things that fit. 

I habitually reorganize my books, and always end up stressed because it’s impossible to choose whether to order them by size, color, author, or topic, and whichever rule I prioritize throws the rest to the dogs. I have a guilty fondness for personality tests and their offer of predictability. Traffic engineering inspires me. I enjoy writing a budget.  

I desperately want things to make sense, and myself the most of all things. 

Well, five days ago I uprooted myself from a lot of what I know and love and moved to a new city where nobody knows me, and tomorrow I start grad school in a program that kind of by default labels me a certain type, and sorting my identity right now is stressful. as. heck. 

Have you noticed how many different categorizations we use to organize and identify ourselves? 

Hi, I’m a human. I am a human of a certain sex and gender. Certain age and height and weight and eye color and hair type. I have a shoe size. An IQ. A blood type. A Myers-Briggs type. A marital status. An educational background. A field of study or work. An income bracket. Political convictions. Ethnicity, birthplace, hometown, and street address. Hobbies. Talents. Taste in music or film or art in general. Habits of dress. Social groups. Preferences in food, travel, and living arrangements. Athletic ability. Allergies and health problems. Sense of humor. 

We do it even in the church: here’s the group for the high-schoolers, and here’s the one for the married people, and here are the ones for the men and the women.

In and of themselves, a lot of those categorizations are inevitable. I didn’t choose them. But regardless of whether I chose them, when I try to find my identity in them, things get real messy real fast.

I’ve long assumed that, as long as I could choose, I would live either smack in the middle of the city or in a country that is not America. And then this week I moved to a bigger city than I’ve ever lived in, but deep into the sprawling suburbs. And somehow, I don’t think I’m going to hate it.

The other day I got to meet some students in my program, and I really enjoy them. They’re the sort of people you meet for the first time and end up chatting about how all the religions and mythologies of the world reflect a fundamental need in the human psyche, or about how literature about traumatic events like the Holocaust is hard to produce because the people who experienced it are almost too close, and anyone else can’t quite imagine it. I like those people. They’re my kind. But then I left that meeting with my classmates and went to a midweek church service at my new church, with a sermon involving a lot of personal anecdotes and not a single literary reference, but where the people are down-to-earth, hospitable, and genuinely invested in loving God and one another well. And from what I can tell, I like these people a lot too. They’re my kind too.  

And then there’s the fact that I started life as a missionary-kid, of which a bright side is that ramen noodles are a nostalgic childhood food, but which also means that when people ask where I’m from it feels like a trick question, and also I’ve never seen The Lion King. Or the fact that I look up plane tickets in my free time because I hunger to know the dust of places, and for them to shape my loves wider and deeper and always more, but when it comes down to it I’m also a firm believer in living well in the right-now. Or how it’s really easy for me to prioritize the part of me that is soul and intellect because the part that is body stresses me out, but a body is something that God made and also that He inhabited, incarnate, and it is good. Or the fact that I genuinely enjoy writing academic papers about books by dead people, but I also genuinely enjoy writing support letters for my favorite non-profit, and somehow those loves are connected in a passion for stories told well, but that’s hard to put on a resume (which, incidentally, is also something I enjoy writing). Or the fact that I really want my relationships to fit in tidy understandable boxes, but I also really want to be the sort of person who loves with extravagance, and that isn’t a gap I’m very good at straddling yet. 

Et cetera.

This morning I was walking around thinking these messy thoughts — and then one thought jumped to the front. It’s something Paul says in his epistles, and apparently it mattered to him enough that he said it twice:

“. . . there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 3:28)

“. . . here, there is neither Jew nor Greek, circumcised nor uncircumcised, Barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” (Colossians 3:11). 

That, I think, is why sorting through all these categories is stressful. Because none of all these loves and all these boxes are meant to define me. I want to believe they can fit together in one cohesive identity, but the only way they can do that is if the soul-deep bottom and the over-arching sky is my identity in Christ. 

Did you ever realize how the word “integrity” is related to “integrated[ness]”? I never had, before a few weeks ago. And yet it makes sense: we trust people whose selves fit together well. And Jesus is what makes my parts fit. That is the only identity that puts the others in order. That is the ground in which a life of passion, deep confidence, and generous love can grow. 

For Christ is all, and in all. 

So far, these are mainly just words. I haven’t figured out how to live them. But, if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to keep trying.

Love,

Krystiana

person, in Christ. 

George MacDonald: beauty, truth, and the thoughts of God

  This post is part of my haphazard series on the thinkers & the writers & the makers who keep me thinking, writing, and making well. Intro here.

I’ve mentioned before, on at least three different occasions, my favorite words ever written about the work of artmaking and storytelling, which come from George MacDonald’s essay “The Fantastic Imagination.” They’re the words I bring up most often in conversations about the role of the makers and why beauty matters, and the ones that I can most count on to keep me in a position of healthy awe.

The fact that the words are MacDonald’s is almost reason enough for me to love them. As a daughter of Parents Who Read (the most fortunate class of children in the world), MacDonald is one of those writers I can’t remember not loving. I was introduced early enough to the silvery-grey magic of The Princess and the Goblin that Princess Irene exploring the house figured prominently in my personal make-believe, and read “The Light Princess”  young enough to have spent at least one night under my purple comforter with wakeful shivers, thanks to the creepy image of the worm consuming the lake from below, drop by vital drop. I’ll defend Lilith as the demonstration of the skill that hadn’t finished developing in Phantastes, and my second-best paper in all of college was on what I learn about gender and virtue from Photogen and Nycteris.

With that long-loving history, there’s a deep and special gladness for me in reading MacDonald now. In The Fantastic Imagination, which was originally the introduction to a collection of his fairy stories, MacDonald comes to the defense of the fairy tale as a vehicle for beauty and for truth. Maybe it’s because I loved his stories as a child that his points seem credible to me — when he argues for using beauty to tell truth, I believe him. I was enthralled with the beauty in his stories before I could have articulated the truth, but now can see both: his writing did its job.

Throughout this essay, MacDonald responds to challenges from an imaginary interlocutor, using the questions as prompts to express his beliefs about fairy stories in particular and about creating beauty in general.

To the question of whether a “mere” fairytale must have some deep meaning, MacDonald argues that it cannot help it: “if it have proportion and harmony it has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the fairytale would give no delight.” In other words, the elements of order and drama that cause us to love stories are also the parts that represent the meaning. To mentally separate them is nonsense.

As to what exactly the meaning might be, MacDonald demonstrates an unconventional generosity. The job of the writer is “not to give [the reader] things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.” Furthermore, what the reader draws out of a work is partly dependent on himself. “If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there!”

And here MacDonald makes the point that most grips my imagination. He explains:

One difference between God’s work and man’s is, that, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must mean more than he meant. For . . . it is God’s things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen . . . A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

That is the passage that gives my mind chills. It makes me quiet. Suddenly each word has more weight than I’d ever given it before.

The currency we deal in is the thoughts of God, lent to us with the aim that our use of it would point back to its origin. Like Jesus pointing out that the coin engraved with Caesar’s image belonged to Caesar, our words, our work, bears the imprint of God and is something owed. We get to work to God, telling His thoughts back to Him, and to ourselves in the process. 

Those are words that keep me working. Those are words that keep me studying — because I get to study stories and stories show me parts of what matters to God. Those are words that keep me loving — because even the love we give each other is a currency imprinted with the image of God, not our own at all. Those are words that keep me writing — because my words don’t have their roots in me. The roots of them are in God. They’re lent to me with extravagance, and they’d better be used, and they’d better be good. They have the capacity to communicate, as MacDonald described, proportion, harmony, vitality, beauty, and truth. 

And that, I think, is work worth doing. Soli Deo gloria. Glory to God alone.