Just found this in my drafts box, after I had suggested it to a friend who was struggling with some of the same acceleration issues I was having…I’ll post this today and go back to Buechner tomorrow!

In the short time I’ve been here at the Synergy conference, I’ve heard humbling stories of women living and loving so beautifully in God’s story of grace.  I am reminded of a day three years ago when my then-13-year-old daughter brought God’s surprising and funny funny grace into a moment of my anger and shame.  This excerpt from my story guide tells that story:

As we learn God’s story of grace, we are freed to live and love as God created and redeemed us to do.  Let me tell you another story to show you what I mean.

“Mom, please don’t cry!”  My thirteen-year-old daughter begged me to lift my head and   look at her.  I had collapsed over the steering wheel when I saw the blue lights of the second trooper in a matter of three weeks, realizing that despite my earnest efforts to watch my speed, I had again failed.  I was furious with myself, even though I knew that I had no malicious intent – I had driven over 3000 miles in the previous two months, carting kids around the Southeast to various camps and volleyball tournaments.  My chief method of coping with the draining and dreary hours on the road was to listen to sermons or lectures and sometimes as I did so I simply forgot to pay attention to how fast I was going.  But I knew it was no excuse and I dreaded the thought of telling my husband, even though I knew he would be understanding and forgiving.  So as the trooper sat in his car scrawling out an illegible ticket, I laid my head on the steering wheel and sobbed.

Then I heard Mary Elizabeth through my fury and self-pity and exhaustion, “Mom, I know – let’s pray!”  And since I certainly didn’t start praying, she did.  She asked God to be with me and to help me know it was just a mistake and to help me remember what a great trip we had had.  Somewhere in her prayer, I heard the voice of Jesus, whispering, “Come out and join the party.”  The officer offered me the ticket like a bill from the local diner and said cheerfully, “Have a blessed day, Ma’am!”  I resisted the urge to tell him exactly what would bless my day and maneuvered the car back onto the highway to drive the last 60 miles of the thousand mile round trip I had done in the last 24 hours.

Mary Elizabeth, tender nurturer that she is, persisted in her goal of cheering me up with more camp stories.  That morning she had been talking with a friend whose grandfather had died before camp.  M.E. noticed her friend was sad and asked her what was bothering her, and the friend told her going home made her remember how much she missed her grandfather.  Mary Elizabeth reported the consoling words she spoke to her friend, “That’s the way it is with losing someone to death, you are sad, then you forget for a while, then you may be sad again, and that’s okay.”

As she told me this story, she seemed to experience a sudden revelation and chirpily added, “But getting a speeding ticket isn’t the same as your grandfather dying!”  I couldn’t help but laugh, and I remembered the words I have spoken numerous times and heard repeated back to me, “This will make a really good story one day!”  Indeed, God was redeeming this story already, bringing beauty out of ugliness.  I would never choose the humiliation of being stopped by state troopers twice in one month, but I also wouldn’t trade the beauty of my thirteen-year-old daughter ministering to my heart.

Because I am attuned to God’s story of grace playing through all of my stories, I can hear the melody of redemption in this particular story.  Though it highlights my humiliation, I must remember and tell this story, because it reveals God’s redemption.  Like my friend, I was committed to a story I had written, one in which I played the righteous hero, the supermom driving my children all around the country, and everyone praised and lauded me for my tremendous efforts.  In this story, a state trooper should understand how I could fall into the trap of driving a little faster than the speed limit, and rather than giving me a ticket, he would bestow a special needs tag on my car that would allow me to drive as fast as I wanted without ever being stopped.

As you can see, my worst sin was not in speeding, but in my self-righteousness and self-pity.  In that state, I withdrew from my daughter, refusing to receive her offers of grace.  Thankfully, the story isn’t catalogued under the title “Elizabeth’s Stupid Sin” because God’s story of grace trumps my sin.  Indeed, the story unfolds in the good news of God’s pursuing love, incarnated in my daughter, who relentlessly hounded me with the sounds of heaven in encouraging me “to remember what a great trip we had” (and unspoken message: “Don’t ruin this memory for me, Mom!”). God did save me from ruining the story for my daughter, and this chapter will stand in our storybook on the page with other memories of God’s miraculous movement in our lives.

Buechner says even if God wrote a message in the stars, it would not convince us:

“We all want to be certain, we all want proof, but the kind of proof we tend to want — scientifically or philosophically demonstrable proof that would silence all doubts once and for all — would not in the long run, I think, answer the fearful depths of our need at all.  For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but who in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world.  It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence.  That is the miracle that we are really after.  And that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.”

If you read yesterday’s blog on Road Signs, perhaps you thought, as I did, of Frederick Buechner’s great sermon, collected in his book The Magnificent Defeat, where he ponders our desire to have God prove himself to us in some “objectifiably verifiable and convincing way”.  He writes:

“Suppose, for instance, that God were to take the great, dim river of the Milky Way as we see it from down here flowing across the night sky and were to brighten it up a little and then rearrange it so that all of a sudden one night the world would step outside and look up at the heavens and see not the usual haphazard scattering of stars but, written out in letters light years tall, the sentence:  I REALLY EXIST, or GOD IS.  If I were going to try to write a story or a play about such an event, I would start, of course, with the first night that this great theological headline appeared there in the stars, with suns and moons to dot the i’s and the tails of the comets to cross the t’s.  And I would try to show some of the ways that I can imagine people might respond to it.  I would show some of them sinking to their knees, not because they are especially religious people but just because it might seem somehow the only natural thing to do under the circumstances.  They would perhaps do it without even thinking about it, just crumpling down on their knees there in the tall grass behind the garage….”

There’s more, much more.  As I was typing, I wondered where I would stop and realized I would want to quote the entire sermon.  And driving duties call, so I will leave you with this and the encouragement to read Buechner’s exhortation.  And a promise to quote a little more of it tomorrow.  Until then, think about whether or not it would change things for you if God did write such a message in the stars.  Oddly enough, sometimes He really does.  See yesterday’s blog if you don’t know what I mean:)