Beloved

This weekend, my husband and I were back in Tennessee for the launch service of Crossings, a faith community. I have talked before about how we came to be involved in this church.

Worshipping was an amazing experience, mainly because I had a keen awareness of being a part of something God is doing. The absurdity that in the entire Chicagoland area we would find our current church, and then that that church would deviate from their typical church planting philosophy to entertain the idea of a church in Knoxville, and that we would be here during that time. Well, I said it, it's ABSURD! However, if I have learned anything, it's that God delights in the absurdly creative. His ways are not my own.

I have spent a fair amount of time these last 5 years feeling angry and disaffected from the Church, confused and disturbingly grieved about many failures of Christianity, Christians, the Church, and several local congregations. Not to mention the wrestling that I was doing with God. He and I had quite a few tussles. There is not enough space on the Internets or paper and ink in the world to record the lessons that God has taught me about God and about myself in the past few years. I have tried God in every way that I know how, and God has proven faithful and real. I have experienced God, tasted God, and known God through Jesus Christ...Just like Mark spoke about in his sermon on Sunday.

I make no apologies for the squall of grief, anger, and despair that I long denied, eventually experienced and finally embraced. In an equally confounding manner, I have watched the clouds of anger dissipate. Only by leading me through such a cloud of despair, allowing my wounds to occur and then binding and healing them, could I come to this moment where my story has become restored to one of wholeness and authenticity that seeks to know God and his creativity through my calling to the care of souls.

When I see the community of faith that is blossoming in Knoxville, I get all excited about the impact God is going to have on the lives of those who live there. I also get excited about the undeniably personal manner in which God is letting me be a part of it. Instead of feeling stuck, or torn between two places (Chicago and Knoxville), I experience the absurdity of God's perfect timing, His calculated writing of my story as a part of His story, and a true knowing that I belong to God, and all that I have belongs to God.

Not too long ago, on his blog, Mark asked people to share their "reel to reel" moments of faith. And I think I just remembered my most important one. Reading the The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen for a class, I recognized myself in both the prodigal and in the resentful older brother. I desperately needed to be keenly aware of God's grace, to know and to believe that I am God's beloved. I also recognized my own scowl, similar to the older brother's, as a sign of my resentment of those who experience God's grace, but who haven't been doing the "hard work" that I have for most of my life. My lack of acceptance of grace stunted my ability to extend grace to others.

For the first time, I sensed a growing awareness and acceptance of God's grace. God kept placing in my life people who reflected to me just how much I am God's beloved. Beloved. Beloved. Over time, I began to believe it. In pieces, in parts, not fully. And being assured of being God's beloved provided to me an expansive and expanding grace toward others. I felt a freedom to love, to shephard, to hold those who dish out daily doses of vitirol, disease, and toxicity. However, my assurance doubts, it wavers, I act as if I am not God's beloved. I forget the loving way in which He created me, the exorbiant price He paid for soul. As evidence of my lack of faith, and my need for continual remembrance, I had that very word..."beloved" tattooed on my body. Not as proof to anyone, not as art, not as anything but a constant reminder that God has declared me His. Even in my darkest moments of doubt, the reality of that ink on my lower back declares to me that in the face of my unbelief, I am God's beloved.

I'm beloved. You're beloved. He is here. He is real.