"Ima hafta stop following you on Instagram."
I laugh because I've questioned myself multiple times regarding the volume of photos I'd posted in the previous 24 hours. I scan back through them at the risk of seeming disinterested in Arthur Christmas and the gathered audience of middle schoolers. I search my feed for a defense and I find it, but I don't feel defensive really.
I take these pictures because I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for these faces, these hearts, these personalities-- a joy cocktail I sip slow and often take in by the snapping of pictures.
I post them publicly for others to taste and see, knowing full well that my "followers" have their own lives surrounded by their own treasures and it amazes me, truly, that anyone sticks around to be witness to mine. She has every right, that truly supportive sister of mine, to unfollow as I abuse the medium. I get that 28 reaches annoying levels and private thanksgiving needn't flood public forums. Still, I'm unashamed of the volume because my cup runneth over and I will snap and count blessings with my life otherwise too often hungry for more, starved of thanksgiving.
Cocktail. I use the word without regard for the traditional "alcoholic drink" definition because mostly what I mean to convey is the deeper concept-- the combination of several factors purposed together so that their combined effect is more potent than any of the parts taken individually. People together bring me joy.
In a chapter titled "Imitating Christ's Humility," Paul writes,
"Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ,
if any comfort from his love,
if any common sharing in the Spirit,
if any tenderness and compassion,
then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love,
being one in spirit and of one mind.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.
Rather, in humility value others above yourselves,
not looking to you own interests but each of you to the interests of the others."
(Philippians 2:1-4)
There's another word traditionally used for alcoholic drinks that sounds way more fun than "punch," so I use it.
Spritzer.
I don't even really know what it is, but I've used the term for as long as I can remember and I know each time I bring it up, eyes will either roll or just stare knowingly-- Sadie will be Sadie.
They laugh at the word choice, the juvenile glee with which I say it, my audacity to make a fool of myself-- to not care what I sound or look like-- because I will do and say what elicits joy.
That requires being my honest self-- all of it {faults and insecurities, too}. Not haughtily but in humble recognition that I cannot rightly be anyone but me. And that {especially this one} I need Him, the God who transforms and renames-- Israel, Paul-- to take me as I am and transform.
Weakness to strength, strength to humility. Knee jerk feeling to heartfelt consideration. Pride to contrition. Fleeting happiness to sustained joy.
Joy. I can't elicit it, really. But I can certainly stand in it's way, refusing to yield to God for fear of self humiliation.
Yes, Sadie. She'll be Sadie.
Because Sadie? She needs God to be God.
I can't be Him. I've tried. And my heart-- the sensitive one with capacity to hurt deep and wound deeply-- it has hardened before by the effort. The thrashing. The rushed attempt to be all things to all people with all answers and best appearances. I've lived with pulse so quickened, chamber walls stretched so thin, that my body could no longer sustain the pace-- all under the belief that if I could make more of this heart, extend my sensitivity a little wider, then others would feel the love, they'd see compassion, they'd embrace peace (Christ) and continue on in hope and like-mindedness.
But speed and stretching thin and suppressed (even if already confessed) sin-- this thinking of self more highly than I ought, this believing that I have what others need-- it will never multiply others' joy or satisfy souls. And the well intended vulnerability through which I give of myself-- give others my best confidence and the benefit of the doubt and my trust, my belief in their beauty, my appreciation for the diversity of their gifts, preferences and convictions-- the vulnerability of emptying myself to fill others with myself {whether they want it or not}-- it opens me up to harsh {correct} correction and insensitivity surrounding.
Others and circumstances, they don't always want to slow to acknowledge the potential, the depth of the moment. A person speaks the depth of their feeling in the deceptive shallows of sarcasm. Others stay silent, refusing to allow any glimpse into the depths. We rush, we avoid, we splash around the shallows, pausing occasionally-- in the wake of national tragedy, for instance-- to posit, "there has to be more to life than what we're seeing." We'll briefly take comfort from James chapter 4 giving permission, instruction to grieve deeply for healing:
9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
But who wants to expose the everyday truth, the necessary work of the preceding verses on days not stinging deep of national tragedy?
"5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.”
7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you.Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded."
To consider life at its depths-- to take God at His Word-- sometimes (mostly) means feeling sadness deep and who wants that?
Kiddie pool it is for us, and especially in groups, because the vulnerability of the deep end threatens. Forget deep joy, the depths threaten security, composure, hard earned appearance, even jovial happiness and we won't have that.
My certainty that I can makes sense of it all if I just speed up and share my heart, my belief that people should be more like me and the vulnerability {oh it sounds so noble} by which I make my heart known so others will operate more accordingly to it {well of course it sounds silly written like that, but isn't that what I'm ultimately saying with soapbox words?} -- all of these things rightly come under attack and I crumble underneath the weight of my own frantic defensiveness. There my heart gets truly exposed for as lacking as it was all along. When I empty myself believing others should fill with me a void within me remains. In that void I see and must confront the depths I've neglected as I've busied myself with myself in the shallows.
Vulnerability empties me out and I misguidedly hand others the content and I get all shocked, all hurt when they don't want it. They don't need me. Why? Because I, too, am broken. I, too, tend to make little sense. I, too, splash around the kiddie pool to avoid stirring the still depths. I, too, have sin.
It's packaged neatly in pride and complacency-- the type of sin tidy enough to escape cultural chastisement. It's the type of sin so often reinforced, if unknowingly, by church culture. So while I appear to be doing so well by the standards of Christian and cultural status quo-- and kind people tell me this on a regular basis-- they don't actually want to know how I do it and ultimately, though I rush around to maintain the appearance and to have an answer to give and to not disappoint people, I don't want to tell them how I do it because what drives me is so often the same sin that fuels anyone's behavior {even the less neat kinds}: pride, complacency, avoidance of the full potential of a given moment for fear of the deep disappointments of life.
I am no better. I don't know better. I just seem better and I cry to God for meaningful words and influence. For courage to be real with people, for confidence in His character, in His power to transform because I know appearances won't keep. My efforts, the quickened pulse for rushing to get it all done, {for playing God} even when fueled by the best-meaning, most sensitive and sincere heart eventually flatlines. And God-- only God-- resurrects, restores, redeems.
I can't be God and I will literally die trying and He knows that, so He says to go ahead and die to myself today and the next so He can bring me to life-- so He can train me with grace to really live in the depths of joy and sorrow, of potential and disappointment. Train me with grace to stir the depths with my actions and not just splash the shallows with words.
If I empty my heart to give foremost to others, with chief aim to please them, I will fill with defensiveness, bitterness, hurt-- all of this from my own heart that of course others don't want because they're crushing under the weight of their own load. So they give it back to me with a shove and rightfully so. Self-righteousness invites others-righteousness into battle and we will both lose every time.
I'll die trying to be God-- won't I just get it-- because in my rushing, splashing, flatlining efforts to be God, to not be Sadie, I will have denied God the opportunity to be Himself in my life. And in death... well, in death, as in self-lived life, I will not know Him or resurrection power.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said something of the sort-- you aren't fit to live until you have something worth dying for. It's silly, those songs we sang and the allegiance we pledged to a dream. But what we learned-- whether we and our teachers knew it or not-- was biblical. I'm only fit to live if in willingness to die. Christ is worth dying to myself for because He alone has resurrection power. What I once naively, idealistically assumed to be the order of the world beyond elementary walls (unity, like-mindedness) I'm having to explicitly put my faith towards as every day I become more acquainted with the real world.
The real world to which I cannot be God. The real world in which I can just be Sadie.
Not proudly, but humbly. Confidently, but also in deep contrition.
And though I cannot be God to the world, He will faithfully be God to me.
So I can busy myself doing good-- washing pans and prematurely scooping up bowls to the sink and we can all laugh when Jackie calls me out for this vain attempt to busy myself with goodness by a simple, "here, need something else to do?"
Yes, I can do good, but it only matters when I can slow myself to seeing God. We can all laugh at the inadequacy of my good effort in light of the adequacy of God. The One who sustains the pulse of this sensitive heart and assures me that if I will vulnerably empty myself for the chief purpose of offering Him the contents, He will fill with joy and contentedness.
If I will pause to consider the depth of moments with humility and contrition, He will gladly take the pitiful self-righteousness I have to offer and fill with His righteousness. That God-righteousness will only rightly express itself in love, never defensiveness or in argument. He will realize-- make real-- the potential for depth of relationship and purposeful circumstance and He will multiply the gratitude of my heart--multiply Himself-- when I slow with thanks.
We all laugh when, from across the room, Giant Elvis asks me to repeat the word: "spritzer."
From German, meaning "splash."
We all laugh because yes, Sadie will be Sadie and there's nothing any one of us can do about it.
I laugh, too. Genuinely. Because, what joy, there is something God can do about it.
It's the deep laughter of deep joy-- even here, where sadness could consume, where sin might bury deep the potential for gladness, where bitterness might stifle thanksgiving. Here where awkwardness might silence us all-- yes, here especially I laugh with joy.
It isn't that all too familiar forced laughter with to escape being laughed at. I have lived the sad life of being Sadie apart from God being God. I've lived with sensitive heart draining to fill again with insensitivity, defensiveness. I know the deep hurt that vulnerability invites when it's extended without regard for God. I've lived the life of woe is me. I've known laughter at my own expense-- the self deprecating kind that only fosters self-consciousness, selfishness.
Now I laugh because I can be me, at His expense. Mercy.
I am me, but I'm not my own.
It means laying down pride, but it also relieves pressure.
Just enough relief to laugh-- to live-- freely.
I laugh knowing how badly I've wanted to not be Sadie.
But joy, that God is God.
I breathe deep so the moment will sink deep.
These people gathered around Christmas sweets and {scalding!} potato soup, they don't need me. They may not even want me. I don't want me-- the over-sensitivity, the pride to then compensate, the complacency, the wordiness, the insecurity, the soapbox, the inadequacy.
But God can only be God when I honestly acknowledge the limits of being me. He can only transform these things as I expose them, for he won't impose Himself where He's granted freedom of choice.
I pause to relish that God is Who He says He is in the midst of the people I deeply care for. He brings community where I once desired to be left alone-- "free" to think and feel in "peace," "free" from hurt and sarcasm and depth, untouched by harm, unopposed, unchallenged, self-righteous.
I laugh, fill deep with joy that God wouldn't leave me there, to die myself, by myself. Instead He called me out-- by name {John 10:3}-- to live by Him. And with others.
I marvel at the company of people who really shouldn't care about me--but who encourage the evidences of God working in me and who treat me patiently, lovingly where the work is glaringly incomplete.
Yes, I want to make them laugh, but I hope He'll make our joy complete. I give thanks for what He makes possible, for how He uses circumstances and people-- moments-- to make faith real and reinforce it deep.
I laugh not knowing that I'll be crying from the sidelines of the Pursuit classroom the next morning. Crying then because as hard as it is to find God in a tragedy like Connecticut, it's harder to believe and confidently live in God's transforming, resurrecting power among my daily sphere of influence, among brokenness here. Crying as Carolyn reads off a list of the hurts cutting deep a few doors down in our own student ministry.
Laughing one day over freedom from taking myself too seriously. Crying the next over the necessary cost of not taking God lightly.
This is the sacred dance of grief and joy and it gathers depth over time. Depths that we'll only reach by slowing, by surrendering the rush, by letting God be God where we can only be our limited selves.
By request of Giant Elvis, I say it aloud one last time, the word God's ironically using to remind me not to settle for splashing when He means to stir deep.
"Spritzer!"
"In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—
continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose."
(Philippians 2: 5-13)
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