Roots

Until I went to college, I lived almost my entire life in the same house in the same town. 

And yet, in the almost ten years since I graduated from high school, I have migrated from place to place, never living more than four years in any one location.  All the while, I never fully felt that where I called home really was. 

I have a deep love of home.  I derive comfort from the familiar.  Adventure and mystery do not appeal to me.  And even though I appreciate a new start, I have learned to brace myself for the inevitable loneliness that accompanies it.

I long to establish roots somewhere.  I have a deep desire to invest and commit in ways that simply don’t happen to the same extent when you know your time somewhere is transitional.

Although part of it is self-protective, it’s mostly because distance requires time to overcome.  Acquaintance leads to knowledge, knowledge to trust, trust to love and appreciation.  These things do not happen overnight.

To know a place and to know its people, patience must reign because walls do not fall away quickly.  To care for a place and its people, the road traveled together must be long and often hard, as affection grows deeper with time.

It might seem strange for me to admit this unsatisfied heart-longing, given that my vocational endeavours have been deeply rooted in community development and urban poverty issues.  True though it may be, my efforts have always been limited to seasons of investment.  Brief moments of time in which to learn and contribute what I can while I can.  Shallow roots pulled out before the harvest.

During the summer I spent in Camden, a friend sent me a card decorated with a single verse: 

Your statutes are my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.  (Psalm 119:54, NASB)

And I started to realize then that God had not promised me familiarity or permanence.  That, even if I spent the rest of my life in one place, I would still long for home.  And as long as I tread this earthly sod, there is only one home where I will never be a stranger.

Beneath the shadow of two well-worn pieces of wood. 

It is finished.

Welcome home.

But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.  They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water.  Such trees are not bothered by the heat or worried by long months of drought.  Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.  (Jeremiah 17:7-8, NLT)

 

Five years

Five years ago today I walked down the aisle of a crowded chapel and promised to love one man for the rest of my life. 

People often say that your wedding day will be a blur, but I was actually very present in every moment of that day.  I remember the look on Parker’s face when they opened the chapel doors and my dad escorted me down the aisle.  I remember the weight of reciting vows we had written with great care.  I remember the sheer fun of our first dance as husband and wife. 

 

I remember how much I loved him.

And yet I love him more today than I did five years ago. 

 No one else has shown me more grace, made me feel more lovely, or known the deepest parts of me and still loved them.

We’ve lived a lot of life in five years, though it seems like it all started just yesterday.  It has been the hardest and best thing I have ever done.

 Written in our wedding program was a verse that has been our prayer for the past 1826 days:

May he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever.  Amen.  (Hebrews 13:21b)

Wherever the road may lead us, let it be so, Lord. 

 

Boston and Savannah have different temperatures in the summertime.

This past weekend my husband and I traveled to Savannah to sweat.  

And to see one of our best friends from college get married.

Because my husband was a groomsman, we participated in a number of activities that allowed us to spend an amazing amount of time with our college friends.  

It’s still hard to believe that we’ve known these people for nine years now.  Somewhere along the way, we became like a family.  At lunch on Sunday, we all instinctively grabbed each other’s hands before we prayed.  We laughed that it was just so natural. 

It really hit me on Friday night at the rehearsal dinner when the groom introduced all of his groomsmen.  As he talked about his relationship with each one of these guys, I found myself so grateful that they were recognized and honored for what they mean to the rest of us.  And then they returned the favor and spoke blessing and honor over the groom for what he means to all of us.  They each did it in their own unique way.  It was priceless.  Lots of laughter, followed by moments where everyone just nodded in profound agreement.  Timely words.  Hilarious and deeply personal.

I sat there listening to each of them, and I thought about how much we’ve all grown since we met as freshmen in college.  And I thought about how much we’d stayed the same.  

It made me grateful to have friends like these in my life.  

Friends that knew you when.  Friends that still know you now.  Friends that know most everything that happened in between. 

It will never be the same as when we spent those four years in Chapel Hill, but the history is always there. 

Sure, they don’t know every detail of our lives right now.  

But they know us.

 

Everyone has a story

When I used to work in a homeless services facility in Atlanta, we would often see men and women whom we had previously served.  They would come back and often be in the same situations – or worse.  Sometimes they had stopped taking medications that helped to stabilize their mental illness.  Sometimes they had relapsed.  Sometimes they just hadn’t been able to stick with a job.   Sometimes their job had been eliminated.

But we had no rules about how many times someone could receive services from us.  We had standards about how many times they could participate in certain programs because, if those services weren’t helping someone to move forward, then obviously it was best for us to connect them to other resources.  But we never turned them away from the doors of our building. 

And let me tell you, there were times when it was incredibly difficult for our staff to exercise that kind of patience.  But we did it, and I do believe that it was a biblical demonstration of the mercy God calls us to exercise in all of our interactions with people.  It is unfortunate that we most often ignore this when approaching those who most need our mercy.

It may sound harsh, but as a society, we are often far more compassionate toward children living in poverty than we are toward adults living in the same conditions.  I know what many would say in response to that statement – that adults have made choices that children did not.  Sometimes that is true, and sometimes it is not. 

Each person – poor, rich, or somewhere in between – has a story.  And we need to be willing to sit down with them and listen to it.  We need to be willing to understand what has brought them to today.  Each person is worthy of our time.  Each person is worthy of dignity and our respect.  Without those things, our self-interested aid is judgment disguised as pity.

There are men and women who are homeless today because of the domino effect of unexpected and untimely circumstances in their lives.  Divorce.  Illness.  Job loss.  Eviction.  A year ago they never imagined they would be soliciting a toothbrush from a staff member behind a counter.  And it could happen to any of us.  

There are men and women who are homeless today because of the crippling effects of untreated mental illness.  Sometimes it is caused by severe addiction.  Sometimes it is caused by trauma in a war zone.  Sometimes it develops as a result of living many years in isolation, huddled under a blanket on a side street while others turn away.  Sometimes paranoia develops when no one can be trusted. 

There are men and women who are living in poverty today because no one ever expected a different future for them.  They didn’t grow up dreaming.  They grew up surviving.  Some of them may have made some unfortunate choices along the way, and now they’ve been labeled.  They are humiliated into explaining why they made those choices, rather than dignified by our expectations of a thriving future for their families.  They are parents who care about their children and want them to have the best education available.  They are single parents who stretched already thin budgets to be a foster parent or even adopt a child because they recognized that he or she needed love more than nice clothes.  They are men who wish more than anything that they could work just one job in order to put food on the table.  They are women who fled abuse and had to start over again with nothing to their names.  

If there’s one thing I learned within the walls of that center in Atlanta, it’s that I’m not the only one who has a story.  It is simply arrogance for me to forget it.  Assumptions are just that.  And my willingness to listen and learn will go much further toward restoring lives – theirs and my own.

“Stop having a measuring rod for other people.  There is always one fact more in every man’s case about which we know nothing.  The first thing God does is to give us a spiritual spring-cleaning; there is no possibility of pride left in a man after that.  I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.”  – Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

 

Write them upon my disordered heart

O God the Holy Spirit,
Thou who dost proceed from the Father and the Son, have mercy on me.  
When thou didst first hover over chaos, order came to birth, beauty robed the world, fruitfulness sprang forth.  
Move, I pray thee, upon my disordered heart; 
Take away the infirmities of unruly desires and hateful lusts;
Lift the mists and darkness of unbelief;
Brighten my soul with the pure light of truth;
Make it fragrant as the garden of paradise, rich with every goodly fruit, beautiful with heavenly grace, radiant with rays of divine light.
Fulfill in me the glory of thy divine offices;
Be my comforter, light, guide, sanctifier.
Take of the things of Christ and show them to my soul;
Through thee may I daily learn more of his love, grace, compassion, faithfulness, beauty;
Lead me to the cross and show me his wounds, the hateful nature of evil, the power of Satan;
May I there see my sins as the nails that transfixed him, the cords that bound him, the thorns that tore him, the sword that pierced him.
Help me to find in his death the reality and immensity of his love.
Open for me the wondrous volumes of truth in his,”It is finished”.
Increase my faith in the clear knowledge of atonement achieved, expiation completed, satisfaction made, guilt done away, my debt paid, my sins forgiven, my person redeemed, my soul saved, hell vanquished, heaven opened, eternity made mine.
O Holy Spirit, deepen in me these saving lessons.  
Write them upon my heart, that my walk be sin-loathing, sin-fleeing, Christ-loving;
And suffer no devil’s device to beguile or deceive me.

(taken from The Valley of Vision)

 

The wrong song

I sing the wrong song lyrics all the time.  I can’t even explain how bad it is.  What makes it worse is that I have this strange habit of developing a perpetual medley of songs in my head that really have no connection to each other.  One note reminds me of a different song, so I start singing it.  Then a word in that song makes me remember another one.  And then my poor husband just stares at me, as if to say, “You are the strangest woman I’ve ever met, and I can’t help but laugh at the stuff coming out of your mouth.”

Because usually I am singing an incorrect phrase or word in at least all of them.

The other night I sang, “Hello, how are you, won’t you tell me your name?” (And I have no explanation for why this was the song that popped into my head.)

Why did I choose to sing “how are you” rather than “I love you?” 

I have no idea.  It just came out of my mouth.

I have a warped mind.

But it occurred to me that, after awhile, if you’re used to singing the wrong words, then you have a hard time remembering whether the ones you’re singing are right or wrong.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter. 

But sometimes it does. 

In an age of continual media bombardment, messages are flying into our ears, minds, and hearts at breakneck speed.  Once we’ve heard them enough times, we begin to repeat them.

Then we begin to believe they are correct.

And we live what we believe.

The poor, deluded fool feeds on ashes.  He trusts something that can’t help him at all.  Yet he cannot bring himself to ask,”Is this idol that I’m holding in my hand a lie?”  (Isaiah 44:20, NLT)

But we must ask ourselves the question.

And we do it by learning to sing the right words.

 

What can we do?

For look, the wicked bend their bows; they set their arrows against the strings to shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart.  When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?  (Psalm 11:2-3)

I think we’ve all been there.  We’ve all wondered how we are supposed to handle circumstances beyond our inherent ability to overcome.

The question is legitimate:  what can we do?

And so the answer comes:

The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord is on his heavenly throne.  He observes the sons of men; his eyes examine them.  (Psalm 11:4)

It’s not exactly what we would expect.  Not exactly an answer that makes the most sense to us. 

And yet it is the answer that forces us to relinquish our tendency to control. 

What are we supposed to do when everything in the enemy’s bag of tricks is being hurled at us?  What are we supposed to do when we are in way over our heads and the waves keep crashing over us? 

Know that the Lord is on His throne.

He has never stepped off of it, even when His own Son experienced torment beyond what we will ever know.

He is on His throne.  He is watching.  And He will act in justice. 

There are times when there is simply nothing we can do. 

That’s why we put our hope in the King.

 

Ride forth in me

O my Savior, help me.
I am so slow to learn, so prone to forget, so weak to climb;
I am in the foothills when I should be on the heights;
I am pained by my graceless heart,
     My prayerless days, my poverty of love, my sloth in the heavenly race,
     My sullied conscience, my wasted hours, my unspent opportunities.
I am blind while light shines around me;
Take the scales from my eyes, grind to dust the evil heart of unbelief.
Make it my chiefest joy to study thee, meditate on thee, gaze on thee,
     Sit like Mary at thy feet, lean like John on thy breast,
     Appeal like Peter to thy love, count like Paul all things rubbish.
Give me increase and progress in grace so that there may be 
     More decision in my character, more vigour in my purposes, 
     More elevation in my life, more fervour in my devotion, More constancy in my zeal.
As I have a position in the world, keep me from making the world my position;
May I never seek in the creature what can be found only in the Creator;
Let not my faith cease from seeking thee until it vanishes into sight. 
Ride forth in me, thou King of kings and Lord of lords,
That I may live victoriously, and in victory attain my end.

(Puritan Prayer, The Valley of Vision)

 

What’s in a name?

Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.  (Psalm 9:10)

The Hebrew word for “know” in this verse indicates perception, understanding, and discernment.  It can even be used for the kind of intimate knowledge spouses have of each other.

Those who know His name.

This isn’t just being able to rattle off a list of God’s names.  It’s understanding them.  It’s recognizing that the names of God reflect His character.  It’s knowing that His name is not just a word but a footprint on your life.

Jehovah-Rapha – He healed you.

El Shaddai – You discovered that He was sufficient when everything else fell away.

Jehovah-Jireh – He was the One who provided for you when there was no other way.

Emmanuel – He was the One who remained with you, even in your loneliest moments.

Redeemer – He has brought forth good from what the enemy intended for evil in your life.

Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you.  (Psalm 9:10)

You know His name.  Trust Him.

 

Stories from just off the streets

If you’ve hung around here for awhile, you might know that I used to work in a homeless services center in Atlanta.  I recently came across some stories I wrote down during the first few months the center was open.  They are really roughly written and were just meant to be my way of recording some interactions that represented the breadth of my daily experiences.  I eventually gave up the process, as each day was filled with too many encounters – both humorous and heartwrenching – to record, but I thought I’d share these in an attempt to provide a window into the peaks and valleys of working there.   

Dennis & Bruce – 8/4/05

I call Dennis and Bruce the dynamic duo.  They are always working together around here while they complete their community service assignments.  They helped me move out of my previous office.  Every day Bruce is wearing a bright red ballcap with a straight brim, sort of like Forrest Gump.  He’s a very skinny and has a moustache.  Dennis always wears glasses and one of those black back braces.  They know they can’t smoke on our property, so they go next door to sit on the back steps of the Municipal Court building.  Those steps are right behind my office window.  Every once in awhile, I will look out the window and see them sitting there.  They wave at me.  It’s good to turn around and see them smiling outside my window.  They call me Miss Rachel.  They help out with anything and everything around here.  The other day Dennis was helping escort clients upstairs to the clinic and the career center.  I told him he was a great conversation partner for the elevator ride.  He said, “Well, people come in here in a funk and you have to have the right attitude to help get them out of that.”

Henry – 8/19/05

I was taking a photographer around the Welcome Center today.  She was taking some pictures of the intake desk and so I stood next to a tall African-American man who was waiting with one of our maintenance cleaning carts.  I apologized that we were in his way and introduced myself.  He said it was no problem.  I thanked him for helping us out here at the Center.  He said we were the ones who helped him out.  “Those drugs are awful.”  I could tell he had some vision problems, but his smile was reflected in his voice.  He said that every morning he wakes up and asks the Lord to give him the strength to make it through this recovery. I told him that God answers those prayers.  He is always faithful to His promises, and He promises that all things are possible through Him.  He said, “I know I must be doing something right because I can sense Satan attacking me every day and trying to get me to give up.”  I said he was right, but that Jesus would help him make it through.  He said thanks for everything we had done for him.  I said it was my pleasure. 

“Mr. Alvers” – 8/29/05

 He stopped me as I was walking up to speak with a gentleman enrolled in our culinary arts training program.  He asked me if the police were going to get the information that we were asking for in the intake process.  I told him that law enforcement had to present us with a warrant before we could give them anyone’s information.  He asked if we had psychologists on staff – not just people with a master’s degree who thought people were stupid.  I told him that we did not have any doctors on staff.  However, we had licensed clinical social workers who knew more than just an average person with a master’s degree.  He asked if they understood “street people.”  I said that they did and that they understood everyone came from a different situation.  He agreed and said that people, like him, who had been on the streets for years were difficult to understand.  I went on to tell him that, at this Center, we looked at people’s individual situation and tried to meet each person right where they were.  I introduced myself and asked his name.  He was hesitant to give it to me, but he did shake my hand.

 Mary  — 8/29/05

I was speaking with David in the lobby, and an elderly black woman was sitting in the chair.  She interrupted us, saying, “You are in the wrong business.  You need to be a model.  You need to quit this job ‘cause you’re wasting your time.  Go to New York and be a model.”  I told her I liked the South too much to leave, but that I was flattered.

[Don't worry about my head ... comments like these were tempered by a woman named Melanie, who promptly informed me one day that she had no idea why I had paired that jacket with those pants.] 

2/13/06

“I’m ready to give up … Either this cold is gonna kill me or the crack will.  The only reason I keep kickin’ is ‘cause of this baby.”

I don’t understand, Lord.  It was just a MARTA token.  That’s all she needed to get down here to the Center.  About 8 or 9 miles stand between the two of us sitting on either side of the phone.  But we are worlds apart.  It was a window of opportunity that may have vanished because we had no way to go get her.  Sometimes the injustice of this world is more than I can take.