Living Story Grace

Today, a guest post from Jackie, my elder daughter, who is in Camden Town with World Harvest Mission doing a summer internship.  I’ve put abbreviations for the real names — probably a good idea, as you’ll see from the story.

“Story time. During Sonship week, we had prayer in small groups after dinner and then we’d go over to Jl’s flat to hang out. Since it stays light here till after 10, we sometimes just sat around outside in the back for a while. We ended up meeting these elementary-school age girls who live in the same complex, so a lot of nights they would see us out there and ask us to play “it” (tag) or frisbee or something. So much fun…So, one of the girls, Fi (10 yrs old), and I were sitting one night, and somehow it was brought up that she’s Muslim, and I asked her a little about it (like did she have to wear a head covering) and she told me “I’m a different kind of Muslim, I’m Kosovan.” I don’t know much about that but I know there was some kind of genocide in Kosovo and that’s probably why her parents moved to London. I asked her some more questions because it was really interesting but eventually the subject died.

Anyways, that’s the background info.

So, a few nights ago, my prayer group decided to walk to Jl’s and pray in the green behind the building. I think the girls (F and her sister, E, 7, and their friends P and M, who i think are 7 and 10) started to expect us so the moment we sat down, out they come. We told them that we would be able to play but not for a few minutes because we were gonna talk and pray a little bit. F goes, “P can pray she’s Christian!” and we told her if she wanted to she could, and then of course E (F’s sister) wants to sit down too, and M. We told them they were all welcome to listen if they wanted, and after hesitating for a sec F sat down too, saying, I’m sure it’s okay if I just LISTEN I mean i’m not actually PRAYING. We were a little worried because we didn’t want to start any tension with F and E’s parents, but even when we made it clear there was no pressure, they still really wanted to listen. So J, L and I all prayed like we normally  would and the girls just listened.

After we finished, they asked some things like about calling God “Father” and how to pray, and then they all wanted to do it! It was the cutest thing. So we went around in a circle again. F was the first of the little girls to pray, and when she was praying all i could think was, Sweet Jesus. This girl GETS it. She was talking to God so personally and so naturally, asking God for a baby boy for her mother, and to help her when she’s at school and being bullied and to make good “marks.” I have to believe that talking to our Father is in our DNA.

E and P’s prayers were equally precious, 7-year-old prayers, (‘Ohhh please God I would really love a puppy”, in a British accent of course. Imagine.) yet they understood that they could ask God for things they wanted, which is SO beautiful. After we played a little they sat down with me on the grass and somehow they just were asking me questions that were actually pretty theologically heavy… but either way I just got to tell them what i believe about Jesus. It was so so so sweet. “Thank you for that interesting information” says F.

I was a little nerviosa that we would get in trouble with F and E’s parents, but what was so sweet was that the girls were asking, and they were interested, and I think they heard something in our prayers that they wanted. Like hello, God just provided the opportunity for us to teach these beautiful girls how to pray. How sweet is that. The following night F sat down with me and asked me “Can we do what we did yesterday?” All I can think is, Jesus, I don’t know what you just did, but I’m pretty sure that these girls want to know more about you, and I can’t believe that you just used us to plant seeds in their lives! GOSSSSSSHHHHH i love these girls so much and want them know him so bad, and as frustrating as it is that we won’t be in Ealing anymore to build relationships with them, I have to believe that God is going to bring more people into their lives to love them and show them Jesus.

The good news is, it’s not up to me to do that. Praise the Lord, he uses us even in our weakness and unpreparedness and messy hearts.”

I love the story, and I really really love the last sentence!!! May we all remember.  If you want to read more of Jackie’s musings from the “Mother Country,” check out “Camden Town, or Life across the Pond”:  http://jacksnack91.wordpress.com/

Days of seeing faces known and newly known run into nights, so again, I think this blog is a day late.  Still, as promised, the second part of my musings on how God’s vow-keeping impacts our vow-breaking.

In Scripture, the story of marriage goes like this – God created male and female, two impossibly different beings (‘as opposite to’ as the Hebrew prepositional phrasekenegdo suggests in its description of the woman (Gen. 2:20)), to join together as one flesh and image him. Even more gloriously, he called these two very opposite beings to labor together in managing and multiplying His glorious creation. He created us with awe and gratitude and sent us into the world to become allies living out that awe and gratitude for one another, for His creation, and for Him.

As the story is told, within a short time the man and the woman lost that awe and gratitude. The serpent tempted Eve to believe that God was holding back, and indeed, she began to doubt the wealth of gifts she had received. Adam stood there like a dumb donkey and the first failure of communication between the two led to the shattering of shalom. Hiding, blaming and shaming were the short and long-term fallout. Then they hid by covering themselves with fig leaves; now we hide by covering ourselves with trendy clothes, fast cars, and the right schools for our kids. Eve would suffer loneliness and would want to absorb her husband to make her life work. Adam, overwhelmed with the chaos of wife and weeds, would run and hide in silence and work. The covenant between man and wife is already broken, and we’re only in the third chapter of the Bible.

Now the story goes out of sequence, and this is good news for us vow-breakers. Even as the fallout of the Fall is occurring, God, the vow-creator and the vow-keeper, is in hot pursuit of His shalom-spoiled Creation. “Where are you, Adam?” is His invitation to Adam to remember his makeup, to come out of guilty conscience into forgiven consciousness. Conversing with His vow-breaking creation, God knows that only His work of reparation, reconciliation, restoration, relocation, and all the other R’s of redemption (that’s for another article), can restore these broken things (seeRestoring Broken Things). So God speaks His vow to the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This promise to crush evil is only the beginning of a story that follows many strange plot twists and turns. As the story develops, God continues making vows, also called covenants – all redemptive, all fulfilled, and all leading to the culmination of the story – the great consummation of the PERFECT MARRIAGE.

God’s vow to crush evil is fulfilled oddly by sending His perfect Son to death on a Cross; in Christ’s death, we vow-breakers are transformed into vow-keepers. As Steven Curtis Chapman sings it, Christ “took the hopeless, the life wasted, ruined and marred — and made it new.” And in the stunning conclusion in Revelation, the biblical Story of Marriage reaches its Consummation with the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in which we the Church become Christ’s bride, “bright and pure.” At this wedding Feast, there will be no antagonistic in-laws, no drunken uncles, no rained-out receptions. In this marriage, there will be no more tears because God has wiped them away, no more loneliness because God will be with us, no more frustration because our work will be fruitful and multiplied. We will flourish in the fullness of the intimacy of his kingdom.

It is this Perfect Marriage created by the covenant of a vow-keeping God that gives this vow-breaker hope in the meantime. Perhaps our marriage ceremony twenty-seven years ago would have better defined the contours of reality if I had spoken the vows I have truly lived, promising Kip I would fail him every day. Then the Reverend could have added two questions, one for me and one for Kip: “Elizabeth, will you promise to repent regularly, to feel godly sorrow over your unrelenting penchant to have your way in your marriage?” And to Kip: “Will you promise to forgive Elizabeth every day?” And to those questions, we could have said “yes” with hope. For indeed, because of God the vow-keeper, we are freed to acknowledge the reality of our vow-breaking hearts and live into the new reality our Groom Jesus has created in us – a heart redeemed and transformed to live in Holy Matrimony.