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.

Dream House

Every morning on my way to work, I pass a small house with a "For Rent" sign. It doesn't appear to be very large, maybe one bedroom, one bath, a small kitchen and living space. It's not far from my parents' business, in a rather industrial, run-down part of town. The majority of the people in the neighborhood are minorities -- and I often get looks being a small white girl driving a big truck down the road. I've checked on rent in these areas, in the event that I ever have the financial ability to move out of my childhood bedroom - a mere $300 a month.

This is not, in a nutshell, a "good" part of town. Not a part of town where my parents would like me to live, not a part of town that is safe for a single female living alone. When my church was involved with the Justice Project last year in a fragile neighborhood in our city, I wanted nothing more than to rent a house, move in, and love people from my front porch. My father was not a fan of this plan and at any rate, I was too broke to move out.

And I know what it looks like - privileged white girl "slumming it" and trying to move in and save the neighborhood!

Really, though, it's not like that all.

In these run-down, impoverished, broken neighborhoods, I feel at home.

I understand brokenness. Understand what it is like to be poor in spirit and poor in finances. I appreciate those people who wear their brokenness on their sleeves, not as badges or prizes, but as expressions of who they are. They are not afraid to show their brokenness, their unlovely-ness, their flaws and struggles and pain. And that is beautiful.

I am tired of running in circles where people say that everything is fine when it is not. Tired of hiding struggles and pain as if that somehow makes me strong. It is my brokenness and my flaws that are the essence of my beauty and the essence of Christ's strength in me.

This sort of honesty and vulnerability is terrifying to so many people. And that is understandable, given the way that our culture has ever-new and varying ways of beating people when they're down, of making them ashamed of their lives and their pasts and their choices. And maybe they weren't great choices, but they can still be redeemed. They are being redeemed.

At the end of the day, I just want to be among people who aren't afraid to speak the truth.

Sometimes, everything is not okay.

And that is okay.

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.