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.

“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.”

“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:)

Even if I hadn’t been on a deadline to make dinner, I would have been in a hurry.  I am, shall we say, an “efficient traveler.”  Ask anyone who has ever had the dubious joy of being a passenger in a vehicle I was commandeering on a road trip.  Don’t drink much, because there won’t be many potty breaks.  I am single-minded and focused in my goal of making it there.  We will stop for lunch at the regular time but we will eat it in the car, so bring a towel to catch all the drippings from that greasy fast food!

All that to say, yesterday, my GPS friend failed me.  But knowing she was going to do so, I had even asked directions from the bell”boy” at the hotel – “How do I get to the Florida Turnpike from here?”  I should have noticed the telltale frown of uncertainty on his baby face (I had, after all, been teaching on “uncertainty” this weekendJ), but I was in a hurry and I wasn’t going to ask someone else.  So I turned back to my trusty friend who had gotten me out of many a jam in the past – Ms Gips, as I call her.  No matter how much I argued with her, she insisted on taking me on the highway – I wanted the byway!

Finally, after wasting an hour or so driving around Orlando, I gave in and went her way, the high way, but not without a rant.  (Yes, my children and husband are thanking God now that they weren’t along for this ride!)  And then.

And then, I said to myself, or should I say the Holy Spirit said to me, “It’s been such a beautiful weekend – lovely women representing not all, but many, of the tribes, tongues, nations, and people groups of this cosmos, along with a handful of very gracious men; deep engagement with the Word and lovely new friendships formed…ARE YOU GOING TO LET LOSING YOUR WAY LET YOU LOSE YOUR WAY?”  Truly.  Will I let all the grace drain out of this glorious weekend?

So I began to thank God, aloud, for every wonderful moment of the weekend, and I tell you, there were many.

Then I saw it.  I had seen the practice circle the skywriter had scrawled in the sky.  But then I noticed a word…I said to myself, “Does that say…?”

But I knew.  I didn’t need to ask.  I knew exactly what it said, even before I could read all the words…”Jesus l…”  I didn’t need to wait for the skywriter to finish his message in the sky.  I had spoken the words with conviction less than 24 hours before:  “Jesus loves you.”  (Actually, the sky eventually said, “Jesus loves u.”

Being the efficient road warrior that I am, I waited for one of the many stoplights that had interrupted my flow so that I could take a photo.  But now I kept getting green lights.  Finally, I did a wasteful thing.  I pulled to the side of the road and took this picture…

Thanks be to the God who speaks to me in the sky when I lose my way on the road!

“What-if…(I never get a new job?)”

“Why…(did my son’s friend die so suddenly?)” and

“How long…(until my child returns home?)”.

And yet, it seems that God does not answer these questions of the heart as much as he raises and answers other core questions.  God tells us:

“What…”:  the marvelous deeds and glorious wonders of his redemption — just think Adam and Eve in the garden after their sin, or the Israelites in the wilderness, or indeed, Christ RAISED FROM THE DEAD!

“Who…”:  God is — magnificent and mighty, holy and gracious, tender and strong, compassionate and ever-pursuing.

“How much…”:  how much He loves us.  Can you really turn a page of the grand narrative of Scripture without seeing God’s love for you written on every page. I wrote about this a few weeks ago:  Romans 8:38 — “For I am persuaded…that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor heights nor depths nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord!”  In other words, take any circumstance in your life that you have a “what-if,” “why” or “how long” question about and put it in this long list and you’ll still come out with NOTHING can separate you from the enduring, indestructible love God has for you.  NOTHING.

I’ll end with this great quote from Michael Card I found as I was researching this topic…

“We think we need answers from God for life’s struggles,” says Michael.  “But in actuality, we just need Him.  The answer is His presence.  God moved off the throne to meet Job face to face, just like Jesus left heaven and came here to feel our pain.”  Michael Card, in interview about A Sacred Sorrow

My friends, there is such great good news to know and share with the downhearted in uncertain stories.  If you’re in town for Synergy, come to the workshop at 2 tomorrow (yes, I know it’s during afternoon nap time:) or stop by my table in the exhibitor’s area to learn more.  I can’t wait to tell this story!

Where does hope grow? In times of hopelessness. When our hope in earthly things fades, our Christian hope swells. Earthly hope is based on limited vision which leads us to dream mild dreams by heavenly standards: a new ITouch for Christmas, an A on the bio exam, a much-needed job, or a longed-for spouse.

While there is nothing wrong with hoping for good gifts in this life, Christian hope far exceeds the small story of earthly hope. Focused on resurrection, restoration, and renewal, Christian hope centers on two key chapters in biblical history. The first is the Resurrection; this real story of Christ dying and being raised from the dead invites us to die and live anew with the raised Christ. It is this story that allows us to look at a world rapidly unraveling, and proclaim with confidence, “New life will arise out of this doomed day.”

Christian hope also focuses on the end of the story told in Revelation 21 and 22, an ending that writes a new and eternal beginning. Revelation tells us that in the new heavens and the new earth there will be no more death, disease, disequilibrium, or despoiling. Instead, there will be health and wholeness, work and worship. Knowing that one day no more tears will flow encourages us to work intentionally on restoring this broken world even as we wait expectantly for a day when our Lord will come and complete the process.

And when our Lord comes, I John tells us: “we will be like him, for we will see him as he really and truly is.” (I Jn 3:4, NLT) Whether we know it or not, this is the deep hope our hearts were made for, the hope that brings our stories into focus. Because of Christian hope, N.T. Wright, tells us, we live differently in this world: “Our task in the present …is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.” Tom Wright,Surprised by Hope, p. 30

It was not uncommon that in the moment we were walking out the door, one of the following things would happen:  the baby would poop in his diaper and the diaper would prove to be incompetent to its task; the baby would vomit all over my dress; the oldest two would start fighting; or the third child would have managed to lose one shoe on the way from her bedroom to the car.

I had a common response to these shalom-shattered events:  I would throw up my hands in anger, look up to the heavens where I believed God must be reading the Sunday paper (I certainly didn’t think He was ‘counting the hairs on my head!’!), and I would scream, “I was made for more than this!”

Genesis 3 tells the story of “The Fall,” how Adam and Eve listened to Satan, the evil one, and chose to ignore God’s commands.  They reached to take something they were convinced was even better than what God had already given them, fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  They took life into their own hands, and the results were shame, hiding, alienation from one another and God, blame, and the expulsion from the garden, among other things.  Cornelius Plantinga, in his book Not the Way It’s Supposed t to Be:  A Breviary of Sin explains that shalom is the “way things ought to be.”  Evil and sin are the “vandalism of shalom.” Adam and Eve’s sin affected the entire universe and everyone who lived thereafter, despoiling the beauty for which we were made.  The Fall tells the tragedy of our stories, but the good news is that God’s grand narrative of grace does not end with this chapter.

I’m reviewing Keller’s study, What were we put in this world to do.  Here are some great quotes that answer questions people have about the Fall:

Keller says the basic philosophical questions are, “How did Satan become evil?” and “why did God let this happen?”

C.S. Lewis gives one answer:  ”If a thing is free to be good, it’s also free to be bad.  And free will has made evil possible.  Why, then, did God give them free will?  Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the very thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”  Mere Christianity.

Keller asks, “What explanation does God give Adam and Eve for this prohibition?”  His answer:  ”…in a way, this single prohibition shows us the essence of the test of obedience.  If we know why it is practical to obey a command of God, then we are complying with his will out of self-interest.  But if we obey a command simply and solely because “The Lord God commanded” it (2:16), then (and only then) we have truly obeyed God.  In other words, God is saying in 2:16-17, “I want you to do something just because I said so, not because it immediately benefits you or is practical, helpful, or exciting.  I want you to do something just because I am God.”  Thus this commandment contains the essence of all commandments.”

And from Derek Kidner, on the painful irony of the Fall:
“The serpent’s promise of ‘eyes…opened’ came true in its fashion (3:22), but it was a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment.  Man saw the familiar world and spoiled it now in the seeing, projecting evil on to innocence (cf. Titus 1:15) and reacting to good with shame and flight.  His new consciousness of good and evil was both like and unlike the divine knowledge (3:22), differing from it and from innocence as a sick man’s aching awareness of his body differs both from the insight of the physician and the unconcern of the man in health.”

You crazy Galatians! Did someone put a hex on you? Have you taken leave of your senses? Something crazy has happened, for it’s obvious that you no longer have the crucified Jesus in clear focus in your lives. His sacrifice on the cross was certainly set before you clearly enough.

Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up!

Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.

Is it not obvious to you that persons who put their trust in Christ (not persons who put their trust in the law!) are like Abraham: children of faith? It was all laid out beforehand in Scripture that God would set things right with non-Jews by faith. Scripture anticipated this in the promise to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed in you.”

“Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It’s no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.
God asked Adam to name all the animals, which was asking Adam to help in the creation of their wholeness. When we name each other, we are sharing in the joy and privilege of incarnation, and all great works of art are icons of Naming.”

“To name is to love. To be Named is to be loved. So in a very true sense the great works which help us to be more named also love us and help us to love.”

L’Engle quoting Martin Buber:
“You should utter words as though heaven were opened within them and as though you did not put the word into your mouth, but as though you had entered the word.”

“I am grateful that I started writing at a very early age, before I realized what a daring thing it is to do, to set down words on paper, to attempt to tell a story, create characters. We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.”