“We have to know in order to love, we have to risk everything, we have to open ourselves up to contact — even with the possibility of disaster.”  -Penny Lane

The fruit-a-year study isn’t turning out as planned. It is so much worse.  I have 5 months to go and I want to quit. I also want to start over. Anything to get me out of this middle spot.

I was getting some great stuff, too. When God told innocent Hagar that her son was a global wreck, I saw Love. I saw active, saturating Love while God was destroying His own people. I saw Love when He gave Israel a certificate of divorce and I saw Love when He was silent for 400 years.

I didn’t write about it like I had planned. Honestly, I didn’t know how. It was the kind of stuff that goes deep in your spirit, settling into a place where words don’t survive.

The first two months of this study were filled with awesome. Then, without warning, life imploded. Our church fell apart. Our family has been dealing with sickness and accidents and financial lack for months. In addition,  the “obeying God in faith” choices my husband and I have made have kicked our teeth in and ground our faces in the dirt. I’m standing in debris, with God looking and feeling very absent and people around me saying, “I told you so”.

I’m in that middle spot – that place between Leap-of-Faith-Adrenaline and Ha-Ha-I-Was-Right Victory. I don’t know if I’m strong enough to endure but I know I sure as hell don’t want to go back. I don’t want what I had. I don’t want to be the moderate investor when it comes to my Christianity.

I don’t want the language and culture of Christianity without the power of God bursting from my heart and dripping from my fingertips.

I’m taken aback at how much a life of faith can suck. The irony is, that when you are held up by Love, nothing is sacred. He doesn’t give a rip about your reputation or your opinion, or quite honestly, your emotions. I’m not saying that He doesn’t care if I’m sad. I’m saying He isn’t going to be persuaded to change His mind just because I burst into tears.

Leaps of faith sound glorious when you are on the cliff’s edge. It’s easy to stand on the solid edge, overlooking the risk and shout to the cynics, “God is real!” But it’s not until you are in freefall, and He hasn’t shown up, that you confront the question you never wanted to admit was inside you: “Is God real?”

And when you crash face first into the ground and the angels you were expecting remain on standby, it leaves you wondering if you are just a whack job. Maybe you didn’t hear Him. Maybe you’ve been the wrong kind of fool.

Love has teeth and those teeth have got me by the jugular. If He releases pressure, I bleed out. If He increases pressure, I die. There is no way out.

I am at the mid-point of an act of faith, the precise point where faith bottoms out.

But I tell you emphatically … I know I’m living the defining moment of my life. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, in ministry for the last decade, a seasoned teacher, mentor, counselor and leader. I have enough maturity and knowledge to “go the distance” in Christian society. But in my desire to sacrifice distance for depth, I’m having to face the foundational questions in every human heart:

Is God real?

Is this Love?

I am not asking in the way of a new believer, but in the way of Gideon (God have you set me up?), of David (Another cave, God?) and of Job (It was You who did this?). Through Love’s eyes I’m seeing that this season is not about a “new chapter” or “double portion” or “new assignments”. It is about Him. It is about meeting Him on His terms, not mine. On His turf, not my comfy morning nook with good coffee and a fancy journal.

It’s about bleeding me of my life source so His can flow instead. It’s about letting Him have my possessions, my affections, my afflictions and my reputation.

It wasn’t until I read the above quote that I realized that Love in a Year and my current crisis of faith were the same thing.

To know Love, I have given myself over to the possibility of disaster.

I don’t want a theology that I can tuck easily into a life that I’ve already chosen for myself. I don’t want to cherry-pick the Gospel -  grabbing what makes sense and manipulating what doesn’t make sense. I have only one life, and if God is real, then I want to waste it on Him.

I want Him to show me what it means to believe  … instead of creating a doctrine that keeps my life tidy, my opinions justified and my reputation intact.

My good friend says, “Love always gets what it’s after.”

Apparently, it is after me.

(The opening quote was shared by Maria Popova in her post, The Voyagers: A Short Film About How Carl Sagan Fell In Love. She blogs at Brainpickings and is worthy of your readership.) 

I have not written any Love in a Year posts in a while.

My summer started off busy and then ended badly. I’ve still been searching for Love in the unlovely passages of Scripture … but I am also grappling with unloveliness in my own life.

An entire community was wrecked by a few people who made some poor decisions.  In the aftermath, there are people who wonder if they are loved, and there are people wondering how such things happen under the hand of a loving God.

You’d think I’d have plenty of answers since I’m in the midst of this study. I don’t. I just know that God is Love … but Love doesn’t always behave the way we want it to.

In love, He exposed things that were in the shadows so that they could no longer bring death to people.  Love doesn’t make the promise of being painless.  Being exposed hurts. Love has teeth. It will get what it is after. Continue Reading…

This week’s word:  Love

Razor sharp teeth and grinding molars

Soft, pointed words of truth displacing

Tearful, stubborn deceit; light invading shadows

Fresh invading stagnant; Morning Star rising

Love always gets what it’s after

For more Six Word Fridays hoopla, click here.

In the past 48 hours I’ve discovered something about myself.

I have 184 varieties of pissed off.

*     *     *

And I have 7893 varieties of grace.

He is still a good Papa.

There have been several passages I’ve had to chew on and it’s like chewing gristle.

If I didn’t already know He is Love, these stories would make me think He wasn’t much better than pagan gods.

What did some of the Israelites think of Him?

Continue Reading…