In Four Chapters.

My friend Trish and I talk often about how life is... lifey.  A statement to encompass our thoughts and emotions regarding the basics and norms and routines of what is life -- the laundry, the grocery store, the errands, the TV show, the alarm clock, the meal prep.  These "lifey" things need to be done, but somehow we get lost in the Disneyland thought that all appears fun or bliss or delightful, like birds singing out windows while we're happily twirling in skirts with candles glowing and merrily dusting the shelves.

We like things to look forward to.  We like big hurrahs.  We like plans on the calendar, weekends away, and dinner with friends.  We like planes to Europe and hiking in mountains and beaching with 25 friends, 3 times a year. We like Derby hats and Costa Rica surrongs and the pleasure of Starbucks in the afternoon with friends.  These are things that bring us great joy, that spark anticipation in the weeks leading, and cultivate conversations and friendships and memories and flourishing delight. They bring a fullness to our days, our years, our hearts.  Causationaly, when life felt lifey, we'd quickly plan a fun Saturday outing or weekend getaway or day trip to Charleston.  Anything to avoid the "lifey" slump -- to keep our lives fresh, our hearts awake.

Over the past year, I have diligently reflected on this perspective and filtered thoughts between adventure and "lifey-ness."  I've watched people from afar, and listened to those close.  I've stared around Trader Joes as every mother, young and old, fill their grocery cart once again this week, as they did the last.  I see neighbors walk to the mailbox and unload carseats and lug in briefcases today, just as they will tomorrow.  I've sat with mommy friends who play on the floor today, just as they did in January and will still in July.  I've listened to women prepare Bible studies for this week, as they will the next four, and the past twenty four.  I've watched empty carts go into Target and gas tanks into BP this week, just like they did the last, and leave full but only for another week...

Many days, life is... lifey.   A lot of days I find myself peering at this thought and pausing at the motions and being confused and pouty with the notion.  I want sweeping romance!  I want Braveheart epics!  I want African adventure!  I want real-life novels and movies and one-hour snipits of Primetime that appear so... full and fun and frivolous!  I like exciting!  I like the hurrah and drama and the exploration and the creation!  New, afresh, alive, anticipation!  !Voila!

But then God draws me to himself, and to his Word, and redirects my vision, my heart, my focus, and my eyes.  He asks me to slow my dreaming, quiet my comparing, and simply... be faithful.  If there is one thing he has talked to me about this year, it is is:

 "When life is lifey, be faithful."

I spent all of fall in an inductive study of the book of Ruth.  What stared at me each week, was the humble boringness of most of her tasks, the completely unknown of what would become, yet her choice to be faithful in each role.

I like to think of her life like a great two-hour film, with its opening scene of grief, the drama of the dusty road, the role play of relationships coming to Bethlehem, the meeting in the grains and scandelous love scene to follow...  I like the drama, the intererst, the way her entire life is written beautifully in four chapters, and I'm swallowed up in the sea of love and bliss and babies and the sweeping of a grandeur story along the way...

So I ponder.  And I reminisce: if my life were in four chapters, it'd read pretty good.  Cockily, I could line up great tales of camp or teaching, adventures of travel, spotlights in high school, or things done with kids...  I could layer stories like poetry of marriage and friendships and the all that blossoms within.  Then add seasons of drama, crisis, and emotions...  Four Chapters, sure, I got that!  But that's not how life is lived.  Life doesn't gather events like pride on an abbacus or hop only on stepping stones...

So I sit with Ruth.  I re-read. I pause and let it sit, let it sink in.  Let it flesh out like hours and days, not verses and plucked episodes. Most of Chapter One presented long melancholy and probably sad monotony.  Marraige, living with in-laws, getting water from the well, baking bread, feed the men... and time goes on day by day, year by year, more water, more bread, more meals... Three compositions of dying and death, dirt roads and dust.  Feet heavy with sorrow, relationships bequeathed with confusion, and minutes melded with tears.

Then with great fan-fare -- no, actually with a dusty walk for days upon days upon days, comes Chapter Two.  In the months and seasons of harvest and gleaning and threshing, Ruth continues the tasks set before her.  She walks the edges of the field, picking up each kernel of dropped wheat, adding to her meager stack from today, just as she did yesterday, just as she will do tomorrow.  Months past and she beats the wheat on the threshing floor.  All morning she's been at it, and still now this afternoon, callouses still brooding from weeks before.  Day after day of these simple tasks...

Chapter Three brings all of love in one conversation, then waiting to find her fate -- one night rapturing a whole tale with drama on its own...

With Chapter Four comes a wedding and a baby, ignoring the nine months of pregnancy, which is actually about 40 weeks or 280 mornings of nausea or large belly or waiting...  Then mornings waking and hours feeding and dinners setting and baths cleaning... Then a quick conclusion, a summation and wrap-up of the entirety of her life all at once, as if with a bow or ribbon tied on top.  All of Ruth, in four  chapters.

In Ruth's Four Chapters, all the dramas and traumas are actually small stitches woven into one long life of living a lot of small moments, faithfully.  She didn't know she wold live in epic fore-tale of Christ's birth.  She didn't know she would be named amongst the line of Jesus.  She only knew she had to walk the dirty road, thresh the wheat another day, find a squatting hole once more, nurse the baby another dawn....  It wasn't the episodes that made her such a woman of hope, of dignity, of nobility (Proverbs 31).  But it was the faithful choices along the way.

So when life feels lifey, when there are no adventures to be had, no birds out your window.  When the laundry is full another day, and the dishwasher once again calls your name... Learn a lesson from Ruth:

When life is lifey, be faithful.

Audience of One [Two].

I stare at the strollers parked aside the hall:  the B.O.B., Britax, and Urbo lined with the others.  I watch the mom's, critiquing them from haircuts to necklaces, and if their wearing shorts, dresses, or jeans.  I peer at their children, evaluating unkempt hair or cute accessory, matching socks or bulging diaper.  I listen to the words tossed like ping-pong balls between -- from "yes ma'am" and "listen and obey" to "stop that!" and "get in here!"

In my daydreams, I'm groping imaginatively through shelves, peaking around the corner to see what the last mom had -- Melissa & Doug?  Target brand?  The Land of Nod?  Consignment sale? What is best?  What is in?

Then Pinterest blinks unyieldingly; Facebook flashes every child on the screen.  Then there's Baby Wise, Baby Boot Camp, and Bringing Up Bebe.  All the while, women in my circles speak their interest or give their insight...

And inwardly I'm full of checklists and to-dos and notes and brands and feeling the inner me interrogated...

And...

I'm not even pregnant, nor trying...

Yet here I am, collapsing under the self-incriminating and society-inducing pressure.  Babies babies babies.  Kids kids kids.  Brands, styles, colors, cribs....   Words spoken, implied, pressure induced....  Books borrowed, blogs read, and baby names reviewed...  Encroaching, en-reaching, enveloping me all so much I just want to either crawl away into a corner and hide for the next ten years, or pop like an exploding ballon just for fresh air so I can breath.

I find myself sitting and thinking and completely coming undone inside and wishing for God to just open the heavens for help in it all...

And he does.   He reminds me:  That I am made, created, loved, and adored always and for, an Audience of One.  It is he who made me, who created me.  And it is He who one day will make and create a child out of the love of me and Mark.  And it is He who will train and teach me to love that child, to dress that child, to create safe and sacred spaces in our home and life for that child.  It is He who I will, and already have, received approval from, to mother that child.

There are days when I get caught up in trying to be the mother I feel pressure from to be.  Either to be my mom, or Mark's mom, or the suburban Charlotte mom.  To look the part, act the part, have children who fit the part.  But that's not who God has called me to be.  He's called me to be surrendered, so that it is only He who I see.

As mothering takes its root someday in me, I am called to learn and live and walk and breath what God is reminding me...

That I live, I mother, for an Audience of One [Two: Mark].

Audience of One.

What sweater?  What color?  What table?  What desk? 

What earring, what lipstick, what shoe, what's said?

The freshman pressure of college had gotten to our heads...

Emily and I sat on the old, brown tweed sofa, trailered down from Gun Lake and nestled under our wooden loft in the dorm room.  Both of us were frazzled and frustrated -- with ourselves, with this feeling, with the pressure under which we were living.

The cute clothes, the clear skin, the conversations we were hoping to make.  All of it swarmed around us like bees in a hive and we were becoming just one more frantic part of it.  Something needed to change...

We stopped.  We talked.  We challenged.  We changed.  Sitting right there on that couch.  We made a vow to each other, and to God, to live with an Audience of One.  To live in a way that our lives matched the call of our hearts, knowing our heads were the connector of the two.

So on that couch the rule was made:  One outfit.  One outfit per day.  What you put on in the morning, what what you wore that day.  The whole day.  

We knew our heads had turned astray our hearts, and our closet routine had gone all a-rye for the sake gaining the interest of others.  We wanted the guy in chapel to notice our shirt, and the girls in English to notice our skirt, and the athletes at dinner to notice our shoes...  So we stood at the closet... thinking and changing...  minutes wasted: analyzing, staring, wondering... all over which cardigan to wear!  Then there was still the moments in the middle -- anxious all day if we fit in with our hair and makeup and clothes and disposition!

So the vow was set, and the discipline was made: an Audience of One, learned by one outfit a day.

And what relief and joy and wholeness God granted!

No longer was college life consumed with fitting in, but with feeling alive and free and finding who He meant us to be!

This story has found its way into so many conversations, now twelve years later.  I relay it in Small Group, in girl talk, in my own head...  For still today, it's one outfit a day.  What began as discipline became freedom and a foundation in Christ.

What appeared as a war of clothes,
Was a war over my heart.

But God won,
And on that couch he taught me,
To live for an Audience of One.

The Called Life.

I know many who are called to be missionaries.  Some who are hoping to be.  Some who are.  Some who have their mind's set on Asia or Africa, some who have their hearts knocking the neighbor next door...  But today I dwell on the fact that ALL Christians are called to be missionaries.  Here, now.  Not then, not when....

A dear friend of mine, Mike Knight, is an incredible example of this called life.  The first time I met him, he was clear he was heading to Namibia (Africa) and that seminary was his training ground to bring Truth through the lies of heresy.  He's been to Namibia most years, to the same place, same spot since 2002, administering the work of the gospel.  I love this longevity, and clear presence and relationship of his call.  What what I appreciate most, though is during this "meantime" struggle to have his heart there and still be under training here -- is that he has a job at the Boys and Girls Club, providing himself a meager income, but also bringing the hope of Jesus day after day to youth in Charlotte, North Carolina.  In Charlotte, or Namibia, Mike is living a Called Life.

My friend Blair does both.  She has a passion for Muslims, and a call to Malaysia, but currently resides in an apartment in North Carolina.  She and her husband served in Malaysia already, now are in seminary, and then will return.  In this "meantime," I love to watch now they allow the Lord to lead and nurture their hearts for missions and others here --  she speaks with her neighbors, he brings Malaysian pastors to North Carolina, she runs to Walmart for needed friends, and he serves on the missions and mercy boards at church.  Both work to live financially responsibly and grow Jesus-knowing hearts in their two young girls.  Both living surrendered to the Called Life, in places and times, at present, today.

My friend Sheree does the same.  Calling women in the church for coffee or tea, meeting for meals or going for walks.  It seems every woman in the church knows her, but she's a little petite woman with a heart that bursts into your life, and somehow, she is the one who doesn't forget you!  She's called by Jesus to places like Ethiopia, but each day touches another woman's heart with Jesus in Charlotte.  She lives a Called Life through cards and phone calls and texts and tea.

I think of other women and men who I know like this -- Heidi, Bekah & Ryan, JD & Sandy...  Those whose "calling" they live today.  They open their homes, they let God wittle their hearts.  They spend their days and hours with intention, with direction, with conviction.  These are those with the Called Life I see.

And I wonder, what of we?  Do we live as missionaries here, or just for the someday when we "get there"?  Does our work and finances show our sense of responsibility to provide for ourselves, as well as for the ministry of others?  Does our time show our connection to those around us, giving faithfully to their hearts as well as ours, and searching ways to love "the least of these"?   Are we waiting and focused on "someday" rather than living as called by God today?

"Therefore, go and make disciplines of all nations..."