Faith Archives - Page 5 of 15 - Kristen Anne Glover

Flesh in the Game

I did not intend to stop writing.

I wasn’t even sure I could stop writing without having a serious emotional breakdown.

But that’s exactly what happened. Shortly before Mother’s Day, I wrote a piece that would be my last for several months. After that, I simply stopped writing.

I didn’t plan it that way. In fact, I tried to get back to my keyboard to release the words that kept dripping into my brain, but I couldn’t do it. I felt I owed readers an explanation, at the very least, but I couldn’t do that either. Just as soon as I thought I had words to say, God said, Wait, I’m not done talking yet.

God was doing something in my quiet, and every time I tried to put words to it, I stopped hearing. That’s the thing about listening: you can’t hear yourself and someone else at the same time.

Besides the fact, the hearing was hard:

Are you serving me or protecting yourself?

Are you using your talents or building your reputation?

Are you caring for the lost sheep or feeding a fat flock?

Are you willing to hear me without explaining away the very thing I just said?

Are you really willing to leave everything behind, take up your cross, and follow Me?

I was wrestling through all of these questions when God hit me with the knock-out punch.

Kristen, are you willing to be the Word incarnate?

Flesh in the game

Wait…what?!

Word. Incarnate. He said it over and over again in the quiet because I am so good at hearing and not listening. Are you willing to be the Word incarnate?

I had no problem with the first part of that equation. Word. High and lofty, timeless, creative, powerful, awe-inspiring: Words! I love them.

But incarnate? That’s where everything gets messy. Besides, I was pretty sure the whole incarnation thing was Jesus’s job, and I was glad to let him have it.

Not that I wasn’t grateful–don’t get me wrong. What a mess I would be in if God stopped with the one and not the other, if he was only Word and not flesh. But he wasn’t. Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus Christ, Creator of heaven and earth, willingly stepped into his own spoken word for me.

That is the gospel.

That is the gospel I heard and said I believed while living exactly like it didn’t apply to me.

And God was calling me out on it.

He knew I spent more time justifying my lifestyle and feeling smug about my “ministry” than I did in actually considering what he said and doing it. Widows and orphans? I cried real tears for them. The least of these? I was going to do something about them just as soon as I figured out who was using the system and who was not. Care for the sick? I had just made a pot of soup for a friend with a kidney stone, I kid you not. Feed the sheep? Yep, I’d written a post or two about that, and I was pretty sure my words were generating a lot of sheep-feeding excitement in the virtual world, and I hadn’t had to interact with any actual lost sheep to make it happen. That’s what I called leveraging my energy.

According to my calculations, I was rocking the incarnation. I mean, I blogged about just about every aspect of my life, as honestly as possible. How much more incarnational with the word could I get?

But God was having none of it. Stop hiding behind your words, Kristen.

It was completely ridiculous of God to say that to me because I wasn’t even doing that.

“God, I’m not even doing that.”

Yes, you are.

“No, I’m a writer. Words are the way I use my gifts and talents for your glory.”

Ahem.

Words are the way you have been distracting yourself from my calling.

“I thought writing was my calling!”

No.

“What?”

No.

“It sounds like you’re saying…yeeeeeeeesssssss, but you need to speak up.”

No. Writing is not your calling.

This is not (ultimately) your calling.

It’s hard to have a conversation with a deity who doesn’t make sense, so I just shut up. Strangely, it seemed like my silence was what God wanted all along.

You are called to be like me. To love like I loved, to minister like I ministered, to be more than just word—to be flesh among flesh. Because it wasn’t just the Word that saved you, child. It was my body. My blood.

And when I tell you to go and do likewise, I don’t mean just write an essay on it.

“I think I already wrote an essay on that…”

If you want to be like me, you need to become the Word incarnate.

“Oh.” I had no idea what was happening but it was scary and confusing and I felt a little like a kid who didn’t know her dad’s favorite color wasn’t hot pink until just after she made him a Play-do creation in…hot pink.

Kristen, you are the Body of Christ.

“I know, Lord. I’m the mouth.”

How about you start acting like the hands.

“What do you mean?” (That was just a stalling tactic. I was hoping God was going to think it over and tell me to write a book).

I mean, it’s time to get some flesh in the game.

That’s what I was afraid of.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” I decided I’d let God in on what I was thinking.

BE NOT AFRAID.

That was my phrase for the year. Fear not. Be not afraid. It was completely unfair of God to remind me of it when I was actually afraid because I had picked it when I was feeling brave.

I considered throwing up.

But before I could, the God who took on flesh for me opened a door for me to take on flesh for him. He silenced my mouth and opened my hands. I’ve been silent on the blog but only because I haven’t had a moment on the sidelines to catch my breath or find the words.

Until now.

*Stay tuned to hear what God’s been doing in the quiet.

Life Interruptions

The washing machine is choking on bedclothes and pajamas. A sour-sick smell languishes in the air, half-heartedly mingling with the fresh herbal scents of the lavender and peppermint I am using to disinfect everything.

My son sits on the couch and watches me through hollow eyes. Just yesterday, he was bright and laughing. Today, he has aged a hundred years. His body holds him captive; he’s a pawn in the fight that rages inside.

He is limp.

Fire burns across his cheeks.

I can’t see him in his eyes; he looks at me, but he is not there.

We have been up all night, we two, one of us huddled around the toilet, the other standing guard with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle. He has been dunked in a tub or run through a shower three times already. My hands are chapped from the washing.

The sun has not yet warmed the sleep out of the earth, but already the plans for the day have evaporated. The intentions of six are trumped by the sickness of one.

Jonathan’s birthday—his tenth birthday—is just days away, and for the first time in my mothering career, I actually planned a party. Not just a party for relatives, but a real party with handmade invitations and too-much sugar and ten high-energy testosterone-dripping boy-guests who are all planning to explode things in the backyard by way of celebration.

But everything halts because this child is ill. I cannot go to the store to get the last few supplies for the cake. I can’t get the PVC pipe to make marshmallow shooters. I can’t even get out of the laundry room long enough to sweep the kitchen floor or pick up the school room. I can’t…I can’t…I can’t…

The sudden change in plans, the newly-formed void in my day, opens up a space in me that my heart rushes in to fill. Gurgling, bubbling, spilling out into me from its excess of good—or bad—my heart shows up in that interruption.

It happens so rapidly, I cannot stop it. It is just there, like a sudden string of traffic on an already busy morning, and I can do nothing but look and see what has just bubbled up inside of me simply because plans changed. In an instant, I see the state of things in that hidden room.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the heart. When the day brings something unexpected, or plans change, or life gets interrupted by God’s intentions, your heart will fill the void.

It may rush in with hot words and short-tempers, if that is what it has in greatest supply. Or, if it has enough in stock, it may spill over into your soul with grace and patience. Either way, the greatest indication of where your heart is at is not in how it behaves when life is under control. It is in what happens when life is interrupted. What flows out of your heart then is the surplus, the thing it has the most to spare.

Is it good?

Or is it shameful?

I finally get a moment to stand in the shower while my boy sleeps on the couch with a bowl by his side. I think back to my grade school days. Twice a week, we lined up and trotted down the hall to the art room. We donned oversized shirts to cover up the school clothes we’d already dirtied on the playground and set to work with brushes and pencils and glue that smelled like it should be eaten.

Sometimes, we were given great lumps of clay to work into bowls and saucers and little figurines that our mothers would feel obligated to keep on their dressers until we married.

Those lumps of clay were always gooey and cold in my hands, at first. If I was impatient and tried to bend it into a bowl, it snapped and crumbled. But if I held the clay in my hands and worked it until the warmth of my body infused that bit of earth, then I could twist and turn and bend it in any direction, and it would not break.

My heart is clay.

Sometimes, it is cold and brittle. Any sudden, unexpected molding causes me to break instead of bend. It does not matter if I intend to break or not. It simply happens that way because I was not ready. My heart was not prepared the way it should have been.

But when I dwell in the hands of the Potter, and His life radiates through every molecule of my little lump of dirt, I cannot help but be pliable. He has warmed and readied me for His own purposes.

My life was interrupted today. Was yours?

Did you like what you saw when your heart bubbled up to fill the void in your sense of control?

If not, then take your mind captive to this: Those interruptions are the very things He is using to transform you from a ball of dirt into a holy vessel , sanctified and set apart for Kingdom work. Those things that seem like interruptions and unexpected annoyances do not take Him by surprise. In fact, they are His intention for you.

He uses these things to show you what is in your heart. Then He says, “Now, come into my hands and let us see what we can do with that.”

The interruptions in your day are God’s invitation to dwell in Him. Let Him hold your heart-clay and make it soft. Let Him fill you with His radiating goodness so that when life screeches to a halt, His is the One who fills the void.

Keeping No Record of Rights

The first time Jenny came to church, she wore her neediness like an only dress. You could see where it had been mended over and over again along the same creases, and the places in the hem where pride had been stuffed in to hide the holes.

For five minutes, I loved her with a godly love. I cared about her burdens, and I carried them. I took her into my home and sat her on my couch and thought to myself that it didn’t matter what kind of broken she was, I could love her back together again. It was all very good and terribly Christian.

I’d send her home with a casserole or a hand-me-down for her daughter and all the while, I thought I was sewing her up better than any seamstress she had ever known before.

Then the day came when all the stitches ripped out and the fabric I had tried to save disintegrated in my hands. It cut me wide open in a way I didn’t know fabric could and I watched all that neediness dissolve into nakedness and all that nakedness reveal a horrible disfigurement that I was vain to think I could cover up with a casserole.

It smacked me hard and I stumbled back. I loved her…how could she not love me?

“I am not your project!” she had yelled on her way out the door with nothing on.

“Good,” I thought. “I don’t need a project.” But I said, “Of course not. You’re my friend.”

“Really? We’re peers?”

Well, no…

I paused to think of something sufficiently pious to say, but in that split-second, she opened her mouth and vomited back every good thing I had ever done. Every bit of my love had been chewed up and churned over until it was unrecognizable. She spewed the bitter, sour contents of her wrath all over me until it was all out, every single bit of it, and she had nothing left to say.

I stood on my porch dripping in bile and watched her go.

Of course I will forgive her, I thought in the afterglow of my piety. Even as the words came into my head, it was done. She was forgiven. Love keeps no record of wrongs, I reminded myself.

I cleaned myself up as best I could, but my heart ached. I grieved for her, for this person God had brought into my life to love. Only, she could not receive love. I had poured it into her, but it did not sink in. It only sat there and putrefied.

I thought back over all the times I had listened, all the times I had dropped everything and rushed to her rescue, all the nights my husband had to feed the kids because I was feeding hers. How quickly the list of rights began to mount because I had kept track of them all and I really didn’t think I deserved to be treated the way she had.

I was sure of it.

And oh, I didn’t love her very much right then.

Because just as much as love can’t keep a record of wrongs, it can’t keep a record of rights either. It cannot be good and godly and gospel while running a tab.

It is the same in ministry as it is in marriage or family or any time you begin to think someone owes you something for your kindness, anytime you begin to feel that someone should behave better because you behaved the way you ought.

Secretly, in the recesses of my heart, I had been keeping accounts. According to my ledger, she owed me the change I expected to see in her life. What should have been a work of the Spirit had become a work of my flesh. I had the receipts to prove it.

Only it didn’t work. That kind of love didn’t bind us together. It wedged a debt between us that became harder and harder to reconcile.

I piled works all around where grace should have been because it was easier. It was easier to mend her dress than to dwell with her in her nakedness. She was broken. She was offensive.

She needed me to cover a bit of that up.

So I thought.

Only, she didn’t need me. She needed Christ in me. It’s a fine distinction. One makes casseroles and expects a transformation in return.

The other is the transformation.

All my right deeds and all my right words could not do that for her. Only Jesus could do that. The One who redeems rebels as sons and harlots as brides—that’s what she needed to see in me. He does it over and over again and tears up the receipt every time.

But I robbed the cross when I wrote up her debt, as if she owed me anything for the goodness I gave out of the grace I had been given.

Every time I scribbled my good little deeds into the margins of my Bible, I mared the gospel. As if I could add anything to the gospel with that kind of love, as if I could earn my way any closer to Christ than through the work He did on the cross.

As if I could secure anyone to Him by indebting them with my self-righteous works.

The only place for my record of rights is at the foot of the cross, where all my doings are wrapped up in His “Done” and the only thing I know is Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

It is the only record of rights that is truly love, and the only record of rights that will ever be enough.

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