Six

What’s Even Better
than a Bucket List

Cruciform self-giving is the distinctive dimension of holiness.

MICHAEL GORMAN

I’d been dangerously anemic for weeks, feeling like I was a wet sheet of paper and the story was falling apart right in the middle, right where things were supposed to get exciting.

Out my bedroom window, the rain’s coming straight down on the farm like an honest pouring. Another doctor’s appointment in an hour to stick a needle into the bluing vein and draw out the lifeblood to see if there’s enough iron in it. No surprise there, really. That my blood would lack the element required to produce steel. I keep praying like a fool that the cross on my wrist—its iron is seeping into me, its strength forming me. Any kind of love that lacks the iron of the cross in it is anemic love.

Keeping ink on the nightstand can be a kind of curative, my intravenous needle to remember the eucharisteo every night and send a bit of the thanks into the blood. And, now to ink a cross on my wrist every morning to re-member the koinonia, to draw cruciform communion from my believing head to my forgetting heart. This cross is a sign of my believing, that I am “called into the koinonia of His Son, Jesus Christ.”¹ I know this. The eucharisteo precedes the miracle, and the miracle is always, always koinonia. But maybe I haven’t been living it long enough yet?

Wash my paling face at the bathroom mirror. The woman in the mirror is a wide-eyed deer caught in the headlights, life running her down, and she’s desperate to know: How can you believe there is enough in you of any value? How do you believe there is enough of you to live given—and be wanted?

The wheat in the fields needed this rain that’s sheeting down like some upstairs plumbing let loose. The sky slides down the windowpane next to the bathroom mirror like something a bit busted.

I need these questions, need answers to fall, to grow something in me strong enough to withstand this broken life. If I want to truly Give It Forward Today, if I want to be the gift, don’t I have to believe there’s enough in me that’s a gift to give forward? Maybe we believe in Jesus; we just don’t always believe in Him working in us.

The cold tap water feels good splashed on my face, running down my neck. It feels strange, even wrong to believe He could find any value in my tarnished brokenness. But didn’t He, somehow? Didn’t He believe it was worth redeeming, renewing, resurrecting, to make all into more than enough, in spite of my brokenness and through it? That cross on the wrist, wasn’t it a sign of Jesus’ believing? Isn’t the cross a sign of Christ believing in us, believing that the busted are to be believed in? Which feels unbelievable.

The slowing rain seems like a bestowing, belief growing.

Lotion massaged slowly into dry and chapped palms. Rubbed into the broken creases across the backs of my hands. There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And somewhere over the mountains, the light thick above the clouds, the rabbi had turned to me, mid-conversation. “Why do you people always say it’s about having a strong belief in God? Who sits with the knowing that God’s belief in you is even stronger than yours in Him?”

I’d put down my Styrofoam cup of black coffee and tried to read the rabbi’s face. He’d leaned forward in his seat and tilted his head so he could look at me directly. “You may believe in God, but never forget—it’s God who believes in you.”

He looked out the window and pointed. “Every morning that the sun rises and you get to rise? That’s God saying He believes in you, that He believes in the story He’s writing through you. He believes in you as a gift the world needs.”

God’s mercies are new every morning—not as an obligation to you, but as an affirmation of you.

Was I living my life like I fully believed that?

I’d nodded slowly, and instinctively reached my thumb over, tracing the faint cross rubbed into my left wrist. Christ is in me—so God can’t help but believe in me!

“A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”² God made the work of Jesus to “bind up the brokenhearted”³ and there is more belovedness in Christ for us than there ever is brokenness in us. When Jesus is gracious to us, why would we be cruel to ourselves? “Weaknesses do not debar us from mercy; rather they incline God to us the more,” seventeenth-century Anglican pastor Richard Sibbes wrote, echoing Psalm 78:39: “He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that does not return.”⁴

I’m the broken . . . and I’m the beloved. Were there more healing words to be heard in the universe? Was there a more soothing balm for all my brokenness?

The moment God stops believing in me, He’d have to stop believing He is enough. How do we believe in Jesus in a way that Jesus believes in us?

I’d sipped down steaming coffee above the clouds that morning, swallowing down a bit of the eternal. And now this morning, the clouds heavy and low and rent with rain, I’m drinking down only that: belief is a rare kind of communion. We in our brokenness believe in God—and God believes in us through our brokenness.

I put the lotion back on the bathroom ledge. The clouds behind me are low to the east, reflected in the mirror. The rain’s a rhythm of steadying grace on the windowpanes and the wheat is drinking it down. Suddenly, my phone rings. Elle Jae calls every morning to check in after running her kids down gravel roads to school. I decide to confess.

“Well—just standing here struggling to believe there’s enough in me to have anything to give. Trying to remember.”

“Hey, listen to this,” Elle Jae says through gulping down her breakfast. “Last night’s conversation at small group was about exactly that.” I hear water running on the line like she’s pouring herself a drink. “When Jesus chose His disciples, He chose imperfect misfits. The broken ones were the ones He believed in, right?”

I run a comb slowly through my hair. “Right.” The end of the eaves reflected in the mirror is this constant drip.

“So you know how when Peter got out of the boat he wanted to be like Jesus, to walk on water, but he saw the waves and he began to sink?” Elle Jae asks. “So listen: who did Peter not believe in?”

I turn toward the rain coming down, wondering.

Himself. I don’t say it aloud, but it’s immediate. I get it. Maybe Peter didn’t doubt Jesus in that sinking moment, the Jesus standing on the waves right in front of him, the Jesus he believed in enough to cry out to save him . . .

“Maybe Peter really doubted that Jesus—believed in him.” And just like that, her wisdom washing over me, she tells me to go and have a marvelous day and hangs up.

I stand there, left with her stunning words thrumming something in me. I’ve been called out and helped up. Can I believe in God, in Jesus, in a way that I know Jesus believes in me? Maybe it isn’t enough to believe in Jesus—maybe I have to believe that Jesus believes enough in me to choose me. If Christ has chosen me, can He not believe in me? Can I believe Jesus believes in me?

And what do I know about living as if He does believe in me? Nothing can possibly separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.⁵ And yet I doubt? Wasn’t that cross on my wrist Jesus’ sign of believing in even me? Jesus calls us to the abundant life because He knows He can empower and fill us with His Spirit. And if He believes in us and what can be given through us, how can I not believe?

I turn to the window. Grab my purse. Raindrops walk down the glass unafraid. Jesus still walks on water. Jesus didn’t just calm one storm—He can calm all our storms. Jesus sings grace in the wind, He pours mercy out like rain, He grows abundance up through the broken cracks of things like wheat, and a bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not snuff out. And He comes as a sign to us, a sign of the cross, a sign God’s reaching for us, believing in us, in love, in redemption, in making all things new, in making us enough because He is. And He comes like light through rain coming down. “Come, follow Me—come, I believe in you—because I’ve come to live in you.”

Along the long back roads into town, the falling rain feels like the kindest anointing of belief.

At the doctor’s office, waiting on a blood test, I pick up the magazine lying on the seat next to me, the pages falling open to some editor’s column.

The fireplace at the end of the waiting room flickers like a smile. The woman in a Mennonite bonnet across from me, she hauls her restless toddler up onto her lap and away from the heat of the fireplace.

“We all have one.” A bucket list. I’m reading this article, still rung by Elle Jae’s pronouncement. According to the article’s author, a bucket list is “a number of experiences or achievements that a person hopes to have or accomplish during their lifetime . . . Whether it is written down or tucked somewhere in the back of our minds just waiting for the right moment to transition over to ink on paper.”⁶

I pause, mildly amused by the ridiculous coincidence. Here I am inking eucharisteo on paper, inking koinonia on my wrist, trying to let a cruciform spirit form in me, to get me to pay attention and be present and to make Christ present. And now a writer is recommending writing down the experiences you could check off to break you out of your boring life and into the abundant, exciting life. Is this what enough looks like?

I finger the corner of the glossy page. The restless toddler’s given way to sleep, splayed and perfect in his mother’s arms. The flame in the fireplace curls against the glass, the rain plunking on the roof like a visitation.

I look up from the magazine. There’s an older woman hunched by the window with a permed and thinning crown of white. She’s shaking a Bic pen in her exquisitely bony hands, trying to get a tiny river of ink to flow. All she needs is enough . . .

And there’s this kid in a too-small, faded yellow T-shirt, dangling upside down from his chair at the end of the row of waiting chairs, hair cascading and his rounding belly button looks for all the world like the one begging you to push it for the answer to joy—and for this one strange, beautiful moment, I’m looking around a room of glorious strangers with hearing aids and walking sticks and plastic costume jewelry and bonnets and belly buttons, and all our lives are woven together, breathing and broken and bound to this wide world and each other.

I’m sitting there in a full waiting room and I want to find this editor/writer and tell him, “Look, the whole lot of us are done with waiting room theology. We are done waiting for some elusive future moment to say life is good enough. We are done waiting for some big enough house, some big enough step up, some big, exciting enough experience to finally think we’ve arrived at the abundance of being and living enough.”

I could feel it, a bit like iron running in the veins: we are done waiting around to be enough, sitting outside of “real life.” We are done with waiting room living. Real life is happening, and it’s happening right now.

What if instead of waiting for good enough things to happen to us, we could be the good thing to happen to someone else who’s waiting? What if we could cure our own waiting room addiction by making room in our life to be the good others are waiting for? What if instead of sitting in life’s waiting room, waiting for a chance for something good enough to happen to check off a bucket list—what if abundant living isn’t about what you can expect from life, but what life can expect from you?

What if the point of everything is simply this: change your life expectations to focus on what life expects from you—and your life changes?

Upside-Down-Kid, his tongue’s hanging out now like he’s panting for something. Lady-Waiting-for-Ink, her glasses on a chain, she’s making these hopeful circles on the back of an envelope across her thin knee. Sleeping Toddler’s cheeks are flushed, his mouth open and breathing a holy warmth, draped across his mama’s strong gardening arms. I want to cup all their glorious faces.

This is what I know right then: the world is brokenhearted and full of suffering, and if you listen to what life needs instead of what you need from it, you could fill the brokenness with your own brokenhearted love—and this will in turn fill you. What if you were not afraid?

Lady-Waiting-for-Ink breaks into a pure light when I lean over and hand her the pen I’ve found in my bag.

Rain’s collecting on the window like grace pouring straight down.

The article stubbornly waxes on. “Although I have had the great fortune to check several items off my bucket list, many still remain: explore Venice by gondola; heli-ski in the Canadian Rockies; climb the hills of Salzburg, Austria; kayak the boundary waters of Minnesota; explore the Colosseum in Rome. As you can see, the list is long and ambitious, and it continues to grow.”

Ambitious? There’s a tin bucket of wheat sitting at the back step that’s pleading with me to die and to grow a hundredfold. If you spend your life striving trying to get more, is that the way you actually end up with less?

Who needs more when He’s already made us enough?

Why grow the list of what I want to have instead of the list of what I can give? Why not let the heart grow big with a love large enough that it breaks your heart and gives bits of you away? Does “real life” only happen when you get to pick some balmy destination and a cheap flight itinerary? Or is “real life” when you choose to be bread to all kinds of hungry? And maybe this is how your soul truly gets fed anyway?

I’ve got to stand up, lean my head against the window, tickle that bare tummy kid, kneel and tell the lady her eyes catch light, and ask where her spirit comes from and what joy has it seen. How does being present to their presence tether and untether me all at the same time? Was that the running dare, not to fly somewhere else to find enough but to be like Elijah’s ravens to bring people bread, to believe you could carry enough, carry Him, carry God? To be His givenness, just five minutes to Give It Forward Today, to be the gift—who doesn’t have five minutes to become a gift? And what if doing that gave you the gift you’d been hungering for yourself?

I run my hand across the glossy magazine page, try to smooth the whole warped thing out. The underbelly of the sky’s scraping low and dark across the horizon, across the tops of trees, torn open. The rain’s driving hard now against the window.

“Where do you want to go?” the editor asks. And I’ve got this overwhelming desire to dig around for another pen and try to clear things up. Ultimately? Exhilaration isn’t in experiences themselves, but in exalting Christ Himself, in expending everything for Christ.

EMPTY, POURED-OUT BUCKETS
ARE ACTUALLY
THE FULLEST BUCKETS.

“What do you want to see—and, most important, with whom? Then just do it! Figure out a way to make it happen, and twenty years from now, you will not be disappointed. As we have the opportunity to check items off the list, not only are we given fantastic stories to share, but we also gain memories that will last a lifetime.”

Is that what the great point of an abundant life is, that we have stories to share? Bragging rights on the seeming abundant life? But it’s like iron in the veins. Before you blink and your one life’s a tendril of smoke, a memory, a vapor, gone, know this: you are where you are for such a time as this—not to make an impression, but to make a difference. We aren’t here to one-up one another, but to help one another up.

You could go ahead and take up that editor and figure out how to make an exotic bucket list happen. And twenty years from now, you might wake with a few more wrinkled folds and that sick gut feeling that you bought a lie. Because more than a time or two, you’d grazed up against this truth: no change in circumstances can change your life like meaning and purpose can. No certain place can give you abundant life like a certain purpose can. Like purpose and meaning and connection can.

I had a philosophy professor who once said that Freud may have thought life was all about pleasure and Adler may have thought life was all about power, but there have been saints who’ve come through fire who can attest: life is about purpose and passion and meaning. At the core of our being, we need both meaning and belonging to believe we are enough to be part of what deeply matters. He believes in me. What if the deeply satisfying life was found in the givenness of sacrifice—to something of significance—through the spirit?

Rain’s falling through the old maple trees lining the street.

Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, says meaning comes when one does something that “points, and is directed to, something, or someone, other than oneself . . . by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love.”⁷ Maybe that’s how you peel back everything that distracts and cheapens and derails a life—transcend this life by giving yourself for someone else.

Experiencing the whole world will not fill your bucket like experiencing giving yourself, and finding the meaning that will fill your soul.

The warming rains come delivering life, and common grace keeps falling regardless.

Every soul wants more than a powerful experience. It wants to experience a powerful connection. More than being in awe, what the soul seeks is intimacy with the Other. More than profoundly astonished, we want to be profoundly attached. Communion, koinonia, is the miracle. More than seeing and experiencing something beautiful, we want to be fully seen and experienced by Someone. More than intimately knowing wonders, we want to know the wonder of being intimately known.

I wonder if this is the language of rain falling over broken places. What if living the abundant life isn’t about having better stories to share but about living a story that lets others live better? What if the goal isn’t to experience more of the world but for more of the world to experience more?

The sky’s drumming on the leaves all down the street.

Isn’t this how God made the cosmos—with givenness at the center and generosity as this broken path to abundance? Look at us all in this waiting room. Look at us all wandering around a spinning planet with these bucket lists, desperate to fill ourselves up with meaning, when meaning comes from emptying ourselves out.

That Hasidic rabbi on that flight headed west, he’d picked up a full water bottle off my tray. “You know how we all want more?” He holds up the full-to-the-top water bottle in front of me. “Look at this. You can’t have more unless you pour out. You can only receive more as you pour yourself out.” And then he’d tipped the water bottle over my empty Styrofoam coffee cup, and I watched the water pour, and I felt upended and it felt about perfect. When you are filled to the brim with the enoughness of Christ, the only way you can possibly have more is to pour yourself out. The only way to more life is by pouring more of yourself out.

I’d looked over at the rabbi with my flickering smile. God believes in me. Christ in me makes me enough. I have more and become more, the more I pour out.

I look around the waiting room, the sky pouring out over all of us, raining down. The abundant life doesn’t have a bucket list as much as it has an empty bucket—the givenness of pouring out.

That cross on my wrist where I used to self-harm, that cross keeps relentlessly suturing me together. And it might heal the world through this broken, vulnerable way:

Have this same attitude in yourselves which was in Christ Jesus . . . who . . . emptied Himself [without renouncing or diminishing His deity, but only temporarily giving up the outward expression of divine equality and His rightful dignity] by assuming the form of a bond-servant . . . He humbled Himself [still further] by becoming obedient [to the Father] to the point of death, even death on a cross.⁸

This is profound mystery: God became emptied of God.

When God pulled on skin, when He rounded small in a womb and a billion cells broke and grew into God-the-flesh, He emptied Himself. His emptying, His kenosis, was a glorious self-renunciation. Jesus, wooed by the interests of others, “emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and [was] made in the likeness of men.” He emptied of His will and offered Himself to His Father’s will alone because this alone is abundance. Jesus’ self-emptying hid His divinity but became the window through which we saw divine majesty.

At the end of the waiting room, a mother cradles her swaddled one to herself and I can hear the swallowing, suckling, the givenness of a woman so a child lives.

We are most fully Christlike when we are most emptying. Most emptying like a cross. Cruciformity is the form of God. Conformity to cruciformity is how we take the form of Christlikeness.

The sky’s rent wide open with sheeting rain, as if the world’s code just got cracked open.

“They seem a bit behind in here today,” the lady with my pen says, nods toward the nurses striding through the doors. “You here to see Dr. Reid too?” she asks in a raspy whisper.

“Just to get my blood tested.” I return her smile, lean forward to lay the magazine on the table between us.

“Checkup.” She slips the lid on the pen, the greying light in her eye as she looks up at me. “Cancer.”

I nod, hoping my eyes speak the ache in my heart.

“You know what? Dr. Reid said the last time I was in here, that in our human bodies, the cells that only benefit themselves are known as cancer.”

It’s like the whole waiting room has gone dead quiet.

“I think about that a lot. ‘The cells that only benefit themselves are known as cancer.’ ” She pats her bag. “Thanks again for the pen, dear.”

I swallow and falter. I can’t hear anything but the ringing of her words.

How had I never known that cancer is the cells that only take for themselves? Cancer is what refuses to die to self.

The waiting room’s heavy with the scent of old perfume, with us dying and trying to live, and I wonder if that isn’t a better way to live than carrying around a bucket to fill up: live for something worth dying for. Let love break into you and mess with you and loosen you up and make you laugh and cry and give and hurt because this is the only way to really live. Bucket list or not, don’t waste a minute of your life on anything less. Don’t waste a minute on anything less than what lasts for all eternity.

I’d once met a preacher man with a PhD who lost his mother when he was only two years old. He was one of five poor kids in Kansas, and she had grabbed her husband’s hand and whispered her last words: “Always keep eternity before them.”

No bucket list. Just five words. Always keep eternity before them. Think of eternity, and live backward from that. Maybe all that ever matters is to live backward from this guaranteed moment in your future:

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Enter, you who are blessed by my Father! . . . I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, I was homeless and you gave me a room, I was shivering and you gave me clothes, I was sick and you stopped to visit, I was in prison and you came to me’ . . .

“Then those ‘goats’ are going to say . . . ‘When did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or homeless or shivering or sick or in prison and didn’t help?’ He will answer them, ‘I’m telling the solemn truth: Whenever you failed to do one of these things to someone who was being overlooked or ignored, that was me—you failed to do it to me.’ ”⁹

Looks like? Jesus won’t be asking to see any bucket lists. Giving a glass of cold water in Jesus’ name may be more fulfilling in the long run than filling your own bucket.

The belly-flashing kid’s jumping on the brown-cushioned chair. The older lady, her red lipstick seeping into fine wrinkled lips, she’s chuckling over the raucous. The gas fireplace blazes on and there’s this strange new burning in my bones. More than any bucket list of merely exploring the world, you could live an empty bucket list of expending all for the world. Where are the people ready to do hard and holy things?

Had I realized it quite like this before? When you fail to care for others, you don’t care for yourself. When you help others live better, it’s your life that gets better.

That’s what I feel in my bones—faith is a glorious death experience. Faith is a glorious death experience: death to the law, death to the flesh, death to the flash of the world.¹⁰ Justification by faith is ultimately a daily co-crucifixion that’s ultimately life-giving.¹¹ The cross drawn on my wrist, it’s drawing me into something, into a holy experience my soul craves.

I’m called.

The nurse calls me. Lay out my arm there on the table. Penned cross there at the willing, surrendered wrist. The nurse draws blood. I can feel the drawing. All the living in this givenness.

It rains the whole way home, heaven poured out over parched wheat.

It’s after dinner that I catch the replays on the news: footage of a tropical storm hitting hard in Haiti. Rain sheeting across a little, lithe Haitian boy running wide-eyed and terrified, desperate for refuge from a storm bearing down.

In the news clip, the shirtless kid grabs a bucket at the corner of a rusting tin shanty and runs with that empty bucket over his head. Carries that empty bucket like a roof.

And I stand up, stand up like I’m struck, a bell rung. And a note flashes up on my phone. A note from Elizabeth, my friend who is waging a flat-out war on cancer.

I’d given Elizabeth a red bucket of brownies the week before. I had given her brownies and a basket of food for a pasta feast—bread, cheese, sauces, pasta and spices, and grapes spilling the platter, because when you’re killing yourself in a full-scale onslaught against stage 4 carcinoma with five kids at home, one with leg braces and a wheelchair and oxygen tanks and the youngest with Down syndrome, maybe someone needs to show up and give you dinner.

You know what I need to do? I need to send you a picture tomorrow with George and his bucket. I read Elizabeth’s message slow. You know the brownies you gave us? They came in a red bucket. Which is now George’s red bucket.

Why does it sometimes feel like everything in the universe is colliding in some kind of supernova of serendipity?

I’ve got to tell you, George absolutely loves how that bucket has a lid and a handle, and he carries everything he finds in it—and then dumps it out. George is five. It’s her little George with Down syndrome who Elizabeth worries won’t remember her.

I am thinking that over all—Elizabeth’s words unfurl across the screen—the joy of the bucket and watching George carry it around, filled with whatever he finds, and then dumping it out? That’s even better than the brownies. And you better believe all seven of us loved the brownies.

I nod, all of her words turning liquid and blurring. I’d given it forward, decided to #BeTheGift, and I can see Elizabeth smiling, her bald head gleaming, and George with his red bucket, like a celestial eruption in her darkness, gathering up just whatever he finds—and finding exactly that more than good enough. And then going around pouring that ordinary glory out. And all I can think, what everything in the universe seems to be saying, is what I text back to her: So it looks like—the bucket is more meaningful emptier than full.

That, she types back. That’s the whole point. Who needs a bucket list? Empty, poured-out buckets are actually the fullest buckets.

Does she know how I’ve just sat in a waiting room and read this article that’s burned me up more than a bit? Does she know my heart’s slamming up against these thin walls and drowning in this strange painful joy?

She’s not finished. You know what? I am not going to die until I have given away everything in my bucket. All the love, all the graces, all the secret happiness stories. Hear me? My bucket is going to be EMPTY.

The meaning of being is givenness. Ask Christ.

The phone buzzes with Elizabeth’s last words that fall like a blessing with the given sky:

Rain down, rain down . . .