Strong Girl {an essay}

Every morning we lug our three bicycles from the apartment into the elevator, then down the corridor to the glass doors that leave the building. The job of reaching up to press the door release button and then push with a mighty heave against the metal bar that is the door handle has fallen to the youngest, still not quite three, because the rest of us are barreling along with the bikes. Every day her brothers encourage her as they pass her stout little legs holding steady, her back against the glass, “Strong Girl!!” She basks in the glow of the compliment, and sometimes states it herself when they are not around. “Strong Girl!”

I saw a sign the other day, one meant to inspire and be hung on a wall and remind you every day of it’s important truth, “You never know how STRONG you are until being STRONG is the only choice you have.” I wondered about that. What if when you have no other choice but to be strong, you aren’t strong enough? What if you lose control, or give up, or let someone down, or don’t make it through, or break apart? Maybe then you find out you aren’t very strong at all...and then what? But the sign sounded nice, for strong people I guess.

If you have been reading around here at all lately, it probably wouldn't surprise you to learn I've been wondering about being a strong person, a strong girl, a strong woman, and what it looks like. Our society lifts up strong women. We tell ourselves via advertisements and movie scenes and magazine articles that women are meant to be strong, can be strong, should be strong, will be strong. We pat each other on the back for our strength when we show it. Ra ra for strong women.

I’ve wondered about being a strong woman, or person in general and what it can and should mean as a Christian who believes in the dignity of humanity, but the fallenness of our situation because of sin. And I don't feel strong lately. I feel like I can’t be the person I want to be, can’t respond to my circumstances how a strong woman would. It’s in these kinds of moments that it's easy to cling to Biblical passages like “my strength is made perfect in weakness,” or “The Lord delights not in the strength of horses nor the strength of man, but He delights in the man who fears him.”

But then there are those days when I DO feel strong. I feel capable and on top of it all. I see my talents and the ways I’ve been gifted and I sort of bask in the fun of being able to do something well.  On those days I wonder if the clay pot thing doesn’t apply to me anymore… what do I do when I don’t feel like a weak failure of a person? Am I just fooling myself pride with or have I now been disqualified from being able to shine forth the glory of my Maker and Savior, because I’m not weak enough?

One of the most unattractive displays of strength is in an arrogant person. Arrogance must be among the great acts of thievery in the world: the proud and haughty wrenching of credit for something you had nothing to do with. Certainly there are all levels of strength in the human experience. Some have great strength of body and physique, some of intelligence, some of emotional stability and fortuity. Yet none of us arrives at these strengths of our own doing. We do not choose our upbringings, our genetic makeup, nay our every life circumstance. Some have much to work with, some have very little. Whatever strength we have, it must certainly have been endowed to us and not created ex nihilo by our own volition. So arrogance is an entirely misplaced and perverted view of oneself and the God who made all things. Adam, arguably the strongest of all men in mind and body and spirit, was of all men most obviously shaped and molded by God alone.  How silly it would have seemed if in his prowess, he had turned to look upon himself and taken even one ounce of credit.

Perhaps that is why, when one looks at strength in a particular personality of flesh and blood humanity, the ones that seem most attractive to us are those who give the credit where credit is due. It is why we marvel at a man like Eric Liddell and gaze with wonder upon a woman like Joni Erickson Tada. One had the strength to with the speed of horses, but he knew it was a gift from God, and in his strength he shone with the glory of his God, and not himself. Joni has so little bodily strength resulting from her quadriplegia that she cannot do one movement on her own. But she credits her strength of spirit to the God who healed her soul and will one day heal her body, and she too shines with the glory of her God, and not herself.

I know that in my weakness of late, I have both marveled at the beauty of being small before a Mighty God who is near to those in need, and cringed in disgust at how humiliating it can be to feel like a wimp of a person who cannot handle what so many others could. But these words keep splitting into my at times weak, at times strong and able soul, “His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man: the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love” Psalm 147:10-11.

In the 50^th Psalm the LORD says, “I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens, for every animal of the forest is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills…the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? [as in, do I really need your animal sacrifices??] Sacrifice thank offerings to God, fulfill your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you and you will honor me.” The point is it all belongs to Him, and comes from Him. But to whom do we lift our eyes? To whom do we give the credit? When we are weak… call upon His name. When we are strong… give glory to His name.

Clay pots we all are, shaped and formed and gifted with the breath of life from the Creator who molds and makes all things for whatever purposes he designs. And the clay of a man like David ran just as thick with the strokes of God when he shouted out strength in the Name of the Almighty at a giant as it did when he lay prostrate with his face to the dirt, a man broken by his sin and failure. In both moments he called out to the one who could save him. In both moments his clay was brittle but out of him shone the burning bright glory of his Maker. He was just a clay pot, housing the treasure of the all-surpassing power of God. And that is what God delights in. He made us. We are not gods. But He reins us in and fills us and lifts us up on wings of strength that make us feel the wind of heaven and all his glory goodness in our faces. It’s a beautiful and ponderous mystery, the way our strong God delights in our weakness because it makes him look good, but all the while he is delighting in making us look good with his goodness.

And my strong girl, you are not a strong girl. You are strong because someone made you strong, and you ought to look up and tell Him how thankful you are and how good he is. You ought to offer every bit of that strength right back to him; basking in Him when you bask in your given strength. Yes, strong girl, you are not a strong girl. You are made of clay and sometimes you will break. And when you break you ought to look straight up into the eyes of the One who made you and ask him to carry you, wait on him to heal you, trust in him to do everything you in your useless broken state cannot do. And you can bask in Him when you bask in your weakness. He absolutely loves it, and you will too.

Re-entry Days

Rain, rain, come today. Come and wash my stains away.

Starting up the hill, I was plucking along on my four-weeks-out-of-shape legs, feeling the

slight burn in my chest, until it leveled out again near the sea where waves foamed gently in

the evening air and the crowds started to thin in the darkening light. Then the rain came. A

drop on my nose, one on the back of my shoulder, leaving me unsure if there was someone spitting high above where the embankment rose up from the boardwalk, or if a storm was pending. Minutes later the phantom spitter was acquitted and I welcomed the cooling downpour.

Just rain, you might say, but it felt like a baptism straight from the heavens above. I know He didn’t send that rain just for me tonight, but surely He speaks to me in it, using those cleansing drops pouring in rivers down the lines of my face as he poured spirit words from the Word into my soul.

It was a rough day. Re-entry can be like that sometimes. A husband gone long, now returned but spending his first hours shivering in bed on a hot and humid day, and an overly anxious wife with expectant eyes and nearly burst brain cells. It wasn’t the fairy tale homecoming I had been longing for.

The worst part of it is that I knew I would react wrongly. I knew something would happen in my over-eagerness of his return. And as he slipped and slumped into that aching, incapacitated state I felt the annoyance start to rise and I knew it wasn’t his fault but my eyes still stung with tears of weariness and disappointment as I hauled the kids outside for yet another day.

And at the end of the day when I had cried it out and we had talked it through I ran in that rain, wondering why it is that even when I know I am heading down the path of bitterness and begrudging and want to stop, I still nurse those inner feelings of entitlement and resentment.

And then that rain kept falling and the Spirit kept talking. Maturity doesn’t always look like sainthood, sometimes it looks like needy weakness on its knees. That’s not to say I am in that place… I still think my choices reflect immaturity most of the time. But rather than drive me away to despondency, I know I need to lift my face to look straight into the weeping eyes of heaven, letting those drenching, cleansing drops wash my filth away. Pride tells me to sit and nurse the day’s mistakes, but humility says this is my wrong and if it wasn’t for You it would leave me dirty and muddied. But admitted, it is washed clean over and over again. And I run clean, and wet with the memory of what it took to make me free.

To Lent or Not To Lent

When I was growing up I didn't hear or know much about Lent. My friends may have followed it or had little ash marks on their forehead from Ash Wednesday Mass, but if they did I didn't notice or it didn't make much of an impression. The church communities I was a part of had special services for Christmas, Palm Sunday, and Easter, but that was the extent of their adherence to any sort of formal church calendar. We were non-denominational evangelicals after all, and any allusions to high church had no place in our gym-renting, chorus-singing Sundays.

 Before you let the hair start rising on the back of your neck, let me say I am thankful for the places of worship that shaped me as a young child and into my early adult years. They were rife with issues, as any place that is made of men will be, but they pointed me in the right direction and more often than not gave me a desire for and tools to use in learning to love and follow Jesus. They did not however, observe Lent.

As I've grown older and seen the struggle and the joys that come with walking daily as a follower of Jesus, I've started to wonder about and appreciate some of those centuries-old traditions that much of the Church today still utilizes. There's a whole discussion here about a  myriad of topics like form and function, tradition and authority, and all the differences in theology between all the different denominations and divisions of the Church (which I believe have importance, but certainly not in this short little space, which as you know is sometimes not that short). I merely want to talk about how (in spite of my wonderful, conservative, tradition-dumping past) I think there is something to my make-up, and perhaps to everyone else's as well, that desires and needs a bit of bit of the ole orthodoxy.

Lent is really just a simple season of preparation. I don't know what kind of human beings we think we are when we imagine we can run around with our heads cut off, caring about everything else in our lives like work and friends, cooking and shopping, crisis handling and community-planning, reading and internet surfing, iphone and ipod playing, tv watching and toddler chasing, and everything else that fills the minutes of our precious days, and then somehow have the presence of mind to fully celebrate the most important festivals of our Christian faith. I don't know about you, but year after year I feel like I come to Dec. 24th feeling like I was busy enjoying all the beautiful traditions of ambiance-and-memory-creating, but am ill-prepared to enter into the fullness of joy I could be experiencing in celebrating the Birth of our Savior. There is something within the makeup of our minds and bodies that begs for and needs preparation.

The centuries old traditions of both the Advent and Lent seasons are just such preparations. Their aim is to get us thinking every day about the celebration that is coming, so that as we prepare our minds, our hearts, even our homes and physical surroundings for this special event, we will be at full capacity to appreciate and delight in all the Joy and Truth those special days call us to remember. "Remember." I remember a class I had in college on the major prophets of the Old Testament. It was a wonderful course and one phrase still comes to me often today, "the call to remember..." It's a problem that has plagued man since the beginning. We forget. We forget what God has done, who we are, what we have done, what in the world we're supposed to be doing, to put in the baking powder... (some more serious than others of course-- but I think baking powder is pretty serious, actually).

I love that God gave the nation of Israel a year stocked full of festivals just to help them out with this! These festivals were sometimes somber, but always pointed to a joy-full reality and were for the purpose of bringing them back to his Goodness. To me, it seems no different today. We forget so much, and the seasons of reflection leading up to and including the holidays where we celebrate Christ's birth and resurrection can be a beautiful  means of remembering the most important truths of our lives.

A few short facts about Lent:

• It appears from later writings of Tertullian and others that the Lenten season was being observed as early as the 2nd century. 
• Beginning with Ash Wednesday, Lent consists of the 44 days prior to Easter. Technically, it is 40 days of fasting, minus the 4 Sundays of those weeks because Sunday is always a day to celebrate the resurrection (I love that!)
•  It is a time of personal reflection and confession, always with the intention of seeing one's need for salvation and the glorious, loving, forgiving and merciful provision of that in Jesus' death on the cross. It is serious in nature, but for the purpose of being celebratory. 

I heard the best teaching I've ever listened to on the Lord's Supper from my father-in-law awhile ago. Specifically, because he talked about how it is not supposed to be a somber, serious, face-down-turned occasion, but one of rejoicing and thanksgiving for God's love in saving us from our sin. And that is just what our repentance and confession should always turn us toward. It SHOULD, but I am no robot. This progression of repentance to rejoicing does not happen to me if I just show up one Sunday in my pretty Easter dress after having hidden colorful eggs for an hour in the backyard. I need time to think, to mull, to be made aware, to be shown, to undo the mess that is my brain and heart, to be quiet, to prepare, to talk and to pray. It doesn't make Easter or Christmas or any other day perfect, but I hope it makes it less of a "ritual" and "thing that we do" and more of a way of life.

The challenge to live and thinks this way gets really practical when you have kids in the house. Recently, I read a little excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters where Screwtape tells Wormwood to convince the parents that things like kneeling before bedtiime for prayers with their children and saying memorized prayers is all form and tradition... nonsense really. "At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls." It really has got me thinking about the way we pray (or don't) with our kids at night. Throwing out the rituals because they can seem stuffy and not "authentic" is fine,  but then perhaps we are throwing away other things I hadn't thought of or realized were important too? Thoughts for another post I guess, the point merely being that it has all got me thinking how we do some of these important "traditions" with our kids.

The result of all this thinking... we decided to begin Lent as a family with a simple Dinner Picnic in the Living Room. It was great fun. All we needed with our little homemade pizzas was a sheet and some candles...and the kids were beaming. "It's like we're having a celebration!" the 5 year old announced with light in his eyes. And that's exactly what I wanted them to feel; that this is exciting, anticipatory, something to enjoy even in it's moments of solemnity.

We ate our pizza, then listened to a shortened version of the readings for the day from the Lectionary (simply an organized set of purposeful Scripture reading for each day, and right now specifically for the Lent season). We talked a little, as far as interest would allow about what this season was for and what it would mean. And then we talked football and basketball jerseys, and who had to clear the plates.

This morning, as we ate breakfast, my eldest looked at me with his clear blue eyes and motioned something with his hands (the pretend sign language he likes to speak in sometimes), then translated saying "mom, I said 'your heart is from God.'" It was simple, and yet I found myself thinking about that phrase again and again throughout the day. He really encouraged me, that little one did. As much as I agonize over what damage I may or may  not be doing to them with all these imperfect attempts at leading them down the path of life, I thought that if just a few simple truths would plant themselves deeply in his little heart as simply as he stated that one this morning, then that would be enough for me.

If you're interested in a set of daily Scripture readings in preparation for Easter, here are a couple resources:

Readings, Prayers and Meditations from RCC Common Lectionary 

Readings from PCUSA lectionary

Readings from the Revised  Daily Common Lectionary