Finding God in the Daily :: The Intimacy of Always

The light shines through all of it.

This one is going to take a story to get us there. Come along for the ride?

— 

If you’ve been reading here for some time, you know I spent this last year in a pretty intimate season of prayer with Jesus. My morning prayer times included a strong image of the two of us walking on a beach shoreline — sometimes talking, sometime stopping to face each other, sometimes sitting on the sand watching the waves, sometimes playing in the water.

Every day, as I met Jesus in that image, I held a question before him: “What do you want to say today?” 

It was a question about this online space, Still Forming. What did he want to say through me here that day? And every day, he answered. He directed my attention to his heart for you each day, and I wrote my way through almost a full year of week-daily posts by going through that process of prayer with Jesus.

But if you’ve been reading here more recently, you also know that image has changed. We no longer walk on the beach each day. Instead, he gave me a tree. And then he planted me on a cliff. 

And as a result, I’m learning a new way of being with Jesus. 

Instead of looking up at him through the eyes and posture of a child leaning in to listen, I see him gazing at me directly, eye to eye.

There’s so much trust in this gaze.

And it’s a disconcerting place to be. Less dependent. More mutual.

This morning, I sat on the couch and told him how different this feels. When it was me leaning in and listening, I could take myself completely out of the equation. I didn’t have to worry about diluting the purity of what Jesus wanted to say to you because I wasn’t in the mix of the decision. I just relayed what he told me to say.

But standing here in this new place, him looking me in the eyes, he’s asking me what I think. He’s inviting my voice. He wants to hear my opinion. 

And an awareness of all my “stuff” starts rising to the surface. 

“Are you sure you want my opinion here?” I ask. “Because I’m going to muddy the waters like you never will.”

He’s completely pure and completely perfect. All his ways and thoughts are right. Me? Not so much. I’ve got parts pure and murky.

And that, I’m learning, is part of the point of this new place. Who I am today — the pure and the murky — is who he wants to know, who he wants to have show up, who he wants to keep transforming.

—

There’s something about this last year of walking on the beach with Jesus that is and always will be precious to me. It was a beautiful, intimate time. Through it, I learned dependence in wholly new ways. Through it, I better learned his voice. 

But this new place is even more intimate. 

This is about him being more fully integrated in me. It’s less about “what Jesus says” over here and “everything else” over there, with clear lines of demarcation between the two. Instead, it’s about the whole of me showing up and us talking together about all of it. It’s about him using me in this space, even with my splotchy parts, instead of there being a clear line between him and me. 

—

The same can be true for you. When it comes to finding God in the daily, it’s less about a demarcation between “holy time” and “all the rest of our time.” God can — and wants to — become fused into the whole of it with you. 

Where is one of the places in your “all the rest of it” time that you can let God be with you?

He Delights in You

The last couple days, I’ve been camped out in a single verse from Psalm 44: 

We didn’t fight for this land;

   we didn’t work for it — it was a gift!

You gave it, smiling as you gave it,

   delighting as you gave it.

— Psalm 44:3

I keep meditating on this verse in the context of my tree. I mentioned yesterday that I experience these images from Jesus as a gift, and this image of being a great oak tree planted on a jutting cliff, where birds come and find nest in its branches is certainly that. 

So in this psalm, I find resonance. I didn’t fight for this place I’ve been planted. I didn’t work for it at all. It was a gift! Jesus accorded me this identity as a tree, and he led me to the place of my planting. 

And then the psalm says that he gave it, smiling as he gave it, delighting as he gave it. 

Yes. 

I’ve learned that Jesus loves doing what he does in our lives. He loves being present. He loves spending time with us. He loves hearing what we have to say — he really listens. He smiles!

And he loves doing the work only he can do in us: the work of excavation, of restoration, of building up, of leading, and of planting. 

He delights in us and in the ever-new realities he is making of our lives. 

Do you feel connected to the delight of Jesus in you?

A Turn in the Suffering :: When We Can Consider Forgiveness

It took me a really long time to get to forgiveness. 

I knew forgiveness was pretty important — Jesus makes that really clear in the Gospels. But I also had gone through enough of the process of learning my heart to know what was really in there. I couldn’t fool myself into believing I’d forgiven when I really hadn’t.

Besides, I knew that wasn’t what Jesus wanted, either. He’s the one who taught me the importance of the heart. He’s the one who helped me learn that our hearts are the key players in relationship with God.

I couldn’t just play lip service to forgiveness. Neither Jesus nor I would be fooled. 

So what do you do when you know forgiveness is important but you just aren’t there? 

You ask God to help you get there, and you be with the truth of the mess in the meantime. 

I’m serious. This is what I did. For years — literally, years — I consciously asked God to help me learn forgiveness. And then I would look at the reality of my heart and know that forgiveness wasn’t in there yet. I was still reeling. Still in shock. Still picking up the pieces of brokeness. Still learning what happened because of all that brokenness. 

Still learning what Jesus could do with all that brokenness, too. 

I read so many perspectives on forgiveness over the years, and none of them penetrated me.

Forgiveness is a choice, they said. It’s a choice you keep choosing and choosing and choosing each day. Or they said, Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying that it’s okay. It means wilfully choosing not to hold that against someone anymore. Or here’s another one: Unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the other person to die. 

These things may be true, but none of those declarations or platitudes meant anything to me. They just didn’t compute. And they annoyed me. 

What got me to forgiveness was being with the pain. Examining it. Learning from it. Figuring out how it had formed me. Allowing Jesus to take me on the long journey of reckoning. 

And then getting to a place where I saw new things. 

The thing that helped me the most with forgiveness was having been with Jesus through that long season of darkness and scratches at healing. That long season helped me realize Jesus could handle everything that had happened to me. Even more, he could bring me through it — teach me new things, make something new.

I became more identified with Jesus and what he was making of me and my life than with the broken circumstances that had brought me to him in the first place. 

That’s when I could finally consider forgiveness.

When I didn’t need to hold the wrongdoings so close to my chest anymore. When Jesus had given me something more.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When We Become Less Identified With the Circumstances

Do you know what it’s like to feel so identified with your suffering that you don’t know how to tell your story without it? 

I do. 

I know what it’s like to be so connected to all the ways I’ve been broken that I can’t see anything else anymore.

Living in the anger. Living in the sadness. Chafing against the injustices. 

You feel like your suffering defines you. It’s the only identity you have.

I also know what it’s like to come out on the other side. It feels like slowly waking up, or watching the misty fog clear before your eyes.

Suddenly, there’s more to see.

For me, each time this has happened, it has been akin to realizing God was able to handle all that happened to me. It didn’t surprise him or faze him. He let me come to him with it and said, “Yes. It’s true. I know.” And then he sat down beside me or walked next to me in the aftermath, attending to the process of carving out a new identity, showing how these things would be connected to bigger pictures. 

I became less identified with what had happened and more identified with what God could, would, and was already doing with it. 

It makes for a pretty monumental shift.

I’ve experienced a shift like this a few different times in my life, and each time it has felt like a huge boulder being removed from around my neck, and the connecting rope along with it. Instead of being submerged at the bottom of the ocean anymore by the weight of it, I found that I could stand upright in the water, my feet sure on the sandbar beneath me, feeling the cool water and its buoyancy against my skin, surveying the waves and the horizon and the light … free, now, to play.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It Creates a Reckoning

I’ve shared here previously that I walked through a marital separation and divorce in 2003-2004 and that it was an experience that created a heavy cloak of shame that I wore the length of my body every single day. 

I remember sojourning back to California from the Midwest, where I’d been living the previous year, with all that belonged to my name packed in the backseat and trunk of my little white Volkswagen Jetta. I arrived at my dad’s house, which would be my new home for the first part of that new season, and stepped into the tiny guest bedroom feeling all out of sorts and wondering what, exactly, my life had become. 

I was starting over. Starting from scratch. Re-entering the familiar context of my hometown, surrounded by people I’d known my whole life, but nothing was the same. 

Those first few months created a cocooning of sorts inside my soul. I would hole up in my room at the end of each day and play Sarah McLachlan’s new album over and over and over. I sat in that room with the door closed tight behind me. It was the safest place I knew.

And it was grief. Disorientation. A place where I pulled my shame cloak just a little tighter about my shoulders each day. 

But I’ve also shared that, eventually, I began to rethink all the beliefs that had been stamped into my soul through that experience. That was I worthless and thrown away … but no, I was beautiful to Jesus. That I was a single girl on her own for the first time … but no, I was now the bride of Christ. That I was less than desirable … but no, Jesus found me to be lovely. 

And then, in what was one of the most pivotal moments of turning around inside that season, there was the belief that my shame was merited because my new life as a divorced woman was counterfeit … but no, God sees me as Christianne, his daughter, not Christianne, his divorced daughter.

It became a season of reckoning. 

My suffering brought me face to face with what I truly believed about myself, others, and God. And by leaning into what those beliefs really were, God and I could look plainly at them together. In the context of that painful honesty, he could begin the work of reforming my crumbled foundation. 

A Turn in the Suffering :: Let It Take as Long as It Takes

When I think about “turns in suffering,” my mind immediately flies back to the first major turn I encountered in my own experiences of suffering. 

I had been walking in a very intent way with Jesus for about 10 years. Ten years was about how long it took for me to find myself steeped in my belovedness, to be rooted and grounded in that identity of love. I’d spent many long years encountering the truth of my heart — learning what my heart even was, and then learning what was true of it — and then combining that with the process of learning who Jesus was and how to bring the truth of my heart into relationship with him. 

In those 10 years, I’d discovered and acknowledged the wounds in my heart. I’d been through the anger mill. I’d grieved a lot of losses. I’d allowed myself to admit what I didn’t know. I’d allowed myself to learn.

And it wasn’t until about 10 years into that sacred journey that I experienced my first turn in the suffering. I guess healing — or preparation for healing — just takes that long sometimes. It did for me, at least. 

And when it did, I was ready to receive some new perspectives. 

Let it take as long as it takes. I’ve learned from experience that the wait is worth it.

What is it like for you to let the suffering and healing process take as long as it takes?

Getting to Know God

Mary Magdalene: “I have seen the Lord!”

When I realized what the title of this post was going to be — “Getting to Know God” — I kind of chuckled and shook my head in amazement. I mean, really — get to know God? The maker of the whole universe? The one who conceived of the reality we know and exist inside each day? Get to know him?

It’s rather incredible that God even allows such a thing, isn’t it?

In this “getting to know God” process, I find myself so thankful for the Scriptures that teach us who God is. There’s a whole massive book written by about forty different individuals, all sharing with us different facets of God’s character and action in the world.

I’m thankful, too, for the created world and how it can teach us about this God. For instance, just yesterday, Kirk and I were talking about heaven. He wondered aloud if we would still have organs in our bodies in heaven. Such an unusual thing to think about, but my eventual response was, “Why not? God created the super-complex and incredible systems of our bodies. Why wouldn’t those remain in heaven? God considered them good when they were first made.” The uber-complexity of our bodies and how beautifully they susbist in their own system teaches us a lot about this God of all being — it teaches us that God is masterful, creative, scientific, mathematic, and precise, for instance.

I find it incredible, too, that the person of Jesus is also there to greet us in the Scriptures as one more way for us to get to know God. God himself! In the flesh! Walking around and talking with and being in relationship with real, live people. Yet one more way that God allows himself to be known to us.

All of this is kind of mind-blowing, if you ask me.

How have you gotten to know God in your own life? What kind of things have you learned?

It Requires Safety

Yesterday I wrote about one aspect of the good news of Jesus — that he is about the work of restoring our broken places. I so love that about him. 

But as a dear person recently reminded me, the thought of going back into those broken places is scary. Even turning around on the road to see them there behind us is hard. It can jab us with such sharp pain, just knowing those potholes and drop-offs and broken-up pieces of cement are there, can’t it? 

And the thought of going back into them, even to receive something as wondrous as healing? Terrifying. 

This is why getting to know — really know — the person of Jesus is so paramount first. 

I could not have allowed Jesus to visit those tender and difficult particulars of my life, much less excavate them and begin an in-depth reconstruction project, if I hadn’t first learned to trust him.

That’s just sanity, right? 

But the good news is that he is indeed trustworthy. It takes time to learn this for ourselves — to let the person of Jesus beecome known as real and concerned with us specifically. It takes time to learn what he is like, how he really sees us, how he converses with us, and how he holds us together.

Once that foundation of trust and safety is laid, perhaps we’ll be ready to let him heal us in the deepest of ways. I’ve come to know there is nothing better in all of life than this.

Do you want to get to know this trustworthy Jesus?

This Is Good News

There are many things we could say about the “good news” of Jesus. There are layers and layers of this good news that bring us into a life we’ve never imagined for ourselves or even realized we needed like our own next breath. 

But today I want to focus on just one aspect of that good news. 

John the Baptist, when telling the people to prepare themselves for God-in-the-flesh who was coming to earth among them, said: 

Every ditch will be filled in,

Every bump smoothed out,

The detours straightened out,

All the ruts paved over.

— Luke 3:5

I have experienced this good news of Jesus. 

When I began to know Jesus in a real and intimate way, I could look back on the terrain of my life and see ruts and jagged edges and huge ditches and potholes littered throughout the whole of it. My life’s history was pockmarked with brokenness. 

I was broken, and so was my history.

In my life with Jesus, he has been about the work of filling in those ditches, of smoothing those sharp edges, of filling in all of those potholes. He has been smoothing and filling the back road of my life. 

And do you know what he’s been filling it with? Himself. 

Do you have ditches and potholes and detours and drop-off edges in your own life’s history? Do you want to experience the good news that Jesus brings to you and those places? 

The Path of Progress

Currently reading.

Over the last week, I’ve started reading some new books that we’ve had in our home for a long while and seem perfect companions for me right now. One of those books, by a fellow brother in Christ named Watchman Nee, is called TheNormal Christian Life.

I’ve just this morning opened its pages for the first time and haven’t yet progressed further than the opening preface and table of contents, but I can already tell is it going to help clarify and crystallize elements of our life with God that I have written down in snatches here and there and intuited inside for a great long while. 

For instance, one of the first things I noticed is that several of the chapters begin with the phrase “The Path of Progress.” I assume this means that the author has identified stages of the Christian faith that occur along the way of our formation with God. 

The main thing I want to notice is the fact of this formation itself: there is a path, and we progress along it. 

Our life with God is not a destination. It is not a one-time deal that gets infused into us at a particular moment in time and then is finished forever. 

Yes, there is an end point in the great, grand scope of things. This would be heaven, also known as the new earth in which we will live and reign with God at the end of time. And yes, in the eyes of God, the new life given to us in Christ, because of his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, makes us sons and daughters who find full acceptance and freedom before God. 

But what happens at the end of time and what we gain at the moment of salvation is not the whole picture. It’s also about what happens in between those two points in time. That is a really important element in the whole scope of it.

There is a path of progress. There is a process of formation that continues while we live. And I, for one, absolutely adore and am grateful for this process. 

This path of progress is about learning the kingdom of God and what it means to live inside of it. It is about being conformed ever more into the image of Christ. It is about growing more and more fully into the reality of our true selves.

Do you consider your life as one that follows a path of progress?

Knowing Your Belovedness

I shared yesterday that I struggled this week with an acute feeling of aloneness. Thankfully, a book by Henri Nouwen helped broaden my scope to remember that all of us struggle with that same experience. 

Aloneness is a prominent experience of the human condition. 

I’ve been continuing to think about that feeling of aloneness, and it’s caused me to see that part of the reason I experienced it so acutely on Tuesday was because I’d gotten disconnected from the knowledge of my belovedness. 

When I’m connected to the truth of my belovedness, I’m not alone.

I’m connected to God. I feel his delight. I feel free of pressure or expectation or criticism or condemnation because the power of love dispels those dark, negating things. 

I’ve come to deeply and firmly believe that life — salvation — is about discovering our belovedness, exploring the truth of it to better understand and believe in it, squooshing ourselves all around inside of it so that it covers and fills every part of us, and then connecting to its truth again and again and again. 

Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said to “abide in his love” (John 15:9). 

Do you know your belovedness? 

Pulse Check: How Have You Changed?

Several times in the last few weeks, I’ve noticed changes in myself while in the midst of certain moments. 

It got me thinking — and thankful — about the ways we change over time.

For instance, recently I found myself walking along with a new friend without anything top of mind to say. My usual pattern would be to wrack my brain for something to talk about — and probably to berate myself in the process to hurry up and say something interesting, worthwhile, or funny.

But I chose not to do that. Since nothing came to mind to say, I just let the silence be what it was, and I felt really okay with that.

That was a pretty surprising — and amazement-inducing — moment. 

I saw that I’d changed. I wasn’t scared of the silence or of losing my new friend.

Another time I read a passage in a book that talked about the kind of character needed in a person for them to be ready to take up their calling. Normally, I would have analyzed the author’s words — along the way, analyzing myself — and clung to the book in an anxious attempt to find answers. I would have underlined and hemmed and hawed and wondered what it would take for me to measure up to my own calling. 

But that didn’t happen this time. Instead, I noticed what the author said, agreed with him, and trusted that God is making me into the person I need to be to do the work he has for me to do.

That was another revelatory moment. I’ve seen enough growth in myself to know God is growing and changing me, so I don’t have to be anxious about it. Nor do I have to try to change myself.

Isn’t it interesting how we form and change over time? 

Sometimes we don’t even notice it’s happening. We’re going along and slowly, almost imperceptibly, our values are changing. Our measures of ourself and others and God are changing. Our knee-jerk reactions are becoming less knee-jerk. We’re growing in our capacity for patience, generosity, and charity.

And then, one day, we notice it. We’ve changed.

I’m curious if you’ve noticed any changes in yourself lately.

When you look back over the last little while of life — it could be 3 months, the last year, the last 5 years, or even the last 10 years — in what ways do you notice you have changed? What is it like for you to notice those changes?

This Is Spiritual Formation

God rewrote the text of my life

   when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

— Psalm 18:24

A couple weeks ago, I was thinking about the way our lives de-form us.

I was reflecting on many of the pieces of my heart — large, sweeping sections of it down to the tiny nooks and crannies — that Jesus has come in and healed. These pieces and places that he’s healed and the way he’s then reconnected me to the true self he created in conceiving me — this is spiritual formation. This is the work of God (and us) in our life with him.

This is his intent. Healing. Wholeness. Freedom. Life. The extension of the kingdom into the places where we live.

How might God intend to rewrite the text of your life? What is it like for you to consider opening the book of your heart to his eyes?

On Inhabiting Ourselves

In the last 24 hours, I’ve been thinking a lot about clouds and pretzels. 

Clouds, in the sense that they are what I see up ahead to indicate what could go wrong in any given moment, decision, or scenario. They are the “what if?” voices inside of me. What if they don’t want what I offer? What if I misstep their expectation or desire? What if it makes them angry? What if they blame me?

I have oh-so-many “what if?” voices inside me. And yesterday I realized they’re like murky, massive clouds that I can see ahead. 

And that’s where the pretzel then comes in. 

In response to the “what if?” clouds I see ahead, I start contorting. Twisting, turning, anticipating, curling — living outside myself because I’m living up ahead in the possibility of the “what if?” outcomes. 

It’s tiring being a pretzel. 

And who knows if those “what if?” clouds even exist? They exist in possibility, not reality. And yet in response to them, I contort into a pretzel instead of standing up straight and inhabiting my actual body with my actual eyes, arms, legs, skin, and voice. 

The fear of “what if?” creates a pretzel dynamic in me. But today, I’m learning and practicing standing up straight, unafraid and courageous and real.

Can you relate to the “what if?” clouds and the pretzel contortions?

This Is About Lifelong Growth

In lots of different ways lately, I’ve been reminded of this truth: 

Our formation is a lifelong process. 

There is no “big finish” that we reach here on earth and then are done. Our life with God is a lifelong experience. It continues and continues and continues, unraveling more layers of truth and growth as we go, inviting continual form.

This might seem discouraging. We are conditioned to look for answers to problems. We want things to be better. We want a happy ending. 

I’d like to invite you to take the long view in this.

This reality we’re living in is about healing and wholeness. Reality, in the end, does resolve. This is what we understand from the holistic teaching of the Scriptures. 

But it doesn’t resolve until the end. Meaning, the end of all ends, when all things are finished and are then made new.

Our lives today are a piece of that. Our lives today prepare us for resolution. But the resolution doesn’t finish in this life. 

Growth happens here. Healing happens here. Jesus is about your continued wholeness as his aim. But it doesn’t happen in a flash. We are not zapped into perfect existence. It is a process. And a beautiful one, at that, I might add.

How do you respond to this notion of life with God as process? Does it surprise you? Anger you? Relieve you? 

It Doesn't Have to Look a Certain Way

One thing I am continually struck by in the vocational work of formation that I do is that life with Christ does not look one particular way for everyone. 

Each person is unique. Each person’s story is unique. The way each of us were formed by God to be is unique. The way each of us were formed by our own particular lives is unique. 

Jesus wants to walk with you in your own particular life. 

He wants to be with you as you are.

If you are an extrovert, he wants to connect to your extroversion. If you are musical, he wants to connect to that musicality in you. If you are quiet and introverted, he wants to know you in that quiet, introverted way that you are. 

You don’t have to be someone else.

You don’t have to be other than he already made you to be. 

This is exciting for someone like me, whose life’s work is to walk alongside others and pay attention with them to their lives and the presence and movement of God in their particular life.

Every conversation is different. It is absolutely glorious and beautiful and amazing. I love to see how God is speaking and forming each person in unique and utterly creative ways.

What are the particulars of your one particular life? How can you invite Jesus into those particularities today?

How Is He Leading You?

I love talking to people about their life with God. I can’t tell you how excited I get — literally, my heart starts pounding a little faster, I get a huge smile on my face, and sometimes I even get goosebumps — when talking with someone about their life with God and I start getting glimpses at what God is doing there. 

There’s really nothing like it in the rest of the world for me. 

This morning, I read a short passage in the psalms that highlighted a similar thought. The psalm said: 

You’re blessed when you stay on course,

   walking steadily on the road revealed by God.

You’re blessed when you follow his directions,

   doing your best to find him.

— Psalm 119:1-2

This is what our life with God is like. 

He reveals the road, the next steps, and we say yes. He has the plan in mind, and our part is to notice and respond. 

We’re blessed when we stay on his course, walking steadily on the road he reveals. We’re blessed when we follow his directions, doing our best to find him. 

What is God doing in your life right now? How is he leading you? 

"Man Is More Manlike . . ."

While reading a book over the holidays, I came across this quote by G. K. Chesterton that has continued to stay with me: 

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I’ve known quite a bit of grief in my life. 

Some of those griefs are more obvious than others. Some made pricks with the tiniest pin at the time they grazed me, almost without my noticing, until the pain of it came cascading down in a torrent fifteen or twenty years later. 

For many, many years, such grief and pain were the major themes of my story. 

But that isn’t the case anymore.

I give full credit to the healing work of Christ’s love in my life for that. (I wrote about one of those threads of healing that happened in my life 10 years ago on the blog for Spring Arbor’s graduate program earlier this week.)

Here is something true.

There was a time I couldn’t fathom telling my story any other way than through its prism of pain. But I’ve since learned there is completely new and free and joy-filled life on the other side of sorrow, when we are met in the honest depths of our pain with love.

Such love brings about a life that eventually makes the pain small. It is a love that eventually helps us know joy as the main thing, and grief as the minor. 

Can you relate to either sides of this story — living inside the depths of grief, or emerging on the other side of it into healing’s joy? What have you learned through either experience?

It's Nature and Nurture

I was reading Psalm 104 earlier this week and deeply encouraged on so many levels — namely, with the recognition that it is nature and nurture that make us who we are. 

The psalm speaks mainly of the natural world — of oceans and mountains and all kinds of animals. Here is a portion of the text: 

You blanketed earth with ocean,

   covered the mountains with deep waters;

Then you roared and the water ran away —

   your thunder crash put it to flight.

Mountains pushed up, valleys spread out

   in the places you assigned them.

You set boundaries between earth and sea;

   never again will earth be flooded.

You started the springs and rivers,

   sent them flowing among the hillls.

All the wild animals now drink their fill,

   wild donkeys quench their thirst.

Along the riverbanks the birds build nests,

   ravens make their voices heard.

You water the mountains from your heavenly cisterns;

   earth is supplied with plenty of water.

You make grass grow for the livestock,

   hay for the animals that plow the ground.

God’s trees are well-watered —

   the Lebanon cedars he planted.

Birds build their nests in those trees;

   look — the stork at home in the treetop.

Mountain goats climb about the cliffs;

   badgers burrow among the rocks.

The moon keeps track of the seasons,

   the sun is in charge of each day.

When it’s dark and night takes over,

   all the forest creatures come out.

The young lions roar for their prey,

   clamoring to God for their supper.

When the sun comes up, they vanish,

   lazily stretched out in their dens.

Meanwhile, men and women go out to work,

   busy at their jobs until evening.

What a wildly wonderful world, God!

   You made it all, with Wisdom at your side,

   made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.

Oh, look — the deep, wide sea,

   brimming with fish past counting,

   sardines and sharks and salmon.

Ships plow those waters,

   and Leviathan, your pet dragon, romps in them.

All the creatures look expectantly to you

   to give them their meals on time.

You come, and they gather around;

   you open your hand and they eat from it.

If you turned your back,

   they’d die in a minute —

Take back your Spirit and they die,

   revert to original mud;

Send out your Spirit and they spring to life —

   the whole countryside in bloom and blossom.

— Psalm 104 

We’ve been talking quite a bit these days about the true self and the false self.

I would define the true self as the image God had in mind for us when he conceived to create us. It is a self connected to God and rooted in the reality of God’s good intention for our existence.

I would define the false self as anything in us that separates or disconnects us from God and our true self. This can include original sin, chosen sin, or simply the distractions and diversions that we seek out in an attempt to build ourselves up into an image we’ve created for ourselves, rather than the image already given to us by God that is deeply good and beautiful. 

In this passage above, I see so much that speaks to these dynamics, both in the ways we were created to exist (the true self) and the ways we can be de-formed away from that existence (the false self). 

Let’s begin with the way God created the earth and all that dwells within it.

In its serene, contented, intended state, all of creation responds to God and is given everything it needs by God. We see the plants and animals and livestock responding to their existence by simply going about it. They eat grass that never stops growing up for them, they build nests with endless supplies for the making of them, they trust God for their next meal. 

This is the intended existence of life: being who we were made to be, un-self-conscious about it, and trusting God for everything good thing. 

But then think about what happens to animals when they’re harmed. 

When I read this passage the other day, I thought about my lovely cat Diva.

Kirk rescued her as a kitten from behind an opera house (hence her name), but she was a matted, mewling mess. She’d been abandoned, and the elements had not been good to her. She weighed next to nothing, and she skitted away from human contact. It was only because of the immediate way Solomon took to her that day — Solomon, whom Kirk was also rescuing that day — as he began licking her all over, cleaning her fur, as soon as they were set down in a box together, that Kirk knew Diva was going home with him that day.

When it came time for me to meet Diva for the first time, about six years after she’d come to live with Kirk, he warned me she would likely run away and hide under a table or couch, scared. But instead she came near, smelled my feet, rubbed against my legs, allowed me to bend down and run my hand along her back quite a few times. 

Over the last seven years of my life with Diva, she’s grown. She still gets skittish, especially fighting against too much presence crowding her space if you hold her close to your chest, but she has a quiet confidence about her. She rests next to me on my desk each morning, content to simply be with me. She waits expectantly by my chair, staring up at me with an unending gaze of plaintive eyes, begging me to give her some affection and completely unafraid to ask for it. She has grown a very full and soft, downy coat of fur (and a little bit of a healthy-sized belly!). 

Nurture has affected her — both for ill (in the early days of her life) and for good (thanks to kindness and unconditional care).

We know this to be true of all animals, too. Those who’ve been abused become frightened or, sometimes, angry and abusive themselves. But the psalm shows the true, intended state of the animal kingdom to be that of peace and trust.

So it is with us. 

We have a seed of God in us — it is the presence of our true self. We also have the seed of the fall of mankind in us, as well as the seeds of all that has nurtured us toward health or harm. 

We are both. 

We Form by Degrees

I was talking to a dear friend of mine earlier this week who just finished her second half-marathon. I am so not a runner and can’t imagine doing something like that myself, but I absolutely admire and stand in awe of her for setting her mind and body to doing it and then accomplishing it. 

Because this was her second half-marathon, running has clearly been a part of her life for some time now.

I remember when she declared her goal to run a half-marathon the first time, and then I watched her join a formal running group and incorporate training runs into her weekly schedule. 

After her first half-marathon, she shared with me that she’s discovered running is most fun for her in the sweet spot of about 5-6 miles. She wasn’t sure she’d run a half-marathon again since she’d learned that about herself.

But then last fall, when she came to stay with me for a week, she’d recently made the decision to train for this second one.

I remember waking up one morning during her visit last fall to learn that she’d already gone for a 2-mile run in our neighborhood, having pulled up our address on Google Maps and mapped out what seemed like a good route for herself. And then I watched her sit at our farmtable in our front room that same morning and plan out her training schedule for the next few months, steadily marking an increase in mileage for each week that would get her up to the 13.1-mile race day.

When we spoke earlier this week about the race she’d completed over the weekend, it just struck me with so much force: 

“Katy,” I said. “It’s kind of amazing that you’ve become the kind of person who can run 13 miles in one go. All your training has led to you being someone who has that capacity now.”

She didn’t used to be the kind of person who could run 13.1 miles. But now she is. Her wise and intentional training led her there. 

It gets me thinking about spiritual formation. 

We are human beings designed for growth.

We grow in the womb, and then we proceed to continue growing outside the womb in so many different directions. In fact, it seems the nature of every living thing is bent toward growth. Animals do it, trees and plants do it, and sometimes I wonder if the growth element God seemed so keen on implanting in living things will continue somehow still in heaven.

And our growth always happens by degrees.

It’s so tempting to think of the ideal life of Christ — or even just our ideal notion of a Christian — and expect ourselves to be able to live like that once we have given our lives to Christ.

We forget, or perhaps do not even know, that life in Christ is about formation. We grow in Christlikeness over time. We grow deeper into our true selves over time. 

Growth always happens by degrees. 

In what places are you growing right now? What is it like for you to focus on this “next right degree” Christ is about forming in you, rather than an ideal, fully formed image of Christlike perfection?