Seven

Love Is a Roof for All
Our Brokenness

Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off . . . is . . . the truest index of our real situation.

C. S. LEWIS

When the Farmer comes in after eleven o’clock from the field, he carries it in on his grimy shirt, a few pounds of dirt. I wonder if he feels the whole gritty world on his shoulders.

He finds me in the rocking chair at the window in lamplight. There’s a book in my lap. He has no words. Before I can find words of my own, before I can say anything, before I see it coming, the tired guy kneels down on the floor. He takes my bare feet in his hands and starts kneading in these slow circles all across my weariness.

Slow circles across the bottom of my foot, pressing away the day with his hand, pressing back what hurts with his earth-lined field hands. He looks up at me. Why do I want to pull back, pull away?

Why is it so hard to receive? Why is it so hard to believe you are believed in? Why can it be easier to pour out than to let yourself be loved? What in the busted world am I afraid of? He gently strokes my tired arches, long slow strokes, then deep, pressuring circles.

And I try to simply breathe. Letting yourself be loved is an act of terrifying vulnerability and surrender. Letting yourself be loved is its own kind of givenness. Letting yourself be loved gives you over to someone’s mercy and leaves you trusting that they will keep loving you, that they will love you the way you want to be loved, that they won’t break your given heart.

I don’t know what to say. I want to distract him from loving me, want to ask him about wheat and moisture and straw, about the corn in the bin and weather forecasts and if there’s more rain coming across the lakes.

He winks, hushes my rising angst with his gentle touch, his hands working out the ache across the soles. A day can utterly exhale under someone’s touch. And to let yourself be loved means breaking down your walls of self-sufficiency and letting yourself need and opening your hands to receive. Letting yourself receive love means trusting you will be loved in your vulnerable need; it means believing you are worthy of being loved. Why can that be so heartbreakingly hard?

Isn’t giving love sometimes—infinitely easier than receiving it? Does chronic soul amnesia make me keep forgetting that if He believes in me, I am enough, because He is? All I feel is I don’t deserve love like this—and I don’t. It’s a gift, and in the pure givenness, there’s pure communion. I yelled at a kid this morning. A son needed a ride into town, and I sighed too loud and said not today. I didn’t read aloud tonight, and a little girl went to bed a bit shattered.

I know he can feel it, without need of words, my regrets knotted right deep into me.

Why are you afraid to be loved?

The Farmer’s kneeling down in front of me with my filthy feet in his work-etched hands. There’s a kind of mutual surrender necessary to communion, this decision made to receive the pouring out that I hadn’t realized before. He cups my bare feet. Everywhere, there can be a willingness to be given. Everywhere, there can be the possibility of a vulnerable communion. Koinonia is always, always the miracle.

He looks like Jesus kneeling down in front of a woman caught in adultery, and it comes like a slow grace, how Jesus handled her critics: He deeply unsettled the comfortable and deeply comforted the unsettled. The woman grabbed by the Pharisees was given what I myself desperately need. Before all the pointing fingers, Jesus looked up at the wounded and rewrote her fate: “You’re guilty, but not condemned. You’re busted up, but believed in. You’re broken, but beloved.”

Whatever you’re caught in, I make you free. Whatever you’re accused of, I hand you pardon. Whatever you’re judged of, I give you release. Whatever binds you, I have broken. All sin and shame and guilt and lack I have made into beauty and abundance.

Who gets over a love like this? In the midst of trials, Jesus guarantees the best trial outcome: you’re guilty, but you get no condemnation. No condemnation for failing everyone, no condemnation for not doing everything, no condemnation for messing up every day. Who gets over a release like this?

You are Mine and I am yours, and all I have is yours and all you have is Mine. I marry you to the mystery of whole perfection, and I carry all your brokenness to divorce you from all despair.

I can feel it along my touched fractures like light getting in: Jesus is not merely useful; He’s ultimately beautiful. When I see Jesus as merely useful, it’s tempting to want to make Him move my world. When I see He’s beautiful, it’s the heart that’s moved, and this begins to change my world. When Jesus is only useful, He’s a gadget or pill to make life better. But when Jesus is seen as truly beautiful, He’s a joy that makes us live better . . . love better.

NO MATTER
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING,
EVERYONE’S ASKING,
“CAN YOU JUST LOVE ME?”

Jesus looks plainly beautiful in this man tonight.

And he’s planting something in me: the grace of a love like this. A grace that will grow, as grace always does.

His hand covers my heel and he lifts my foot. Grace that covers your sins is always grace enough to grow you toward transformation. I reach out, touch his cheek. Grace given . . . grace surrendered to and received. It isn’t a paltry thing, but the most powerful thing—the very power of God, a thing never to be underestimated. Grace doesn’t ever negate transformation—but always initiates it.

The wondrous order of Christianity isn’t “go and sin no more and Jesus won’t condemn you.” The order of Christ and Christianity is “neither do I condemn you—go and sin no more.” This grace reorders everything in His radically gentle way. Just as God didn’t give His commandments and then see if the people were worthy of freedom from captivity, Jesus frees us with His love and then captures our hearts with His new order. It’s the experience of being daily touched by His willingness to save us first that moves us to be daily broken and given ourselves. It’s His beautiful, relentless love that makes our lives relentlessly beautiful, not any striving to measure up or work to follow any commandments.

The Farmer’s faithful hands work along the arch of feet and I can hardly breathe. It feels incomprehensible: God gives grace and acceptance before we break our sin.¹ Because it’s His grace and acceptance that enable you to break sin. You never have to overcome your brokenness to claim God’s love. His love has already overcome your brokenness and claimed you.

A slow understanding is unfurling somewhere between my lungs and rib cage. His declaration of “NO CONDEMNATION” is the seed of all transformation. Habits of self-condemnation can only change when they’re taken to the cross of Jesus, not to the court of judgment. Go to the cross first and hear no condemnation; then go to the mirror and see deep transformation. There is always more grace in Christ than there is guilt in us.

The touch of my husband’s hands on my feet is this tender loosening, a metaphor. There is a grace that’s strong enough to cover the things I wish I hadn’t done, and the good things I wish I had. The heaviest weight of condemnation can come for all those things undone.

His thumb massages around, around, across the ball of my foot. If I could let him love me, I could let Him love me. I could receive His pouring out—even for me.

I want to look him in the eye and say what I’m finding in this slow circuitous way: everyone is always asking only one thing—will you love me?

But I say nothing. And neither does he. We say what we’re always saying without saying a word. We sit in the dark house, in a ring of light from one lamp. Can those who feel unlovable bear to be loved?

He looks up and smiles. I close my eyes, hardly bearing the tenderness.

But isn’t this the way of love? Love bears all things?² “To bear,” stego in the Greek. It literally means a thatch roof. Love is a roof.

Love bears all things like a roof bears the wind and the rain, like a roof that bears the burden of lashing storms, brutal heat. Like a bucket poured right out that could make a roof over your head to absorb storms, that gives itself as a container to carry the burdens of others.

Real love is a roof. Real love makes you into a shelter, real love makes you into a safe place. Real love makes you safe. Stego.

If I can learn to receive, can I become love that breaks itself open, that pours itself out and becomes a roof over another? Stego. No matter what they’re saying, everyone’s asking, “Can you just love me?”

I brave looking down at him. He’s still looking up. Let him pour out. Let yourself receive. Do not be afraid of this kind of communion. Stego—come in and be safe.

He’s cupping my heel, massaging slow, pressing it all back, making a safe shelter over me.

“You must be so tired.” I hardly whisper it, not wanting to be more of a burden for him, wanting to draw my feet away but not wanting to withdraw from him. Let the love come, be vulnerable enough to let the brokenhearted love come, and let it fill your brokenness.

“No . . .” He smiles. “I’m not tired . . . not now.”

The moment of givenness, of pouring out—of becoming a roof—it’s like that.

Weightless.

Come night, he lies with his arms around this softening middle, his breath warming the nape of my neck. And the thought comes like a flash of soundless sheet lightning: anyone can lay down some money to buy flowers, cheap jewelry, a box of chocolates. But that’s not love. Love isn’t about how much money someone’s willing to lay down for you, but about how much life they’re willing to lay down for you. He lies long beside me in the dark. His hand rests across mine, the one with the black cross scrawled across the wrist.

After the tub drained tonight, I had seen these rings. Covenants are beautiful in grittiness. He’d left behind his sacrifice, the dirt he’d worked in the fields.

I’d reached for a rank towel to scrub off the scum. And I’d seen it on the inside of my wrist, the black cross I’d drawn on myself and remember those three words: Make Christ present. Continuously do this in remembrance of Me. Remember Me—re-member the world, re-member yourself in breaking yourself and giving yourself away.

It’s strange how the remembering can happen when you don’t expect it, how scouring off scum can feel like a sacrifice, an offering—a presenting.

The terrycloth moves in circles, around and around. I’ve been here before, and life goes in circles, and I’ll polish it down to the pearl of great price. I’d wondered why in the world we have lives of to-do lists. Here’s to tossing those sorry things, crumpling them, tossing and burning them. The dirt around the tub rubs away and leaves restored clarity: To-do lists can become “to-love” lists.

The ceramic feels ridiculously sacred, like a space to love him. Like all love languages are spoken in the dialect of time. Time to serve, time to touch, time to give.

I’d looked up at the clock. Time is for this. The hands on the clock never stop waving to get my attention, that time and my own hands are for nothing more than love—not schedules or agendas or to-do lists. Continuously make the ever-present Christ present. The hands of every clock never stop signing this: the best use of your hands is always love. The best way to say you love is always time. The best time to love is always now.

Practice brokenness and givenness and a bit of the kingdom is here now.

I’d washed out the tub slow, listening to what this all really is—the touch on the shoulder, the surprise note left in the unexpected, the phone call that comes regularly, the cup of something warm left without interruption. This art of being broken and given, of being the gift—I’d read that apparently it stimulates the longest of cranial nerves from brain stem to abdomen. These gifts of kindness can actually stimulate the vagus nerve that literally warms up the heart.

The gifts of love you give, they literally warm, revive, your heart.

What if . . . you never have to be afraid of needing, of speaking your unspoken brokenness, of feeling like a burden—real love is a roof.

Come in and be warmed by warmed hearts.

Light from the rising moon splashes across the wall, across a framed photo of our wedding day taken up in the barn because it’d rained that day. We had been in need of a roof. I’ve never stopped being in need.

The Farmer, he’d written out a check for the hydro, the vet, the phone, today in this Bic-blue inky scrawl. I saw him sign his name, hunt for a stamp. I didn’t say anything, my arms full of wet laundry for the line, tired jeans, faithful plaids.

After the sun dried them out in the grove of ash trees, after I slung Grandma Nelly’s wicker basket on my hip to go unclip their warmth from the line, I found him dangling on an aluminum ladder at the corner of the house, a tool belt around his middle, working on the eave at the edge of the roof.

“What are you up to now?” It’s the way he wears his work, his dirt, like he’s broken out of the earth, his jeans looking like he’s wrangled for a piece of this sod.

He doesn’t even look down from the ladder. I hear the smile in his words: “Loving you.”

Two words, and he’d stopped my heart: loving you. Every to-do list can be a to-love list.

I stood there looking up at him on top of that ladder and suddenly I didn’t simply want an empty bucket list as much as I want a to-love list for all this. This could be us. The wind could be in our hair like this, the sky wide with hope over us, the trials but stones on the way, and all the stones but steps higher up and deeper into God. We could be filled on the comfort food not of the world but the Word, enclosed in the broken-and-given of a vulnerable communion, and Love Himself would make us into love, pour us out, and make our hearts into a roof for others to absorb their beating storms. Stego . . . we could be a roof—a safe place. Ours could be a vocation of translation, every enemy made an esteemed guest, every face encountered made the face of Christ, all this, all this living, made into the cruciformity of Christ. We could be buckets poured out and crushed into bread to feed the busted and we could be dead to all ladders and never go higher, but only lower, to the lonely, the least, the longing, and the lost. That right there would be our love song.

He looks down the ladder at me, looks down from the edge of the roof. That four-day-old stubble of his carries a grin that speaks what you can only feel where the chambers of the heart meet. Yeah, there are those big-banner, social-media, camera-rolling moments with some imagined soundtrack building to a thundering crescendo, times when we think we’d all pour out our lives, throw ourselves out of a plane, in front of a train, show no restraint and brave the howl of the hurricane to rescue love, to save our love. But real love doesn’t always look like that kind of heroism—that’s more like Hollywood. Real love looks like a sacrificing savior. That’s the holy truth. The real romantics know that stretch marks are beauty marks and that different shaped women fit into the different shapes of men’s souls and that real romance is really sacrifice.

God is love. And because God is love, He gets to define love: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”³

Love is not always agreement with someone, but it is always sacrifice for someone.

Love only has logic, only has meaning, when it takes the form of the cross.

You do something great with your life when you do all the small things with His great love.

That black-inked cross, the one daily written on my wrist, it might cut into me like a tender surgery, break me and remake me, reform me cruciform. It all seemed embarrassingly small, how I ended up daily being the GIFT: complimenting an insecure kid, doing a messy chore, making a tired man’s bed, taping a scrawled love note to a smudged and splattered mirror.

Why hadn’t somebody showed up a long time ago in a three-piece suit to tell me those small acts of intentional love actually trigger the brain’s receptor networks for oxytocin, the soothing hormone of maternal bonding? That little acts of large love actually release dopamine, that hormone associated with positive emotions and a natural high? Why hadn’t anyone told me: bend low in small acts of love, and you get literally “high”?

Real love dares you to the really dangerous: die in the diminutive. Be broken and given in the small, the moments so small no one may applaud at all. Pour out your life in laundry rooms and over toilets and tubs, and pour out life on the back streets, in the back of the room, back behind the big lights. Pour out your life in small moments—because it’s only these moments that add up to the monumental. The only way to live a truly remarkable life is not to get everyone to notice you, but to leave noticeable marks of His love everywhere you go.

Love is so large that it has to live in the holiness of very small moments of sacrifice. Love demands you lie down and die in the small moments, the moments not scripted for screens, but written into the inner hem of a heart that can change how someone breathes.

In the night stillness of our bedroom, his breath is warm and close. His fingers find mine. Our hands lace in the black, the promise we keep making, even in near-sleep. I will let myself be bent into a roof for you, a shelter for you. I will be your roof. I will be your stego—your safe place. I will love you.

It’s this. I lie there thinking how it is all of this. The real romantics are the boring ones—they let another heart bore a hole deep into theirs. The broken way is the beautiful, boring way, the way two lives touch and go deeper into time with each other, one act of sacrificial love after another. The best love could be a broken, boring love—letting your heart be bore into by another heart, one small act of love at a time—the way you touch the small of his back in the middle of the night when he can’t find relief from the fever. The way he saves you a piece of strawberry pie. The way you hold your tongue quiet as a way of holding him. The way you slow and look right into the eyes of a child every time she speaks so they feel seen and known and safe. This is the love we all seek and love is simple and small and complicated and a kind of boring and the largest of all and love is all there is. It comes quiet. Real love is in the really small gestures—the way your hands, your feet, move to speak your heart.

He and I, we fall asleep at the end of a kind of boring day, heel upon arch, swaths of moonlight falling up there across our roof.