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All these multiplying moments …
Entering fully into the moment can overwhelm, a river running wild.
I do what I always need to do. I preach it. I preach it to the person I need to preach to the most. I preach to me. The skin’s tugged hard by the rush of time and I say it aloud in current pounding past, words I need like water: Calm. Haste makes waste. Life is not an emergency. Life is brief and it is fleeting, but it is not an emergency.
Emergencies are sudden, unexpected events — but is anything under the sun unexpected to God?
Stay calm, enter the moment, give thanks.
And I can always give thanks because an all-powerful God has all these things — all things — always under control.
Life is not an emergency.
Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere, and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential — a bubble held in awe.
When did I stop thinking life was dessert?
Only in the slowing, the sitting down at the table, when His hands held the bread and the thanks fell from His tongue, do the open-eyed, the wide-eyed, see the Face they face. The fast have spiritually slow hearts.
Life is dessert — too brief to hurry.
And all this. This cathedral moment, this time before it bursts. All this.
Slow never killed time. It’s the rushing and racing, the trying to catch up, this is what kills time — ourselves. Why in the world do we keep wounding ourselves? Life is not an emergency. And this, this is the only way to slow down time … Long, so very long, she and I, we just sit. We just soak in frog songs on golden pond. When our toes are cold and the shadows stretch, I stand slow, not wanting to. “We leaving the frogs, now?” she whispers up to me. I nod … reluctant.
“You can only hear your life sing — when you still.”
In Christian circles, we elevate what we deem beautiful, endeavor to create spheres of pristine beauty, and perhaps rightly so, for “whatever is good, pure, lovely, think on these
things.” But I wonder if maybe in the upside-down kingdom of God, what we regard as unlovely is, in Jesus, lovely. Because somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. Seeing the world with Jesus’ eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness.
Does all the ugliness in my life look this beautiful? It would, if I got closer. Is that why God stays so close to us? Lord, draw me nearer to the scratched situations in my life, the scarred places. Get me close enough to You to see the beauty in them.
Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine…. Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. Isaiah 43:1, 4 ESV
A promise that I hope in and cling too.
And Rachel stops midsentence. She reads the words chalked on asphalt out loud, words I’m focusing on. She reads them slow, like a decoding of everything. “Hey beautiful, you are loved J” scrawled right there on the sidewalk, happy face chalked there grinning too. “Oh.” She says it like an awakening. “And here I just thought it was graffiti.” I nod in the middle of an epiphany. The graffiti can be grace. What seems a defacement may be a glimpse of His face. All the writing on the wall could be love notes.
And the dialect of God is the day just as it comes — and whenever I slow down and shift perspective, it’s possible to read the impossible: the divine language of love written on all the walls. This smiling, startling alphabet of grace.
Grace isn’t a mere Pollyanna feeling. It’s a force. It’s a powerful force. As startling as the power of electricity. Grace is the power of God pulsating with this passionate love of God, this jolting, blazing, dangerous love that pierces all of humanity’s pitch-black. Grace always shocks. Grace always stuns. Grace is always what we need.
This thanks that I am doing — it seems so … crude. Trivial. If this list is the learning of the language of eucharisteo — this feels like … guttural groanings. But perhaps the “full of grace” vocabulary begins haltingly, simply, like a child, thankful for the childlike. But doesn’t the kingdom of heaven belong to such as these? At first, it’s the dare that keeps me going. That and how happy it makes me — giddy — this list-writing of all that is good and pure and lovely and beautiful. But what keeps me going is what I read in that Bible lying open on my prayer bench looking out the window to
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whispers it: “I have learned …” Learned. I would have to learn eucharisteo. Learn eucharisteo — learn it to live fully. Learn it like I know my skin, my face, the words on the end of my tongue. Like I know my own name. Learn how to be thankful — whether empty or full. Could the list teach me even that hard language? Over time?
When I name moments — string out laundry and name-pray, thank You, Lord, for bedsheets in billowing winds, for fluff of sparrow landing on line, sun winter warm, and one last leaf still hanging in the orchard — I am Adam and I discover my meaning and God’s, and to name is to learn the language of Paradise. This naming work never ends for all the children of Adam. Naming to find an identity, our identity, God’s.
I name. And I know the face I face. God’s! God is in the details; God is in the moment. God is in all that blurs by in a life — even hurts in a life. GOD! How can I not name? Naming these moments may change the ugly names I call myself.
Lord, help me in the true work You’ve assigned to me today: to name the graces You give me this day. Cause me to name the ways You love — so I can own my own name: Beloved.
Rather, his prayers move kings and lion jaws because Daniel “got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before” (Daniel 6:10, emphasis added). Three times a day, Daniel prayed thanksgiving for the everyday common, for the God-love spilling forth from the God-heart at the center of all.
I am struck, a bell, and I chime long. Daniel is only a man of prayer because he is a man of thanks, and the only way to be a man or woman of prayer is to be a man or woman of thanks. And not sporadic, general thanks, but three times a day eucharisteo.
It really is a dare to name all the ways that God loves me. The true Love Dare. To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable. This is the vault of the miracles. The only thing that can change us, can change the world, is this — His love.
Love is ridiculous and reconfigures everything.
I used to think that God’s gifts were on shelves one above the other, and that the taller we grew in Christian character the easier we should reach them. I find now that God’s gifts are on shelves one beneath the other, and that it is not a question of growing taller but of stooping lower, and that we have to go down, always down, to get His best gifts.23
The quiet song of gratitude, eucharisteo, lures humility out of the shadows because to receive a gift, the knees must bend humble and the hand must lie vulnerably open and the will must bow to accept whatever the Giver chooses to give.
Down, always down, water runs, always looking for yet lower and lower places to flow. I watch water run and think spiritual water must flow like this … always seeking the lowest places — and the washtub begins to rock. I must go lower. I tell myself this, watching water run. That whenever I am parched and dry, I must go lower with the
water and I must kneel low in thanks. The river of joy flows down to the lowest places. And here on my knees I can see.
