Multitudes of brokenness

How did the radio stations know my heart was anxious today?

I flipped the dial on my radio station to a speaker talking about the problem of anxiety and worry.

How worry undermines your testimony.

How anxiety ultimately reflects a heart which does not believe it has someone who will be there when their world falls apart.

The Christmas season heightens my heart’s greatest dysfunctions–a soupy mix of worry, fretfulness, anxiety and ultimately, disbelief.

I admit it.

Worry is a symptom of the pieces of my heart which have yet to be sculpted–and surrendered–into faithful, believing reflections of God. I am ashamed I have so many of those pieces. Perhaps I can take comfort in knowing my love for Jesus must be holding the pieces together.

Because I do love Him.

So, so much.

And yet, I know my disbelief grieves the Spirit. Grieves the One whose Word bathes me in the assurance that He is with me. He will always be there. He has always been there.

And so, on this Multitude Monday, I ponder my multitude of broken, anxious pieces. In doing so, I find as ashamed as I am of them, I am just as grateful for them. Grateful for the #45 gift of brokenness.

Because brokenness makes me seek Him.

In my broken courage, I fear.

I find the #46 gift of strength in God’s unfailing love which guides and redeems me.  (Exodus 15:13) The same unfailing love which guided the Magi away from their riches to a stable, forlorn and in a foreign land.

In my broken satiety, I covet.

I find the #47 gift of fullness in Christ’s power within me. (Colossians 2:10). The same power which flung itself from a throne in the heavens and into a manger, damp and scratchy with straw.

In my broken heart, I am bitter.

I find the #48 gift of forgiveness when I fall in reverence at His feet. (Psalm 130:4) The same reverence which buckled the knees of shepherds . . . nameless, insignificant shepherds . . . chosen to be the first to hear the good news of a savior’s birth.

In my broken patience, I am harsh.

I find the #49 gift of gentleness when I realize just how near Christ is to me. (Philippians 4:5) The same nearness of the breath of a newborn baby on the face of a teenage girl named Mary . . . a tiny breath painting a starlit sky with the mist of its salvation.

In my broken trust, I am insecure.

I find the #50 gift of being held when I relinquish control to the One who never tires of or ceases reaching toward me. (Romans 10:21) The same embrace of the One who held the world like it’s never been held, God’s arms clothed in the navy velvet robes of the night of Jesus’ birth.

In my broken faith, I deny.

I find the #51 gift of belief in the One who helps me overcome my unbelief. (Mark 9:23-25) The same One I see in the twinkle of my children’s eyes in December . . . children with hearts unbroken and spirits bent toward the promise and the gift of Him . . . marked by a 24 on a human calendar . . . designed for eternity on the calendar of the divine.

“Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always.” I Chronicles 16:11

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What gifts lie before you today?

Potholes and promises

Yesterday I woke up, my belly churning, head swirling and eyes burning with a lot of unhealthy emotions. Fighting the urge to crawl back into bed, I decided to take two of our three dogs on a walk.  (I took two, because it defies logic and exceeds my physical capabilities to walk three at once. The other one got his own walk later.)

On my walk, I cried, I lamented to God, and tried to dig deep inside me to see where all the turmoil was coming from, because honestly, I just didn’t know.

Do you ever have days like that? Weeks? Months, perhaps? When nothing you seem to do makes much sense, the direction you’re going seems dim and foggy, and you treat those you should be nicest to with the most disdain?

It was an Elizabeth-Gilbert-snotting-on-the-floor-feeling-sorry-for-myself sort of moment. I sheepishly admit I wasn’t in a snit about anything spectacularly tragic–just a culmination of a hard, hot summer of unexpected, unresolved conflicts.

I walked along, gaping at corn rows alongside me instead of at the road in front of me, and I fell flat on my face–and I do mean flat and on my face–after my foot caught in a pothole. It took  a minute to figure out which way up was, until my puppy licked a bit of feeling into my numb, plastered-to-the-pavement body. 

As I sat on that hot country road, the burn of two skinned knees, an awfully sore ankle, and two skinned palms broke through my daze, and I felt pretty darn broken. For a moment, I wondered if I’d be able to walk home. Not a soul was in sight. The road is not frequently traveled. And I didn’t have my phone with me.

After 1/2 dozen steps, I was just fine, except for the tears which had morphed into full-blown blubbering.

“I’m scared to death, Lord,” I cried. “That’s what’s wrong with me. I’m just plain scared.”  

I’m scared of the journey of life. Scared I’m not enough–for my husband, for my kids, for my extended family. Scared of the when’s-the-other-shoe-gonna-drop feeling that hangs with me,  a frustrating remnant of abuse and post-traumatic stress recovery. 

Yet there in the middle of that lonely country road–like the kind and gracious Father He is–I heard God say, “You’re right. You’re not enough. But I am. You do trip over silly things and into big holes. But I pull you up and out of them. You have and will continue to have days you fall flat on your face. But the thing about falling on your face is the only place to look is up.” 

Which is exactly as it should be.

So much awaits us in the moment we choose to direct our gaze toward the One who lifts people up; who pulls Josephs out of wells (Genesis 42:6) and who raises dead men from their slumber (John 11:42-44).

But You, O LORD, are a shield about me,

My glory, and the One who lifts my head.

~Psalm 3:3~

The eyes of the beholden*

When, as we wander through life, do we stop looking into the eyes of others?

As a nursing supervisor, this question blind-sided me one night when a family brought their mother into the emergency room for breathing trouble. The stale smell of urine choked us when we entered the old woman’s room. She moaned when she inhaled and sighed when she exhaled, the simple, for-granted movement of chest bones like a rusty metal cage scraping the sides of tender lungs.

Helping her breathe became the ER staff’s focus. They tried to flatten her contorted back against the inflexible foam gurney. Pulling back the covers to position her revealed hips and knees kinked into a pretzled pile of pain.

As I wheeled her to the x-ray room, I wondered how we’d ever straighten her enough to sandwich her C-shaped torso between the ramrod plates of film.

Burning anxiety—the kind a nurse feels when she knows the pain about to come to a person—crept up my chest and into my throat. I clutched her hand, roped with blue veins, and got real close to her . . . close enough to see the flecks of green and grey in her blue eyes . . . blue eyes I imagined once loved well by a man or a toddler reaching up to her from his crib . . . blue eyes I imagined dancing with daffodils on a spring day when her legs were all flesh and freedom.

She looked back at me, brow furrowed with the question of pain and the exhaustion of living.

“We have to move you a little to get this x-ray,” I said. “But I’m gonna try as hard as I can not to hurt you.”

“No one . . .

. . . has ever . . .

. . . said that . . .

. . . to me before,” she said between gasps for breath.

Tears puddled in her baggy bottom eyelids.

I don’t remember much after that, except I know we got the x-ray, and I know we hurt her some, as gentle as we tried to be, and as many pillows as we tried to stuff between her bones and the edges of equipment.

Yet I doubt the pain she felt that night hurt more than the pain of not mattering.

The pain of the unblendable.

You know: the unblendable. The sort of folks who can’t mesh and meld their disfigured, grieving, warped and stiffened selves into life’s crowded current.

Those who can’t hide, but into whose eyes no one will gaze.

No one . . .

. . . except the ones who dare unfurl beyond their own brokenness to wrap gentleness around a shivering, lonely, beholden heart.

*This post was written for the One Word at a Time blog carnival today on gentleness.