The Dirty Truth

I'll be 26 soon. And I'll be honest - my life looks nothing like I thought it would. To be further honest - I'm tired of lying about it. Tired of lying about what my life looks like on the outside when sometimes, on the inside, things are falling apart. Heck, sometimes on the outside things are falling apart (please reference the last 6 months of my life). Tired of pretending that life is all puppies and rainbows and I'm awesome and life is great and I love Jesus.

Sometimes, life is crap.
A lot of times, I'm not awesome.
Most of the time, I don't love Jesus all that well.

Months like the last few have reminded me why I named this blog what I did -- it is a long, hard road. It is a long, hard road where sometimes you can't even see the end. Sometimes, you traverse the same 100 yards back and forth and back and forth. Sometimes (okay, a lot of times), I question the "good, good end."

A friend asked me the other day if I trust God. Like, really really trust Him. Ever since I came back to the church 3 years, I've struggled with the trust issue. My answer to her was that I trust Him for some things, but not for x. Oh, and maybe not y either. And sometimes I struggle to trust Him for z.

It seems like the longer I've been a Christ-follower, the harder it gets to trust. Maybe I'm just given bigger things now and maybe that's a vote of confidence on the part of a God who sees things in me that I don't see. Maybe the "honeymoon" phase has worn off and it's time to get into the nitty-gritty of my walk. Maybe it's both of these things.

So there it is: the truth. Sometimes I don't trust God. Sometimes I hold things back from Him, convinced that I can do it better. (Altogether now: How's that working out for you, Jess?)

Am I the only one with this problem? How did you all learn to trust God?

Picking Up the Pieces

People are messy.

Maybe you already knew that, but I'm learning that. I have spent a lot of my life trying to avoid my own mess, which has necessarily meant avoiding other people's messes, too. If you keep things always on the surface, your mess isn't exposed and you don't have to deal with this person or that person's mess either.

It's convenient, really. It is also very, very unfulfilling. You never get to know anybody truly and nobody ever truly knows you. So a while back, I started digging a little deeper with folks. Excavating parts of myself that were normally kept under wraps. They followed in suit.

And they're messy. I'm messy. We're all really, really messy.

Sometimes, I hate it. It puts me face to face with the limitations of my being only human. It makes me feel painfully inadequate to get a phone call from a woman I love and to hear her fret over not being able to pay her light bill. I drive over there, knowing full well that I cannot pay her light bill for her, and all I can do is give her bus fare to get to the crisis ministry in our city. I listen to her heart, which is scared and frightened, and I have no words to soothe her, but I pray. It is messy. My mess entangled with her mess, my words entangled with her words, prayers to an unseen but very real God. We don't know how he'll clean up our messes, but he will.

So sometimes, I love the mess. It reeks of Jesus, of his redemption, of his glory. It is one chapter in a book that was finished 2,000 years ago, when death and sin were defeated. The mess, when you are reading it and living, is painful. And yet, there is hope.

We are messes, each of us.

We are also redeemed.

I think sometimes we just need to be reminded of how we are human and messy and faulty. So then God can remind us how he is glorious and beautiful and gracious.

I love how God does that.

My Father's Daughter

Most often, the follow-up to the "What are you doing with your life?" question is the "So, what do you do for a job?" question. Because, in case you were wondering, following Jesus doesn't always pay the bills and this girl's got a degree that she'll be paying off until she's 90. Give or take.

When I left my job at the end of July, I sort of floated for a while. I filled my days with an internship at my church, my evenings with friends and long runs, and took some time to catch up on sleep. To be honest, it was necessary. The past year has been, in a word, difficult - and while I don't have any desire to unpack that here, the time off and reduced schedule was so very necessary for healing body, mind, and soul.

So I rested for a month, worked at church, and finally started applying to jobs. And got rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to hire me. Toward the end of September, I started to get nervous. I have never been one to doubt God's provision for me in physical and financial matters, but I was really starting to question whether or not He would show up "on time" - which is to say, before my bank account hit zero.

Then, one Monday morning, I got a job offer. It went a little something like this:

Mom: Jessica! Come downstairs, please!

Me: [grumble, grumble, grumble, stomp, stomp, stomp] Whaaaaaaaaaaat?

Mom: So you still don't have a job?

Me: [grumble, grumble, grumble, way to rub it in, lady] No.

Mom: Well, your father and I would like to hire you at the office. I'm going to be working out of the office more and we need someone to take care of cleaning, invoices, answering the phone, and eventually start doing electrical drawings.

Me: Okay.

Mom: You start Wednesday.

So that is how I came to work 35 hours a week in a dusty machine shop, breathing in particulates that are probably considered carcinogens in the state of California, and picking up lunch orders for the most insatiable carnivores I have ever met.

I joke that my job description is that of "glorified gopher" - but the truth is that I am incredibly blessed. Incredibly blessed to have a job at all, incredibly blessed that my parents have a business that is doing well enough that they can hire me on for a season. It has also been an incredible blessing to have this simple, daily connection with my family again. I was running around at 100 miles per hour for the past year, rarely seeing my parents, the three of us like ships passing in the night or trains passing in the suburbs or... something.

Now, I see my parents every day for hours a day. It is a reminder that I am a part of a unit, something bigger than myself. I am reminded of that every time I pull open the file cabinet and find the files written in no fewer than six different scripts - both parents, plus all of the kids having done their time at the family business over summers or school breaks. I am learning the business. Learning what my father does. Learning what that symbol on an electrical drawing means and how to strip furniture. Learning the inside language of machine building and how to draw up packing slips and invoices.

In short, I am learning to be my father's daughter.

And in all the quiet moments, mundane activities, and challenges that present themselves, I am learning to become my Father's daughter as well.

This season is a blessing on so many levels.

I am trying not to waste it.

The Grand Life Plan

Something about being 25 years old and three years out of school means that most times when people see me, I am asked one question:

So what are you doing with your life?

I guess it's a question that is valid enough. From the outside looking in, I'm really not doing much.

I don't date, so I'm clearly not on the "married with kids" track.
I work for my parents because nobody else on the East Coast will hire me, so I'm not on the "high-powered career" track.
I spend my free time running, reading, and volunteering, so I'm not particularly "ambitious."
Furthermore, I'm not in Africa, so I don't look at all like the "missionary" I thought I would be by now.

I think people probably assume that because I'm not on the mission field now, I misheard - that missions was never really the plan. And I don't fault them for that thought at all. Heck, *I* thought I misheard.

I didn't. I'm more sure of that today than I was two years ago. I'm called.

But here's the thing: I'm also human. So when God speaks, it gets filtered through my own desires and wills and sinful nature and it ends up looking like a schoolyard game of "telephone."

God might be trying to tell me that to "go to Canada next summer to meet the love of your life."
But by the time it is filtered through my fear of looking ridiculous, my insatiable desire to "be successful," my need to so something bigger than myself, and my [totally God-given] desire to serve, I might hear something more like, "hop a train to Mexico and build houses for the rest of your life."

All this is to say that I didn't misunderstand. I'm called. I'm not in Africa now, but that doesn't mean I'll never be. And it certainly doesn't mean that the last two years has been a waste - the process of applying for missions and the subsequent counseling they suggested have brought out the best and worst parts of me.

These years have highlighted just what tight grip I hold on my illusion of "control" and how desperately I need to let that go.
They have left me floundering, looking silly, taking major hits to my pride - and realizing that it was never about what everyone else thinks of me to begin with.
They have taught me what it means to be flawed and broken and painfully messy.

These two years have been God dragging me into the wilderness (kicking and screaming, to be sure) and stripping me naked. It has felt like an act of violence, but in the end has been the purest act of love.

So now what? Now, as I'm finally coming out on the other side of two of the most gut-wrenching years of my life? Now what's the plan?

To be honest, I've rejected any plan. This seems strange for someone who was, at age 12, planning how to get into Harvard Medical School. But I simply don't know what to do anymore. My plans certainly haven't been working. So I quit.

I'm following Jesus.

I'm getting up each morning and surrendering my crap.
I'm praying and learning to listen for replies.
I'm obeying in the best way I can.
I'm accepting the fact that I probably look really foolish to a lot of people.
I'm learning to give myself some measure of the same grace that God gives me.


It's not perfect.
Most days, it's not even pretty.

But the yoke is easy and the burden is light.
I'm following Jesus.
THAT'S what I'm doing with my life.

That's all I can hope to do.

No Blemish

A friend recently challenged me to write out how I defined beauty -- and to write a definition I would feel comfortable sharing with a young girl. It was eye-opening for me to realize as I sat with a blank stare in front of my computer that I really didn't know how I defined beauty -- defining it by our culture's standards seemed silly and even ludicrous, but lacking a personal definition, that seems to be what I base my idea of "beautiful" on.

Luckily, I have a number of amazing young girls in my life. Girls that I love with every fiber of my being and who I am passionate about knowing that they know just how beautiful they are. I wrote this with them in mind. (And I must have been channeling my pastor, as it came out in letter form.)

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Precious Girls,

I worry about you. I worry about the culture you’re growing into. I worry about the messages that you receive about what makes you beautiful and what makes you worthy. I know your parents worry, too, because we’ve had the conversations about how much we love and care for you.

But I worry more than most, I think, because I know just how hard it is to dig yourself out of the hole once you’ve spent so long believing that you have to look a certain way to be beautiful. That you have to match up to some “ideal” to be worthy of time or care. You don’t, I assure you – and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. You are worthy of time and care because you are here. Because you are a beloved daughter of the most high King. You are worthy, dear hearts.

And you are beautiful.

Your confidence is beautiful.
Your perseverance is beautiful
Your honesty is beautiful.
Your generous heart is beautiful.
Your humour is beautiful.
Your passion is beautiful.
Your faith is beautiful.
The way you love is beautiful.
The way you trust is beautiful.

Do not lose those things. They are more important than any physical definition of beauty. And while we’re on the subject of physical beauty, if there were only one thing I could tell you, it would be this:

“You are altogether beautiful, my darling, and there is no blemish in you.” –Song of Solomon 4:7

No blemish. Please don’t mistake this to mean that you are “perfect” in your beauty in the way that the world would like you to believe “perfect” beauty exists. We all have quirks about our appearance.

To say that there is no blemish in you means that there is nothing – let me repeat that – NOTHING about your physical appearance that makes you any less than someone else. There is NOTHING about the way that you were created that spoils your appearance or makes you unlovely.

In fact, it is those very flaws that are the hallmarks of your beauty. Your beauty is not wrapped up in the fact that you are six feet tall with perfect skin and blonde hair and blue eyes – though perhaps that will be true for you, and you will, for a time, get by with relative ease in this culture. But there will come a day when you will see a “flaw” – something that those perfect, airbrushed models don’t have – and you will be faced with a choice. You can either believe the culture or believe the One who made you.

There is no blemish in you.

It is the scars from the times you fell off your bike that are precisely your beauty, because they tell the story of how you got up and kept going. It is the way that your left foot turns in ever so slightly, showing your perseverance and strength as you learned to walk. The way that your nose crinkles just before you sneeze is beauty. Your crooked smile. Your curly, kinky hair. Your long fingers. Your short toes. Your big hips. Your wide shoulders.

Beautiful.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.

Take care of that beauty, girls. Take care of those hips that love to shake and dance, and those legs that are strong and powerful as you run across the playground. Spend time every day acknowledging that you are beautiful now – not five pounds from now, not when you get your braces off, not when you grow a few more inches – NOW. Because you are, beautiful, my darlings – and you have to know that in the core of your being so you will not be shaken when the storms come.

They will come – maybe sooner, maybe later – but they will come. And when they come, you have to be able to stand solidly in the middle of them and know who and what you are. You have to be able to look the storms in the face and tell them that you are a daughter of the King. That you are beautiful and there is no blemish in you. You have to be able to hide that truth in your heart and guard it with your life.

That is my prayer for you, sweet girls.

I love you.
You are beautiful.