For Tatterdemalion - Part 3

As I sit clacking keys thinking back over my time at this new church in Bainbridge, my thoughts run sweet. The church is imperfect, yes. I do not idealize it. But for the first time, I feel part of a body. The Body. There are still times when I feel uncomfortably apart by virtue of my uncovered head, my education, and even my love for fairy tales. Fairy tales and other tales spun of fancy might seem like a small thing, but to me they're really not. I know I'm going off on a tangent here, but hey, why not. My blogging style is sitting down and typing. No revising, no planning ahead, really. Just sitting down and writing. So. My take on fiction in two sentences. I've met God in fiction, in fairy tales. I know Him better because of them.

Now back to what I was saying.

Despite our differences, I've come to know the people of this church as family. We're all bound up together now. I love them, and I know that--some of them, at least--love me, too. For the first time, I'm in a place where church can mean brokenness. It can mean honesty and searching out. I think this church has changed a bit over the past several years because of all of the sorrows God has allowed it to pass through in such a short time. A 15-year old adrift in the Susquehanna. A 17-year old gone to her Lord after months in the shadowland between life and death following a car accident. A 10-year old dying of malaria in Benin. These three were each children of families in church. A church cannot bear up under these sorts of griefs without changing. It can only break open, naked before its God. And this is when His real work begins. I walked in right in the midst of the breaking, and I've seen a people groaning for God, crying out to Jesus for rest. My heart's cry joined theirs, and we became family.

During my first year of teaching, in my aloneness I tentatively reached out to the people at church. I'm a shy thing. Writing is immeasurably easier than speaking when it comes to the deepest things, but my tongue gradually learned to let words roll out into the open here and there. I began learning a new culture (the majority of the families at church have Amish or Hutterite backgrounds), a new way of thinking about hospitality. I was also learning to talk with God on my own time, too. It was only when I had no one else at home to know and be known by that I started really understanding this chase He'd been on with me. I thought I'd been seeking Him out, but perhaps I had it backwards. I don't have the heart, the mind, the soul to know God. They are incapable of knowing Him unless He draws them first.  My eyes cannot see His face until He blows the scales off, and my heartbeat cannot join His until I die and Christ lives in me.

The winter of my first year in Bainbridge was a hard one. The dark, the cold, the stress, and the loneliness battered my spirits. I clung to Jesus, reading my Bible and praying each morning in earnest. Not out of duty, but out of a growing love.

It was that Christmas when a dear friend sent me a book titled One Thousand Gifts. To describe it briefly, it's an autobiographical, poetically-written narrative sharing the author's hunt for grace. A friend challenged her to list God's gifts in writing, and to make the list stretch to a thousand. I cannot do the book justice without a longer review, but suffice it to say that it is all about God's grace in the everyday, and the way in which the natural fruit of giving Him thanks for His graces is the joy we spend our lives seeking. After reading the book I began keeping my own journals full of God-gifts (I'm still at it, and am nearly to 2,000).

What I noticed was profound. As I paused in my busy-ness to give thanks, my busy-ness started to reorient itself around Christ. And the joy did come.

The first three gifts I listed were the last gulp of milk in a glass, the pink of grapefruit flesh, and the surprise moon framed in my window. In looking back at my books of gifts now, I see that what I'm writing is changing. The gifts are becoming harder. Some of them are things that break my heart. But the marvel is, I'm learning to count them as gifts because they help me know Christ.

Midwinter, that book--along with my students, my Bible, my prayers, and my family at church--began changing how I looked at life.

I'll never forget the day I was driving to work and, without warning, a wave of love stopped my breath in my throat. I loved Jesus. I didn't just look for Him, talk about Him, read about Him. I loved Him.

That's what I'd been longing for in high school, in college. That breath catching in my throat.

In the spring I at long last made the big decision to get baptized, a decision that had been a bit intimidating to me prior to this point, and still was because of the vulnerability a public declaration required of me. But in late June, I made my way to a pond on a church family's property. The whole church was there. The sun was brilliant, the water crystalline. Trembling, I wept as I tried to speak of Christ. Then I stepped into the water, was dipped beneath it, and rose, dripping. Crucified, buried, resurrected with Christ. The families started singing, lining up to hug me as I wrapped myself in a towel. No, this church isn't perfect. But it is home.

Fast forward through that summer and the whole next school year. I kept learning, kept waking up. Christ kept getting closer, taking on flesh and substance.

I'm leaving a whole lot out. 

But the most important part of all doesn't start until the very end of my second year of teaching. More and more, I began feeling a quickening, an expectation. I was determined to make the most of my summer (this one just past). Through the hours spent reading, praying, walking out in the middle of nowhere on state land feasting on wild blueberries for lunch, I could feel my world stretching out, growing larger. It was a good summer. 

I spent many of my evenings with friends, family, or people from church. Towards the end of the summer, the younger adults in church began meeting to pray every Monday night. I have never experienced prayer like this before, and it's making me realize how little I know--we all know--about what it means to pray. It's beautiful. 

Then, right before school began God started breaking me utterly. I had been praying for hard things if that what was needed to wake me up thoroughly, and He took me seriously.  Through continuing to try to love a neighbor family whose children I work with at school, giving comfort to one of my students whose sister was killed in a car accident just weeks before school, and going through one of the hardest personal upheavals I've ever experienced, I found myself in God's fire. I won't go into detail here. What I will say, though, is that even as I found myself grieving I knew God as my anchor. And my anchor held. I was not alone in bearing my sorrows, for they had been borne long before by Another.

Over the last few months I have learned to long for humility, for complete self-forgetfulness. I've learned to ask for the hard things if it means knowing my Jesus more. I've learned what it looks like to take up my cross daily and follow Him. I've learned that self must be emptied, and this perhaps is the hardest lesson of all. 

Above all, I've learned that Christ is the center.

I'll leave you with a song: Different Kinds of Happy (Sara Groves)