Some questions...

What does simultaneously preaching Christ to unbelievers and hoarding sin say about my relation to God? What does simultaneously confessing the sovereignty of God with my lips and kicking against His will and actions in my life say about the disconnect between what's in my head and what makes it to my heart?


I picked up a walnut at Camp Curry this weekend. I hadn't been paying attention to the sort of tree I had plopped myself down under until my left hand, aimlessly shuffling through the grass while my right scrawled down various inept ponderings on the value of relationships, found a walnut amidst the dirt and ants. I picked it up, rubbed it a bit, and then smelled it.

Oh! The memories exploded over me then. Perhaps if one tree embodies my childhood best, it's a walnut tree. Their enormous trunks filled my childhood playground at the farmhouse in Illinois, leafy branches shading my memories. They dropped walnuts all over the ground, of course - larger than golf balls. Sometimes my family would intentionally collect them and spread them out in an even layer on the cement slab by the back garden, and then when enough time had gone by we'd cart them indoors and break them open with the nutcracker and meticulously dig them out with the walnut picks that I foolishly mistook for tiny crochet needles in my early youth.

But it's the silly things - the unintentional collections of two or three silly little girls - that I remember best. I remember pulling the hem of my shirt away from my stomach to create a sort of makeshift sack for collecting the green walnuts. Every year, I used my shirt or the skirt of a dress, and every year my clothes were ruined with the brown stains. I quickly learned that walnut sap was the cause of this, but I never stopped using my clothes for collecting (rather like picking dandelions: somehow, when your hands are full of them and you have to pile them in your shirt-sack, they'd leave small, brown circles all over your clothes, but though I acknowledged the source I couldn't seem to stop). We'd hoard the walnuts like squirrels: in our secret play-forts beneath forsythia and peony and pine bush, in the plastic sandbox shaped like a turtle... When we had no more room to hoard and plenty more walnuts, we'd go 'round the yard and find all the gopher holes (there were almost as many as fallen walnuts...). One was large enough to stop them up, but we'd usually stuff two or three down for good measure. (It did about as much good as trying to flood them out by pouring water from a tin cup ... running back to the pump to refill every ten seconds...)

So many more things I could barely remember or have completely forgotten - tossing them about and being told by Papa that I throw like a girl (I still do) - grinding up the outer, green layer for "perfumes" (usually ruining an otherwise nicely-smelling concoction of flower petals and water... somehow at the end, we'd always decide grass or dirt or walnut peelings would enhance the flowery smell wonderfully, and the result was a concoction that smelled of grass or dirt or walnut or all three, but always with the flower-scent completely eclipsed...) Or, in the summer of the June beetles, when the beetles were so plentiful you could shake them from the trees (various unpleasant memories of being lured under a tree by a ride on somebody's shoulders and then having beetles rained down upon me resurface here), we used walnuts to smash them because they didn't suffocate or drown.

But I wasn't in Illinois, and I wasn't under the age of eight anymore - I was at Camp Curry, and there was a walnut in my hand that was less than half the size of the ones in IL, and someone was whistling for us to gather for lunch, so I swept up my things and meandered back up the hill.

The walnut and its smell and the accompanying fragrance of the past seemed to press a stabbing sort of sweetness into my chest. I came to realize that while I don't necessarily miss the ease and beauty of my childhood or begrudge the days gone by, but I know they were very, very good days. Better still, they were made by a very, very good God, and I can see His goodness in wonderfully extravagant measures through them: in stained shirts and lousy shots squashed beetles and gopher holes - but mostly in the walnuts.

I've still got the walnut in my purse. It's good to remember.

Sometimes what we need from the Bible is not the fulfillment of our dream, but the swallowing up of our failed dream in the all-satisfying glory of Christ. We do not always know the path of deepest joy. But all Scripture is inspired by God to take us there. Therefore Scripture is worth more than all this world can offer.

-John Piper

One of my friends quoted that (Eomer to Aragorn on the Fields of Pelennor in Return of the King) when I told her this story. It's not much of a story, granted, but it leads me to conclude God's love is ridiculous. Utterly absurd - and by that I mean, my mind can't possibly grasp his reasoning.

Case in point: A few weeks ago, I finally reached the point where I had saved up enough of my dance earnings to purchase a new pair of hard shoes. I've had my old pair for nearly three years, and they're so stretched out they don't fit anymore. The soles are too thick and the tip of the toe is rounded off, so they don't flex enough to go onto point, and even then they're much too slippery and dangerous. I put in my order and received them about a week ago, and I've been enjoying them greatly. I can now go on my tippy-toes and I can actually point my foot and my rocks are actually visible... I've been having a lot of good fun with them, though the painful breaking-in process still isn't over yet.

Then, out of the blue, I received another package from the same company. It looked suspiciously like the package containing the pair of shoes that I ordered, but I knew I hadn't purchased anything else. I opened it, and there was another pair of shoes, the right size and everything.

At first, I thought I'd botched the order somehow, maybe hit '2' when I meant '1'. I checked the receipt; it said I had only asked for one. I checked my bank account, and I'd only been charged for one. In the end, I could find no particular cause why this pair of shoes arrived, out of the blue, on my doorstep.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the shoes, but I whether I keep them or not seems rather irrelevant. The point is: somehow, God multiplied one pair of shoes into two pairs. This is as much of a correction as a blessing. Oftentimes, when I think of God providing for me, I think of him helping me find something cheap and affordable, maybe second-hand or ill-fitting, but enough. Nothing could be farther from the truth in this instance! These things are brand new: beautiful, shiny, and they fit perfectly.

The whole incident has made me realize that, in my trust that God will provide enough, I have been trying to restrict Him to just providing enough, to giving what is necessary and practical. But where in the Bible does it say God's ways must be practical, especially to a human? I've been praying for a job, for provision for college, for clear direction in my life. Part of me looks at the shoes and wants to say, "Honestly, God... dance shoes? Couldn't you have packaged up a job offer and dropped it at my door?" Even so, I cannot be bitter - just a bit incredulous. I should not be; this is God we're talking about! When have his ways ever made practical sense? Why could He not just tell the Israelites how to eat Cacti or how to cultivate some edible wilderness plant instead of literally pouring the food from heaven? Why make water come from a Rock when he could just as easily have led them to a stream? It's ridiculous--and it's so, so wonderful.

He'll always give me enough, but He's not limited to that. His love is extravagant, sometimes more obviously so than others. I know dance shoes are not nearly as necessary to physical life as manna from heaven or water from the rock, or as vital for eternal life as His death on the cross (is that not an abundance of love?), but the little thing is no less beautiful to me because it points to the same God.

What a beautiful picture he paints every day of Himself, putting things in our lives before we knew we needed them. I did need the shoes, though I did not know I needed them because I thought of dance shoes as ways to express dance. God's imagination is infinitely greater than mine, and they become an expression of love.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:7-11)

I had the oddest, bestest experience today.

I woke up before six, which I hadn't done in a while - not without studying as the primary goal - and went for a ramble outside with my Bible. There wasn't anything extraordinary about that time; it was lovely and cool and the sunrise was just beginning to stain the eastern sky, but beyond that it was just my usual devotional.

Shortly thereafter, I went off to my First Aid (re-)certification classes. Nothing particularly eventful there. On the way home, I wasn't feeling well and was pretty sure I was coming down with something. I was slightly irritated and more than a little frustrated - but somehow (I don't know; I was more inclined to mope than to think lofty, spiritual thoughts) my mind kept coming back to thoughts about conversations I've had recently with a couple people about Godly fellowship and relationships. "Love is like dying," one of my friends has told me. For Christ, love was dying. Dying to his own desire to be glorified on earth, dying to adopt the will of the Father - this was His love for the Father; His love for us.

His love for us? His love for me! And then, suddenly, it seemed clear as the sun above me: God loves me.

I don't know why it suddenly became so real. I didn't hear a voice saying "I love you," or see the words written in the clouds. Money didn't rain down from the clouds like manna to answer my every need, though I've no doubt that God could and would do that if it would answer His good purposes. I didn't suddenly see a way through to the end of my life. And yet I knew - I knew, not just His love for me, but His love for all His children - all the hurting hearts I've ever lifted up in my prayers and all the million more I've never known and never prayed for.

Once that realization struck, God sent me a love song. A cliche way to describe it, but I don't think these things are outside His timing - and at that moment, when I was clutching the steering wheel and trying to focus on the road and at the same time deal with this assault. Tenth Avenue North's Beloved started on the CD I was shuffling in the background. It's a love song from Christ to His Body - not just some nebulous, sappy sonnet from any guy to any girl, but specifically that. A love song from Christ to His Beloved.

You’re my beloved;Beloved, I’m yours. 
Death shall not part us, 
It’s you I died for.
For better or worse 
Forever we’ll be - 
Our Love it unites us 
It binds you to me. 
It’s a mystery...  

Something happened as I pulled into the driveway, triggered perhaps by the song and yet much deeper than a song, where the feeling is lost as soon as the chords die. How can I describe it? I do not know, except to say it shook me so swiftly and effectively that only seconds after I turned the car off, I had to put my head on the wheel and sob. I have never cried so hard over something I could not describe or explain with preceding events. And then--ten seconds later--it was gone. I wiped my eyes and went into the house.

Earlier this morning, I had read in Isaiah 41:

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the LORD will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive. I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, that they may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the LORD has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.

Or, as the above song puts it: You will drink of my lips, and you’ll taste new life.