Dallas

Its been 2 months since God called me out of what I thought was the rest of my life. The exodus was violent and painful and my eyes hurt from crying. Everything I had built my post-college life around lived and breathed in Denver, Colorado and I truly wrestled like Israel with the call to leave. Denver was MY dream, MY plan, MY adventure. It was everything I could have ever wanted for myself. And yet, God has called me higher.

Not to be (too) dramatic, but the morning that I departed Colorado for Texas I read a letter from Bethany and layed on the floor of my empty room and then I cried in the shower. I packed my life of adventure into a tiny used car with high mileage, and I drove away from all my plans; my only hope in Jesus. Sometimes God wrings worship from my heart. He wraps his eternally powerful, ultimately creative, nail-scarred hands around my heart and squeezes with appropriate might, as Lauren Chandler would say it. She goes on:

"It is a deep worship. It is an honest worship. It is the worship we sometimes forget. The humble worship of crying out to God in the midst of our pain. No flowery words. No shiny faces. Not in that moment. That will come later. But for now, this is the worship He seeks - an honest plea for Him to save us." 

You know, I wish I could tell you that joy has been overflowing after the obedience. Like some kind of magical if/then word problem. What I truly feel though is that God is stripping me down to my core. No mountains. No independence. No real opportunity to sin, and responsibility far more than I am capable of succeeding in. I am seen and known in my weakness and it is not pretty. I am not put together, primped, or good at much of anything outside of the grace of God. The painful work of self examination has left me defeated, depressed, and crying in the shower more than usual. The dark night of the soul finds me sweating as I settle my new life in Dallas, Texas.

And then shockingly, out of nowhere, grace shows up like the first blossom of spring after a long winter. A cool morning. A green place in the midst of concrete. A dinner with Becca. A poolside book. God shows up with mercy and grace. And real, deep JOY. Joy that isn't laughter. Joy that presents itself as deep gratitude for the one who loves me enough to perform surgery on my broken heart. The cut is deep, but the sovereign surgeon is careful and precise as he wounds me in order that I MIGHT TRULY LIVE. The joy presents itself in muted tones, but still, it is there.

Through it all, I feel so loved by the God of the Universe. How gracious and loving is it for him to press me, to mold me, to chisel away the idolatry from my heart. My sin disease is shocking and deep, but Jesus - my sweet Jesus - adores me in a way that he will not allow my little plans to ruin what he has already orchestrated for me and put into motion. He knows and He is enough. He is good and He is gracious. He is worth every tear, every hardship, and every day that I lack the mountains. Jesus is worth it. Eternally, but also now. And worship is sometimes that much sweeter in the dark.

"But THIS I call to mind, and THEREFORE I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; GREAT is your faithfulness. 'The Lord is my portion' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in Him.'" -Lamentations 3:22-24

Showing Up

"In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us - that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace. We have that peace when the gracious God is all we seek. When we start seeking something besides Him, we lose it. That is his call to us, simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced." -B.M.

Tonight as I type, I am wounded and sick, woefully distanced from my first love. I am dizzy, out of breath and exhausted spiritually. Also a little apathetic. I feel far away and disconnected, and this by my own doing. I feel happy, but the kind of giggly happy that has no depth.  I spent hours tonight talking with and apologizing to Bethany (which has become pretty standard in our friendship), and hugging her as I realized how far I have strayed this week. Amidst the chaos of my life, it is still amazing to me how fast I can become so fascinatingly out of control. Especially while knowing that God is always the answer and the way to everything that I truly want / need at my deepest soul level.

I don't know what's wrong with me sometimes. Everything gets to be too much, and I can't breathe. Waking up tomorrow seems exhausting the way running on a treadmill does, and getting out of bed is difficult enough in the first place. It sometimes gets hard for me to believe that we are all part of some bigger, less punishing and isolated truth. I frequently get caught up in the "what you see is what you get" here and now. I get caught up in the finite and forget the infinite.  I catch myself swirling around, drowning in the worries of this world while completely ignorant to the things of God.  All too often I end the days just as broken and frustrated and wholly insane as the day before and it gets a little mechanical and traumatizing. Augustine says that "You have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday's faith does not wait for you. You seek it, and in seeking, you find it." And so I get up in the mornings, clinging to the hope that I have in Jesus.

I honestly do not know why God wont just spritz away our hardships, problems, insecurities and frustrations. I don't know why the most we can hope for on some days is to end up a little less crazy than before, less down on ourselves. I don't know why we have to become so vulnerable before we can connect with God, and even sometimes with ourselves. But with the same token, I don't understand how my room gets so messy within a matter of minutes.

I'm guessing that God's answer would be something along the lines of the idea that the journey is somehow producing in us a desperation and need for Him. I have a friend who is always harping on the importance and beauty of the journey regardless of the end goal, something about how the hike is far better than reaching the top of the mountain. I don't even know if I agree, but maybe somehow the journey is allowing us to see facets of God's character and grace that we wouldn't otherwise get to experience if we were sane all the time.  And this idea that I am so magnificently adored despite how ridiculous and immature I always am has the power to cripple me in wonder and praise. Enough that the journey somehow seems worth it all.

So tonight, I did the most radical thing I could think of. I showed up and I prayed. Begrudgingly. I cleared my schedule and spent time with the one who made me and loves me. And to the shock of no one, I, in response, got the peace that I had been searching for in everything else under the sun. When this finally happens for me, my return to the Lord, I am always astonished. It always comes right after I totally give up on myself, and it is there in that glorious defeat that I find the strength to wake up again, drenched in the love and mercy of Jesus. It is then that I realize that my deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done absolutely nothing to earn it or deserve it.

The whole thing is just mind blowing. And awe inspiring.  And crazy.  Which makes me feel not so out of place.

"Come to Me"

"Weary, burdened wanderer
There is rest for thee
At the feet of Jesus,
In his love, so free

Listen to His message
Words of life, forever blest
Oh, thou heavy-laden
Come to me, come and rest

There is freedom, taste and see
Hear the call, come to me
Run into His arms of grace
Your burden carried, He will take

Bring Him all thy burdens
All thy guilt and sin
Mercy's door is open
Rise up, and enter in

There is freedom, taste and see
Hear the call, come to me
Run into His arms of grace
Your burden carried, He will take

Jesus, there is waiting
Paitently for thee
Hear Him, gently calling
Come all, come to me
Come oh, come to me
Wont you come?"
- "Come to Me" by The Village Church (feat. Lauren Chandler)

ITS 2013!  And today, Jesus bids us to come to him, on a day where so much newness gives us tiny glimpses of hope. Of something better, even if only for a minute. He bids us to join him on a journey towards being transformed by the renewal of our minds.  He bids us to focus our thoughts and life on Him.  He bids that we give ourselves fully to the adventure of increasing attentiveness of His presence.  This year. Today.

I usually stay away from New Years Resolutions because I am the person that gives up on Week 1.  And more than anything I hate disappointing myself.  Seems like the ultimate low to make lofty goals of grandeur and then fail miserably at them.  If I could sum up what I would ahem, resolute, this year..it would be that I in general "suck less." (as my friend Kallyn says.)  My flesh screams that I can fix the brokenness in me, the lonliness and the sin nature that keeps me running back to that which will not satisfy.  Suck less, Allyson.  Pull it together.  Eat healthy, work out, dont say cuss words.  Rules which I break as often as I keep. My feeble attempts at holiness and goodness fall so very short.

Instead of this game of pass and fail, my prayer this year, for 2013, is like that of Jesus.  I pray that I can run to God and not away from him even when I feel completely unworthy of him and essentially useless as a human being.   My prayer is that I would experience more of His holy presence and that in seeing more of Him, I would not think of myself as much but that I would have eyes to see and ears to see as He does.  That I would practice thinking more highly of God, that I would trust in his sovereignty and goodness and delight in his truth.

Anne Lamott says that "If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little."

And she is right.  We are hopeless outside of Jesus, and this Jesus is unimaginably in love with us, wanting us, bidding us "Come."  So instead of me buckling down and trying to be all that I feel I am supposed to be, I pray "help." I have run out of good ideas on how to fix the unfixable, so I have decided to finally stop trying to heal my own sick stressed mind, with my own sick stressed mind.

These prayers remind me that I am not in charge, that I cannot fix anything, and that I open myself to being helped by something, or someone. These prayers acknowledge that I am clueless, but that God isn’t. It means I stop trying to figure it out, because trying to figure it out is exhausting and crazy-making.  

 

Lamott says "When we cry out for Help, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of not going limp and not feeling so hopeless that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own—or other people’s—higher powers. We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest. Praying “help”means that we ask that something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems. We stop the toxic peering and instead turn our eyes to something else."

 

So welcome 2013, may this year be one of prayer, steadfastness, trust, and and increasing knowledge of the glory of God.  May it be a year of love, adventure, hope, wellness, and peace.  May my eyes and focus always be set on who God is and not who I am.  May his glory result in my joy, and may I serve and honor him in a way that is worthy of who He is.  To him be the glory, here, and in the years to come forever and ever amen.