(Loosely) Gathered Thoughts

photo by bgrace

I feel ungathered.

Like I'm the huge pile of dirty laundry I've scooped up off the hallway floor. I need to get it down the stairs to the washer but I keep dropping Matt's socks and little girl's panties and old T-shirts. Every time I bend over to pick them up something else falls. I want to gather up all of me and offer it up to You.
So how do I keep from dropping pieces of me on the stairs?

I wrote this paragraph in my journal on May 15th, 2009. God was doing a lot of deep soul work in me. The kind that's so profound I didn't understand it and couldn't even discern what I was feeling. But I knew I didn't want it to stop. I knew that it was good.
I was frustrated though, because on the surface--the part of me that interacted with the rest of the world--I didn't feel the same level of spiritual depth. I didn't feel very "holy." So I worried there was something wrong, something I needed to fix. If God was working in me so deeply, shouldn't there be lots of sparkling clean clothes folded neatly in my laundry basket?

I continued,
I'm pretty sure You are sinking down quite deep in me so that when I am finally able to gather myself it is from the very bottom up. I don't believe I have ever felt this way before. So close to You in the deep and so far from You on the surface. I don't know how to grasp the surface while holding You in the deep. It's like my inner spirit feels Your presence so deeply, so heavy, that I don't feel like I know how to live in the outer world and not sever that connection.

As I was rereading this today, I realized that at the time, I was having difficulty trusting God with me, with my spiritual journey. It was not that my arms needed to get better at handling the laundry. Rather, I needed to trust that yielding to His work in my life and cooperating with Him was my part.  It was all that He was asking of me in that time. I needed to trust that His arms were coming beneath me and gathering me up and taking care of all of my pieces with infinite wisdom and care. I needed to let Him work in the areas He wanted to and release myself from a sense of responsibility to get the rest of me together in the meantime.

A week earlier, the day after I had seen Rev. Mary, I had woken up with a nursery rhyme in my head:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn't put Humpty together again
And then this came to me very clearly:
"But the King can."

One thing I've learned throughout the last few years is that what God is doing is usually much broader and much deeper than what I can see at first glance. We're so concerned with tidying everything up. God's not in such a big hurry to make things look "presentable." When He makes us whole again, He works at the source of things, not necessarily the surface.

These were the last lines I wrote on May 15th:

What kept me connected to you all this time has been pain. The pain reminded me of You. The pain drew me to you for comfort and for healing. The pain drove me to seek truth and holiness. Now I must have another force of connection. There is only one other force that is strong enough. The connection must be love. Your love for me and my love for You in response. But can it be protected? Protected from guilt, fear, shame? Protected from my fear of imperfection? Protected from sin, from callousness, from my selfishness, from irreverence?
What so often severs that connection--that deep being with You--is guilt and shame. Discouragement and frustration so easily crowd out intimacy as I recognize how far I am from becoming like You. Like Adam and Eve I allow myself to be driven away--to hide and cover myself. And yet, being with You is the surest, most powerful way of being changed into Your likeness. So how can I reconcile this?
You have already taken care of that. It is reconciled in grace. I can be with You in the midst of my imperfection. I can deeply abide with You in my undeserving condition because when I abide with You I abide in grace.
The wonder of the power of grace. Amazing.
What does this say about my relationship with others?
What connects us to each other are our thoughts, our memories, and our shared paths. What if love allowed the connection between us to be formed not just from memories of the past but of hope for the future? What if grace allowed us to see our loved ones through the eyes of redemption?
What if our belief in them and in God's work in their life--our eyes of hope and faith--what if that in itself gives power for them to change? Isn't God's belief in me and work in me that which enables me to change?

I'm Charlie Brown
Lyin' on the ground
Lucy's holding the ball
We're Humpty Dumpty
After the fall
All the King's men can do nothing at all
But maybe the King can
Put us back together again