This week I have found myself sideswept headlong into a pace and quiet I haven’t been in for a long while. Without need to give the details, I have been sick and in bed all week…and my usual day-to-day life has come to a rapid and unexpected halt. Sickness is an incredible stripper of all the extras. All the extra words. All the extra strengths. All the extra abilities. With one sweeping strike and I am left curled up with the fresh remembrance of my frailty and the genuine truth of my smallness. I am so weak. I am so poor. And yet here, in the midst of my poverty, I’ve been brought close to something I haven’t got to witness in a long while. The little fire within. Yes, I’ve known it was there because it had to be…but this week I’ve witnessed it firsthand as I haven’t in awhile, as though peering with face pressed to a window to find an old constant companion in the backrooms of my heart. It’s the fire of my communion with the Lord that forms the heartbeat of all my living, that quiet throb of burnings that rises long before there is language and continues long after the words have run out. I cannot live without this fire. It is love ignited within the inner man by the Lord’s own hand and love tended to by His own careful attention. It is the fire that cannot be taken from me…come what may. Externals may change. Strengths rise and fade. Freedoms come and go. Yet what can never be taken from me is that which was born in the place of utter poverty, where I possessed nothing and Jesus poured forth His everything in love. This is what the stillness, the silence, and the weakness of these days has brought me to. The fire is alive and well. It is my most precious possession. Many waters cannot quench it. Nor can the floods drown it. It’s flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame (Song. 8).
If there is one thing I love about loving the Lord, I love that for each of us, it is a personal story being written, a journey with highs and lows and seasons and pro- gressions. Every day is part of that story and every moment plays its role. Every prayer and every movement of the heart unto the Lord become the words inscribed on those eternal pages, the testimony recorded forever and forever. Every tear we cry in love and longing is kept forever as part of our story, always to be remembered. David said, “You number my wanderings; put my tears into Your bottle; are they not in Your book?” (Ps. 56:8). Oh the glory the heart feels when it connects to that real and personal story in the day to day.
I remember in my earlier days how I would spend hours journaling, hours praying and singing and documenting this story…as though chronicling my course and keeping every detail of the journey. I loved connecting to the journey and feeling the progressions of the Lord’s leading of my life as I responded to Him in love. Yet in these days, at the pace and the speed of my life with three young kids and all that goes with, such long hours are not at my dispense. Every day feels a bit like a race. I find that whether I’m warmed up or not, there is a definite start to each day, a definite rigor along the way, the highs and lows, and then a certain finish line at the end. Moving at this rate, I often find my heart juggled along at rapid speed, at times as though out of breath, trying to stay connected, reaching to commune with the Lord, offering prayers and songs in fragments and pieces along the way.
The inconsistencies and ups and downs of my inner life often leave me dizzy, and though I’d love to have a clear comprehension of today’s prayer or the seamless continuation from yesterday’s song, I haven’t the ability to know or even keep track of my own heart before the Lord. One day holds a feeling of an intense hunger, the next I feel distant and far, straining to remember what it was that made me so hungry yesterday. One day I am weeping with affection for Jesus, and the next all seems quiet and silent within, at times almost dull.
If left to my perspective, it would seem that the Lord might have a hard time stringing these prayers and heart-movements together, in effort to make sense of my strewn array of affections and heart-cries. Yet this viewpoint is exactly reverse from reality. I am not the one telling the story. Jesus is. I am not the originator of one good thing transpiring in my inner life. I am not the beginning, the author, or the designer. He is. The One receiving my love is the One who gave me the very love with which to love Him. The One hearing my prayers is the One who birthed and brought forth such holy longings and petitions. Thus, what is so jumbled to me, so disjointed and unclear from day to day, is one single continuous stream to the Lord—His story being told. He sees the end from the beginning. He perceives beyond my inconstancies to the place of continuity, and understands past the tiny fragments, to the point of uninterrupted constancy. Though I live amidst the fog of the unknown of how this moment fits or that prayer corresponds, He sees it all perfectly. Every day plays its contribution and no matter how fragmented my prayers, the Lord hears and records it all. Each like a part of a song that He is bringing together, complete with the highs and lows. The One who brought these affections forth within me, cared for the fruition of these desires, and planted deep within me these prayers, weaves every line of song into one streaming cry and every breath-prayer into one ongoing story.
Without question a story is being written. Without a doubt, He is leading me step by step on a journey of knowing Him and loving Him, of becoming wholly His. And though I may be utterly unable to connect the dots or bring together one day with the next in my understanding, I can rest assured that the pages are constantly being filled and the words written.
One very real day in my future—just as it will be for every believer—the Lord will open a book with my name on it. Page by page and line by line, He will recall to me every day, every moment, every prayer and every tear. He will draw my eye to behold the connection between the days that at the time seemed so disjointed, and He will show me how every moment had its place in this glorious tale. Like a weaver unveiling the finished tapestry and a composer presenting the completed piece, the Lord will reveal the beauty and the masterwork of the book He so carefully authored, the story He so lovingly and brilliantly saw to completion.
Reviewing these days what I believe in the core of me…that truth which indeed delivered me: I am dark yet lovely (Song. 1:5). And this truth is finding its way into who I am as a parent. I am not sure what it is for most, but for me, parenting is a revealer of my ‘darkness’ more than any other function, role, or relationship I play a part in. It exposes quickly every faultline and false foundation in me. And in these days, I am confronted with a great amount of weakness, a stinging amount of impatience, of pride, of selfishness, and the like.
In these exposures of my ‘darkness,’ I am hit full force with the tide of my weighty weakness as I feel its unavoidable impact upon my children. There is no way of evading it. I will fall short. I will miss the mark. And I will do it every day. With that comes the sobering reality that every honest parent since Adam knows, the little hearts and minds of my children will be marked by my shortcomings and errors. It is one thing to be connected with your sin and shortcomings, yet quite another to watch as those faults impact little frames and wound little hearts.
And as I ponder these things once more, I almost hear the Holy Spirit whispering, “Surprised again? Surprised by your weakness? Surprised by the sin within?” That which He has seen so vividly all along, now blares before my eyes, and I am the only one thrown off by it. He rushes in with the remembrance that the Gospel and the Good News never begins with my success or my godliness, but with His fullness in the wake of my poverty. I come poor. I come in need. I come empty. I come as a child. And there, in that place and that posture, He receives me. He embraces me. He delights in me. And He fills my emptiness with Himself. Here He calls me lovely and crowns me with His enjoyment.
This is the gospel I am to live before my children. And it is as I drink of the depths of my poorness, while cleaving to Christ continually, that I will offer my children my best as a parent. I can do nothing apart from Him. Any kind word or good attitude that is not born of the Spirit is wind and a vapor at best. Better that I give my children a vision of desperate dependence and complete poverty of my own with intermittent whispers of the strength of God than giving them some impressive outward spirituality rife with the sickness of my own strivings. The sooner I come to the end of me, the greater my entrance, and thus also my children’s’, into the strength and abundance of God. Yes, living in the deep of my spiritual poverty and clinging to the Vine of Christ—not just in theory but in actuality, and not just occasionally but incessantly–I am at my best as a mom.
These children are not mine to bring forth, they are the Lord’s. I am not their savior, He is. My perfection will not deliver them but only the One who is perfect. And the truth of the matter is, they will benefit the most from seeing me rushing to the Cross when I am wrong, clinging to my Redeemer and leaning into Him for every bit of my strength. This is living the gospel before them, and in turn pushing them into the path that will become for them their own shining testimony of, “I am dark but lovely to God (Song. 1:5).”
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