When Relationships Feel Rough & Truth Feels Like Burlap

When I met Deidra Riggs, I wanted to sit real quiet and listen to her wisdom for hours. That’s Deidra — she lives this idea of  Jumping Tandem with God — huge leaps of faith — and she makes these safe places to ask tough questions and to figure out — together — how to tear down the walls we have built to keep one another at a distance. She’s really something else. She writes about life as she sees it; about race relations in the Body of Christ; and about living with courage, even when you’re scared to death. Most of the time, she’s just trying to figure it out. But always, she’s saving a place at the table for you. It’s a grace to welcome the profound wisdom who is Deidra Riggs, to the farm’s front porch today…

 

words and photos by Deidra Riggs

Truth feels like burlap.

Burlap.

What I want to say feels like burlap on my heart and in my head and on my tongue, but it is pressing its way forward here.

In this space between us, where we don’t always see things exactly the same way. Or, maybe we are worlds apart on one thing or another.

Maybe we will never agree about a certain issue, and we will always have this thing about which we cannot see eye-to-eye.

Do you know what I mean? You’ve been there?

Have you found yourself surprised when a friend of yours — one who follows hard after Jesus — shares a viewpoint or a train of thought or a position with which you simply don’t agree?

Can’t ever agree?

When you realize my vote cancels out yours. You’ve been there?

Can we sit together, anyway?

Would you still save me a seat?

What is the road we take toward each other, and how do we show forth the love of Jesus, even when our disappointment wells up fiercely in the gut and threatens all we thought we knew about the other?

People have said it before.

They’ve tried to remind me, and to take my face between their hands while they lean in close to help me understand. They would be right. I probably would have had a problem with the people Jesus hung around as He brought and lived and breathed Good News to all of us. For all of us.

I like to think you’d be the one whose brow furrowed when you caught a glimpse of Jesus talking about water with a woman by a well.

But, if I’m being honest (and it is this honesty that rubs my skin with its raw weave), that person with the furrowed brow would oh, so possibly (make that, probably) have been me.

I may have given that particular woman a pass, but there would have been others — men and women, old and young — with whom I would have lost my patience.

I would have wondered if there was any hope for them and, by association, if there was any hope for this man who went by the name of Jesus.

Because, here’s what’s at the bottom of that, if I’m being honest:

If I’m too good to be caught hanging out with people like the woman at the well, then — by extension — I’m probably too good (in my own mind) for Jesus.

I told you. Burlap.

A friend of mine once shared with me a question she asks herself, to keep herself aware of her growing edge, as far as people are concerned.

God has called us to love Him, and also to love people — all people — and so, my friend sometimes asks herself, “Who is the person you don’t want your child to marry?”

My answer to that question sometimes looks like a woman at a well …. or a person from a different culture or race  ….  or someone in an unemployment line, or a fraternity member, or the person who cut me off on the highway.

Of course, the question my friend asks herself isn’t truly about marriage.

The question is about the state of my friend’s heart.

And, when I ask it of myself, I’m inquiring about the state of my heart.

Sometimes, when I answer that question, it’s my own heart that feels like burlap — rough and rugged and woven loosely, maybe even fraying at the edges.

It doesn’t matter that I may have my own woman at the well story.

Sometimes I forget that part. I forget I haven’t always been saved by grace and so I fold my arms and shake my head on the inside of me and I decide for myself who can be “in” and who has to be “out.”

I forget that Jesus chose to be “out” — outcast, outnumbered, outdone, and outwitted.

Or, so it seemed.

Jesus said to be careful about the way we judge one another. Strike that. What he said in Matthew 7:1, is this: “Don’t judge.”

The Message version breaks it down, of course, and the words rise up to meet me from the page:

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging.

A boomerang can pack quite a wallop, yes?

As if we set out to throw a few stones, but the wind shifted, and those stones ended up on our very own doorstep, with Jesus writing something in the dust.

Today, I leaned against the kitchen counter and watched a squirrel leap from one tree to another, out in our backyard.

I stood there in four squares of light, divided by the shadow of the window pane. My heart has holes in it, and rough edges, and places where it’s simply too easy for me to let people to slip right between the weave and away from me without a second glance.

You too?

Thank God we’re not too much for Him to handle.

My burlap truth and yours — abrasive and rugged and ragged and worn — is not too far gone for Him to redeem and restore and to reconcile to Himself.

He has outdone Himself, on our behalf, and we are undone because of the Lord’s great love for us.

Reconciliation was God’s idea — bringing us back to Him, and to each other, and to ourselves….

so we can sit together anyway.

 

 

 

Deidra Riggs is an influential blogger, as well as DaySpring’s (in)courage and The High Calling, for which she is managing editor. She’s has been a speaker for TEDx, organized her own women’s retreat, and a mother of 2 adult children and is a pastor’s wife in Lincoln, Nebraska.

I’ve just finished reading Deidra’s upcoming wonder of a book and sat down and wrote a forward to all her wisdom releasing in the fall — – one to get on your reading list: Every Little Thing: Making a World of Difference Right Where You Are.