Little Ones

I am a big fan of being in control. Just truly a huge fan of planning and coordinating and timing things so they go off perfectly. I literally itch and squirm in discomfort when a well-planned thing doesn’t go well. This characteristic has served many employers well, but I swiftly burn right out.

I am equally annoyed by people who are laid back and who accept that they aren’t in control. Honestly, how dare they be so in touch with reality? Where have they shoved their childhood trauma?

I forgot to bring in a succulent from my deck before a cold spell hit, and I could see its dead remains from my living room window in November. Guilt and disappointment and a bit of anger danced around inside me. I dealt with all that quite brilliantly, in a way I love to do – I avoided it. Well, it is already dead so I will just not look at or think about that for a while.

March and Quarantine came a’courting, and so I found myself on the deck, cleaning up the crime scene, and three little starts from the succulent fell out of a safe little spot between the succulent’s pot, and some others. Three little leaves had tucked themselves into a warm, dry place, and sent out roots and new leaves.

Look at that. It’s like creation doesn’t even rely on me.

I have spent a lot of time uncovering the fact that the control freak in me is the result of a graceless Christianity in which many of us are still suffocating. You too may find yourself a bit uptight had you grown up with the overwhelming burdensome dread that anyone you did not share the Gospel with might go to Hell and so you too might also go to Hell. If Hell was one bad thought or one imperfect reaction away, you too may panic over a tiny mistake (see also: The Puritans). In How to Survive a Shipwreck, Jonathan Martin captures this Pentecostal pressure so wonderfully in a story about his utter breakdown at eight years old over failing to witness to a cable repairman. I laughed and cried at how closely I related. He then writes:

But that was the system I internalized, and that is how I always interpreted anything I thought God might be calling me to do. It wasn’t an invitation, but a threat. I grew up feeling sure God was holding a gun to my head, saying “do this or else.” Everything I did for God, even when I grew older, was still done out of a sense of duty and obligation. … When you are living in constant fear, there is no way you can choose to live out of your depths.

Many of us are desperately trying to live into two opposing truths: 1) God is all-powerful and 2) He depends on us to do everything, or else it all fails. That’s a paradox that breeds anxiety and shame, and there grace cannot root. Worst of all, you tirelessly encounter yourself failing (because to be God is — to all of humanity’s continued bewilderment — impossible) so then more anxiety and shame sprout up. The good seed is choked out.

In the summer of 2017, I was asked to help with a ministry at my church wherein emergency financial assistance is offered to community members in danger of having their utilities disconnected. This was part of a larger job, and in the earliest days, I found myself rattled by the interruptions this task caused to my well-planned days. In an especially exhausting moment, as I stood in a brightly-lit lobby with a person over-explaining their situation while a phone was ringing and things needed to be printed, I felt my temper flare because nothing was under my control and I could not do everything and please everyone. This person in front of me was a distraction from what I needed to do. God spoke up.

(A quick aside: I may attend a United Methodist church now, but I grew up a Pentecostal hillbilly*, and God doesn’t worry too much about talking to us because everyone thinks we are a little nutty anyway.)

So, I tell you with no self-consciousness that God spoke to me, and what he said was this: “Listen to my children. “

Truly I say to you, I had not known what it meant to be rattled before that. Before that moment, I was still living in that paradox, desperately trying to know the formula to please God. Am I supposed to witness now? What do I say now? Why am I even here? I want the gold star. I do not want to mess this up. There are so many ways to mess this up. Why are there so many traps?

Shh. I’m inviting you in to just listen, God told me. Because they are mine.

In Luke’s account of the bleeding woman, I love that Jesus stops and looks for the person who touched him. I love in Matthew when the Canaanite woman argues with Jesus about crumbs and changes his mind. Paul wrote to those quarreling Corinthians, “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.” If Jesus stops and looks and listens and loves, then I will too.

Listen to my children. In my time in that job, the fruit of laying aside my plans and accepting that invitation changed me. I understand much more about the injustice of the systems we’ve built. I understand that even as the president boasts to a Boy Scout camp a few miles away from you, a prophet in plain clothes all but defeated by poverty will wrap their hands around yours and speak right to your soul about what it means to truly trust Jesus. I understand that situation was not irony but the rebellious revolutionary truth of the Gospel — that this strange Jesus is Messiah, even while the culture is on its knees to counterfeits. I understand how alone so many people feel, how alone so many truly are. I understand what it means to shut up and get out of the way. Yes, there was often action to take, but the real holiness was just sitting with someone and listening. The holiness doesn’t depend on us, but boy, does it love for us to accept the dance. I’ve seen the risen Christ, and He’s right there in between two of his children sharing a moment of eternity together.

Because I am still here on earth breathing, I have not been healed of all my control and anxiety issues, but that moment and the ones that followed poured new ways of understanding the endless mystery of grace into my life. Even in that little whisper to me, God was saying what he has said since the beginning of time – these little ones are my beloved.

I dampened some soil and put those little succulent volunteers in a semi-sunny spot where their cells have continued to multiply. I look at them every day, and I listen.

---

*I borrowed “Pentecostal hillbilly” from Jonathan Martin’s book too.

Reminder.