Fireflies and 1 Corinthians 13

Beautiful devastation is probably the best way for me to describe my summer.

I spent the first half of my time there like an arrogant martyr, carrying a list around with me of all the amenities of which I’d been deprived (you needn’t look further than my previous post for evidence of that), ready to launch assault with said litany in its entirety on anyone who should ask “how’s Ohio going?” …For those of you victim to that, I’m so very sorry.

Things don’t always “work out” just because you think you have good intentions, and just because people live lives that vary from the way you live yours does NOT mean they are the ones who need to be fixed.

I have a tendency to think that I understand everything and that I have the answers and explanations to all questions. It is a crushing blow to realize that, in a scenario you originally viewed as a rescue mission, you are the only one thrashing around in the water, and your ‘good intentions’ had only been successful in damaging those who had never been in harm’s way to begin with.

I’ve found that believing you know what’s best for someone is the worst way to love them. It insinuates that who they are isn’t enough, and that they must become someone they aren’t in order to earn love and acceptance from you and (what’s even more damaging for us Christians) from the God whose love you represent. If I…can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge…but have not love, I am nothing. Only after being made painfully aware of my complete depravity did things turn around.

Ok that was the devastation part, here’s the beautiful.


Every evening, the sun would drop quickly out of the sky and attempt to hide, burying itself deep in the thick and rippling stalks of corn. But the moon, rising out of the low soybean fields across the street, would always know where the sun had gone due to the violent pink sky the hasty sun had left smeared in its wake. And so the moon would begin its long and labored pursuit of the sun, only to discover that once it had gracefully landed among the cornfields, the sun had already escaped from there and could be seen instead peeking gleefully over the soybeans, again victorious, poised to spring skyward and begin the game anew. It was during the first leg of this celestial hide-and-seek that the fireflies would emerge. Nothing else captivated my mind and quieted my spirit like those bugs with the glowing bottoms. They would lift en masse out of the earth and twinkle happily as they drifted heavenward, higher and higher, until ultimately becoming confused with stars. I fell in love with these insects because they were sparkling pieces of heaven, sweetly lighting up the darkening atmosphere before passing on. The fireflies were to me a visible/physical representation of the pure light of the Kingdom of God: unable to be contained in heaven, bursting through to where we are, puncturing the dark air with beams of His light, giving the impression that we are dancing in the in between, higher than the earth, not yet in the consuming presence of God but hopeful and overjoyed all the same because of this small picture, this poor reflection, of what is to come.

In the interim between here and there, we are (only by the infinite grace of God) the light bearers, shining like stars in the universe as we hold out the word of life… We serve as signposts, as ambassadors of Jesus, heralding the coming of a King who is coming, yes, but is also here NOW… and He asks nothing more of us than to show the same loving kindness to others that He first showered down on us. Love is the most excellent way, says Paul. Love never fails.

o-hey-O-hi-o

Tim Horton I don't know who you are, but you have saved my life. From the looks of it, you seem to be a wannabe Starbucks that has missed the mark and is closer to a DairyQueen instead. But I won't judge, because you have WIFI and I love you.

Tim Horton's has also earned my love and prolonged presence because it is air conditioned. My dad told me before we came up here that it was pretty much the norm for homes not to have air conditioning. Which initially sounded feasible to me; it’s the north, it’s colder up here. A lot of Europe goes without air conditioning, why not Ohio?

On Monday, when it was 95 degrees outside, I carefully (not wanting to offend anyone’s way of life) asked a coworker if it was accepted that air conditioning wasn’t necessary up here. I can’t repeat her response here because it was packed with expletives, but she essentially said “heck to the no…I do not have a desire to die of a heat stroke.” My dad, well-intentioned though he may be, is a liar.

So sweating has become part of my daily routine. As has watching the Reds play baseball and listening to Fox News yammer on about whatever it is that’s gotten Greta’s panties in a twist this time (is there a reason the woman refuses to fully open her mouth when she speaks??). Each day also includes working out at the Y (I’m the only member I’ve seen so far under 60, which really kills my self-esteem when they all outlast me on the treadmill) and, my new favorite thing, a twice a day run around the raspberry bushes in the backyard to gather the ripe ones before the birds get them. My days will soon be packed with pill-counting, but in lieu of a plethera of hours at the pharmacy this week, I've had to become creative with how to spend my time. Today that meant helping make sandwiches at the kids center for their daily free lunch. It was hilarious, mostly because the people I was working with were characters. One man asked me if I was Jeff's daughter. When I excitedly replied that I was, the man gave me a mostly toothless smile. It made me thankful Dad managed to escape here with his front teeth intact.

Another woman, Audrey, was hands down the most entertaining person over 80 I've ever met. She cracked me up the whole time we spent struggling to spread some difficult jelly over Kroger brand bread. When asked if she could help next week she declined but was sketchy as to say why. Later she pulled me aside to confess that she was heading with a large group of senior citizens to Atlantic City but was taking a bathing suit for the hotel pool so she could just telling people she was going on a "swimming trip".

The kids ranged from super polite, and classically curious (a twiggy bright blue eyed 7 yr old gently tugged on my shirt and whispered, "now just what is that thing on your leg??"), to down right hyper-active. One kid told me he didn't want the sandwich I handed him because he was on special medicine and it made him not hungry. I was tempted to tell the kid to share his behavioral meds with his brother, who, at the time, was busy lobbing the pear cups into the air to test the bursting capacity of the fruit cup containers. The kids were cute, but I had to agree when Audrey suggested this experience would make anyone want to go to school long enough to avoid working in a low-paid child care setting.

The church that got me plugged into the free lunch making is incredible. When we went on Sunday, I was prepared for a stiff sermon warped in formality and short on any real spiritual depth. How wonderfully wrong I was. Though a mostly elderly congregation, the church is bursting with an enthuasiam to bring the kingdom of God into our present realities right this moment through love and service. The sermon on "true fasting" from Isaiah 58 was instructive on how to not use fasting/service as self-glorification or "charity", but instead to empty ourselves of everything but God so we are properly equipped to love and care for our equal brothers and sisters around us. Having had a fire lit in me when I had finished Same Kind of Different As Me the night before, I almost lept outta my pew to sign up when the call came for volunteers. So many little things like that have given me the unique joy that comes as a conformation from the Holy Spirit that I'm where He wants me, as mundane as my location may seem. That joy and purpose makes it hard to sit still and I've written a novel here anyway so it's time to bid Tim H. adios...though you best believe my laptop and I will be back; your monopoly of the towns free WIFI makes that much inevitable.

Of slip'n'slides and 10 hour car rides...

Tomorrow (or today I guess...it's late but I can't sleep) will be my last full day this summer in Auburn. I'll be back in the fall, and it's not like I won't ever spend another summer here, but it is just so hard to leave. Summers in Auburn are pretty high on my list of favorite things... just barely below music, the beach, and snow. The above picture is from a recent and incredible day here. This is probably unrealistic glorification, but it seems only in Auburn can you have a slip'n'slide and cookout and not be 5 years old.

As hard as it is to leave even for such a short amount of time, I am ready to go. While this period of great community and lots of rest has given me some much needed rejuvenation, I am ready to be working towards something worth while. I'm ready to employ what I've learned in school into practice in a patient care setting again. I'm ready to partake in bringing the kingdom of God here now through loving others with the love He's saturated me with. I am still completely humbled that we, that I, get to play such an integral part in the story of God reconciling all of creation back to Himself. He allows/calls us "to be a kingdom and priests to serve [our] God and Father" - to represent Christ to the world. I'd be irrational if I wasn't prepared for the next 6 weeks to be difficult, but the joy that fills me helps erase the uncertainties and tiny fears. He has gone before and made a way and it is in Him that all things hold together.

On Saturday I'll make the 10 hour trek through the Midwest. I start work on Monday. Get excited Ohio, here I come.

...Jesus, mystery...

(Disclaimer: this jumble of words is not fun to read; but writing it all out helped me process something that I've been thinking on for a while now. On the slight chance you've been questioning the same things, hope this brings relief.)

A little while ago I was sitting on the couch about to dive into some med-chem notes on serotonin when I first paused to listen to Charlie Hall's song "Mystery". I love this song. But as the song crescendoed with the final chorus, my overly critical mind cut through the joy I was feeling and begin to question it. Why was my heart seemingly swelling with the music? Was it because it was rejoicing with the truth of the lyrics ("Christ has died and Christ is risen and Christ will come again") or was it because the song employed violins which registered in my brain as emotional and therefore caused increase release of some neurotransmitter or endorphin to cause vasodilation in my chest and result in the sensation that my heart was swelling with joy? How much was it a "real" experience and how much was it an emotional high induced by the chemicals in my body? How much of the human experience can be explained rationally and how much is it mystical? Such has been my struggle with science/reason vs faith.

In my frustration, I turned to an article written by David Crowder on how the future of worship can be predicted by the Pythagorean theorem. I won't even begin to try to go into that, but he pointed out some things that were interesting to me. We have relied on science/numbers to give things meaning and definition. We use numbers to organize music into notes and beats and octaves and forths and fifths.
We use numbers to explain beauty; like Fibonacci (0,1,1,2,3,5,8…) whose numbers explained the way a flower unfurls its petals as it blooms, or the spiral of a sea shell. Pythagoras used numbers like 3,4,and 5 to explain the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle. We use numbers to bring order to the chaos around us…to limit the unlimited.


As I sat contemplating this, it hit me: Why can’t it be both? Why do science and faith have to be mutually exclusive? Why can’t the knowledge of science, numbers, other units of measurements we’ve created to explain and assign meaning to things – why can’t all these things be used not to reduce God, or explain away spiritual mysticism, but instead, serve as incredible reminders that while science and reason are wonderful, they fall so, so short of fully comprehending the Divine. Our every attempt to create order out of the chaos of the universe, or “limit” the “unlimited”, just serve as even greater reminders that we cannot fathom His beauty. Love. And most of all, grace.

Pythagoras found his system limited in trying to find the hypotenuse length of a right triangle with two equal sides of 3. This isn't an equation that works out nicely like the 3,4,5 combo. The length of the hypotenuse is apparently 3 root 2 but the point is this solution can't be explained/defined in rational numbers. Crowder says, "This is not something that they (Pythagoras and friends) created, this is not something that they can change, this just is. And without irrational numbers he's not going to reconcile things." All of the most capable scientific/mathematic/psychological explanations will eventually reach its limits if attempting to concretely contain/define the holy, limitless, uncreated God of the universe. Every system must leave room for the abstract.

Even now, the excitement that courses through me at the truth of this realization could be explained by neurotransmitters and brain activity and such, but any explanation excluding the Spirit, excluding the Divine, excluding any allusion to things and emotions and communions beyond our comprehension, would not do justice to what’s happening in my heart as its filled to bursting with joy. I can rejoice because science does not have to be abandoned, but can be appreciated all the more in light of what it could never perfectly/wholly explain.


"And what was said to the rose to make it unfold, was said to me here in my chest, so be quiet now. And rest."

of men and angels

It's the 8th. And seeing as it's become somewhat of a trend, I thought I'd update today with some stuff I've been mulling over.

This past year my theology underwent something akin to a Jughead detonation (yup that's a LOST reference - the first of many to be sure) that left me trying to grasp at pieces of fragmented truth with which I could recreate somewhat of a foundation for what I believe. It's been unsettling but in a really good way. One truth survived all this restructuring and proved to serve as a beautiful frame for where all this is heading: Love. That God is love. And that He loves me. And everyone. And He uses us to be that love to each other. And that this love is most beautifully communicated in the person, words, and sacrifice of Jesus.

Recently I was encouraged (by a LOST theorizing columnist...who says God can't work thru pop culture??) to go read the story of Jacob's ladder in Gen. 28. Assuming you are like me and can't quite remember the details: Jacob falls asleep, has this dream about a stairway (ladder) that comes down from heaven with angels descending and ascending and God standing at the top telling Jacob that He will be with him wherever he goes and will continue to bless him and his family thru the covenant He first made with Abraham. Jacob wakes up, incredulous that he has encountered God in an ordinary place that's not a tabernacle or mountain top or somewhere that's already been deemed holy and says, "surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware."

I love this story. Despite all my present unanswered questions and uncertainties, I believe that the love that Jesus talks about - selfless love, the kind of love that loves others not because they love back, but at the risk it will never be returned, the kind of love that He's poured out on us and given us a chance to do the same for others - I believe that when that kind of love is at work, the kingdom of heaven touches earth with the bottom wrung of its transcendent ladder, and the distance between here and there is smaller, and people are lifted above their pain and brokenness, and are able to catch a glimpse of glory.

I so identify with Jacob and his obtuseness to the fact that God is here, right now in the midst of wherever we are, pouring over us with love. And we have this incredible opportunity with every interaction to be that love for somebody. To help them experience the kingdom of heaven the Jesus preaches about, that is so much more than the present realities we've all settled and chosen to live in. How exciting is that? He allows us, no calls us, to be a part of His movement; reconciling creation, one person at a time, back to Himself.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal..."

the God who wastes nothing

these last few weeks have been saturated with truth of who God is. He has ever so gently decimated the tiny walls of which i had forced Him inside. this demolition has brought not just relief, but physical relief. the tension i carried around in my forehead as i desperately tried to make sense of Him on my own terms has dissolved, letting His unfathomable nature flow unencumbered by my humanity. one such truth revealed through His Spirit is that He is the God who wastes nothing.

Romans 8:28 - And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

i heard beth moore discuss this idea earlier this week saying, "He would prevent (not permit) what He's allowed to happen in our lives unless it was/is/will be used for our good and His glory. Not one bit of our life details are intended by God to be wasted...so quit despising these things...they were allowed to equip us"

His timing is perfect. His purposes are good.

His love that fills us is transcendent.