Seventeen

How to Find the Heroes
in a Suffering World

By compassion we make others’ misery our own, and so, by relieving them, we relieve ourselves also.

THOMAS BROWNE

More than anything, you don’t want to feel all alone in your unspoken broken. More than anything, all you’ve ever wanted is someone to hold you and say all your unspoken broken makes no difference—you are still held. The wounds that never heal are always the ones mourned alone. And you can tell yourself you’re ready for God to heal it or use it however He wills, but that doesn’t stop this quiet questioning of what it could mean or how it may feel. But you can go ahead and strap into a plane heading east, leaving the safety and comfort of home, because you’re doing whatever it takes to move higher up and deeper into trusting God, what it takes to be in a different place by your next birthday, and one ten years from now.

Sometimes you don’t know how wounded you are until you step out of your familiar ruts. Until you’ve slowed down, until you press your back up against the steadying strength of an oak tree on a humid Thursday out in some far-flung place and you look up into those tree limbs and realize half that tree is underground, and you can only see the half rooted in the light. That’s when you can feel the wounded parts of you, the underground parts of you, how they’ll do whatever it takes to keep reaching for the light.

How do you break yourself open so you’re a safe place for broken hearts—and find the safe comfort that you long for, because you’ll never be left alone?

A breeze rustles through a stand of oaks at the edge of the field like they already know. I’m standing under the shade in a field in Israel, where God Himself walked this beaten sod because maybe when you’re trying to figure out how to walk the broken way—you go walk a mile or two where Jesus walked. You can see the goats and the sheep coming down the hillside, their fleece clotted with dead grass and fine dirt. The whole lot of them can’t stop bleating, the whole flock oblivious to the howl of humanity.

The old and weathered man who drove us out to this field in the wilderness picks up the rod lying there across the roots of the tree, and says: “A shepherd is only about compassion and comfort.”

I lean in. The sheep and goats linger in the rounding cool of the tree’s limbs. Noonday heat runs in these silent, sticky rivulets down the hollow of my back. All hope of another breeze seems dead under this smother of blazing sun. That inked cross on my wrist is a sweat smudge, bleeding into pores.

“Seven ways, you hear me? You listening?” The bent farmer leans in to show us. “Seven ways a shepherd uses his staff to show his sheep compassion.” He sticks the rod into the ground. Sun slides down its length and it seems to light like a candle. He leans it away from his body, making this V, and he waves for the sheep to come through between his bulk and the leaning rod. He shows us how he lays the rod out to guard the sheep, and then how it can become an extension of his arm.

“No matter what—always compassion, always love, see?” He nods, holding the rod out like a beckoning, like he’s trying to invite us to see. The rod of God only moves to comfort and the ways of God are only compassion.

Wasn’t this it, what I was looking for in the woods, what I couldn’t see for the trees? The way to be a safe place for the brokenhearted is to let your heart always be a place of compassion.

“You’ve heard that a shepherd will break a sheep’s leg if it wanders from the flock?” the man asks us, rod in his hand, rooted tree at his back. “You’ve heard this? Break its leg to keep it from breaking away from the flock?” He shakes his head, disgusted.

It’s been preached from countless pulpits, how supposedly in ancient times, if a sheep kept darting off and getting miserably lost, the shepherd would resort to breaking its legs so it could no longer run off to danger. Then, after the breaking, the shepherd would nurse the broken sheep back to health so it would remain by the shepherd’s side the rest of its limping life.

The air isn’t merely hot out here; it’s suffocating. Like standing at the edge of hell, the enemy himself exhaling sulfurous lies right into your dripping face. But little cups of dappled light have tipped out of the leaves of the tree, spilling across the backs of the sheep drifting in under a hillside oak tree.

“Look.” He points his rod toward the flock slowly congregating. “A shepherd would never, ever break a sheep’s bones. How would that be compassionate? How would that be merciful? Listen—this is what a shepherd does.”

And he explains that a shepherd may put a “brake” on a sheep’s leg—a weight to temporarily stop a stiff-necked sheep from running astray. And once the sheep is close, once the sheep learns its own name, once the sheep learns the voice of the shepherd and the way he calls her—that sheep learns not to be afraid, to never be afraid. She trusts the ways of the shepherd. The sheep turn and wander a path straight up the side of the hill. And something in me opens, like a returning to the fold. All those broken ways that seemed like dead ends? The ways that twisted and felt like betrayals? All the ways I felt abandoned when my sister’s skull was crushed and broken in front of me and the years of emotional neglect and locked psych wards eroded away the only home I’d known, when my parents’ divorce tore the last crumbling brick out and everything left to cling to imploded? When I’d felt the anxiety of Hope inevitably sliding into my same escapist trap there at the window overlooking wheat and forgot for a moment how to breathe, the weight I’d felt that morning I woke on my birthday? When I’d turned around in the woods thinking I knew the “right” way that wasn’t? Hadn’t all of this been forging a kind of better, broken way?

What if all the years, all the wandering and wounded ways, what if it all found fully sufficient grace just there: sometimes what we think may break us is but a brake to save us. Sometimes what we feel weighing us down is the way He draws us closer. Sometimes what we believe is keeping us from more is a way to keep us close enough to know more of who we are: beloved. What feels like too much can give you more of God. And you can always have as much of God as you want. You can always have an abundance of God if that’s what you want. And the things that feel like breaking things can be things that brake you from pulling away from God—things that pull you closer.

Out of nowhere, this exhale of a breeze comes, like an invisible ocean of relief. What do you say when wounds you didn’t know you even had are touched with a compassion you didn’t know existed?

Maybe it’s the compassion of God that uses the unexpected to brake me so the unholy doesn’t break me. What’s slowing me down and braking me could be a gift that’s keeping me from breaking into a bad brokenness.

“Always remember this . . . always compassion, always love.”

The leaves rise. The grey-haired man speaks with this whispered, gravelly kindness, lifts his rod toward the lingering sheep. “There is a Shepherd who let Himself be broken so the sheep don’t ever have to be broken.”

And it’s like one of those cups of light up in the tree’s dappled shade had tipped and the realization is like an ointment for wounds: Jesus’ compassionate, perfect heart never demands the self-mutilation, self-condemnation, or self-emancipation of imperfect hearts. Jesus’ compassion never holds us to a standard of perfection, but always holds us in His arms of grace. I think—for years I’d covertly actually been one of those Baal worshipers who cut themselves until their blood flowed for all the idols that relentlessly demanded more and more.¹ I think—there had been years of mornings of breaking myself on the altars of a thousand merciless idols, a thousand cruel Baals—the Baal of success, of perfection, of Pinterest, of acceptance, validation, affirmation. How many of us don’t even know that we’re striving Baal cutters, performing all the dance steps around some altar of a god of acceptance, so that if we give enough of ourselves, we earn some rain of approval?

I hadn’t known it like this: You know you’ve got an idol to break whenever you feel broken by performance. You know you have a Baal idol that needs to be cut and broken down whenever you want to cut and break yourself down. Whenever you slash and break yourself, you have an idol that needs to be slashed and broken down.

Because isn’t that what every idol ultimately wants: to make you perform like mad and break yourself for it and drive you right into the unforgiving ground? Every idol wants you to be cut and broken open for it.

There is a Shepherd who let Himself be broken so the sheep don’t ever have to be broken. He let His blood run so you can stop running. The sheep and the goats are this stilled ring of quiet around the oak tree in the corner of the field.

That cross inked on my wrist has left a mirror image on my leg. My body being shaped cruciform. All these things inside of me taking shape: the only way to break the idols in your life is to accept what Jesus gives you freely that every other god demands but that you can never achieve. Jesus comes to give you freely through His passion what every other god forces you to try to get through performance.

I trace the little blurred cross on my leg. How can I not ache with a grateful love for a compassion like this? And how could His compassion for me not compel me to give His compassion to the aching?

The sheep and the goats lap from the river running gold in the slanted light and it’s a fresh revelation I’m drinking in: compassion isn’t saccharine sentimentality; it’s key to humanity’s survival. Compassion heals what condemnation never could. I lap it up—what I’m parched for, what the world’s parched for: Jesus is drawn to the broken with a deep compassion. Jesus is drawn to my deep broken with a deep compassion.

Safety is found where the brokenness of two hearts meet. The relief of it runs down into the wounds of me.

The breeze picks up through all the rooted limbs of the leaning oak trees. And it feels a bit divine.

When I return home after a handful of days walking the ways and the fields where Jesus walked, I step in the back door to a load of wet laundry dumped right in front of the back door, a bag of oozing trash ripped apart by a zealous puppy, and a rotting squash leaking all over the bottom of this bowl on the kitchen counter. A swarm of fruit flies circle like tiny vultures and I want to, very nicely, break someone’s neck.

Compassionately, of course.

I don’t feel one dripping iota of compassion for the laundry dumper. I have this undeniable, embarrassing urge to give the garbage-rooting puppy a soccer-sized kick out the back door. And I don’t even try to stifle this raging rant at the kids for the fruit flies.

When I get my hands really flailing, I can see the cross I’ve inked right there on the wrist and I suddenly think how theology is an exercise in futility unless it’s exercised under our roofs, unless it’s exercised with our hands and our feet. How in God’s holy name can I go from knowing fully God’s unspeakable compassion, standing there under an oak tree with a flock of sheep, to having a full-blown raging reaction under my own roof with a mess of my own?

The young oak trees right outside our front window, they grow through summer days, age with these rings of light all around the trunk. How do you accumulate light, age with rings of light around your heart? You wouldn’t guess I cared a flying fig that Spurgeon said, “If you would sum up the whole character of Christ in reference to ourselves, it might be gathered into this one sentence, ‘He was moved with compassion.’ ”²

Moved with compassion?

Does that mean compassion isn’t an occasional stance only when we are moved, but a mark of character, the entire posture of how we can move through our lives? What if the whole revolving earth wasn’t fueled by ambition, but was moved with compassion?

“To be moved with compassion”—that phrase, it’s spoken of in Scripture only in regard to Christ and our Father, and it’s splanchnizomai in the Greek—and it’s what we’d call guts.

When Christ was moved with compassion, it’s like He got kicked in the gut.

When Christ’s people feel compassion like Christ did, and they feel the strike to the stomach—they feel the pain in the deepest places, and they hurt and they bend over and they reach down and they reach out and their lives become cruciform, shaped into the cross of Christ.

Compassion isn’t merely a vague sense—but a feeling so strong that it causes you to bend. It shapes your body, your life, into a response.

Compassion is the radical cross-shaping of a life.

Sometimes I can actually feel that cross on my wrist: live the posture of Christ, stretched out there on a tree. Hands broken wide open to embrace the Christ in everyone, embrace the grace in everything. Hands broken wide open to receive the gifts in everything and give those gifts to everyone.

Everything broken open. Brokenhearted openness. Brokenhearted vulnerability. Brokenhearted intimacy.

Cruciform.

How else can you make Christ’s presence known apart from cruciform compassion? What if the only way to move forward in any situation is to always be moved with compassion?

It’s relatively easy to pontificate on how to live the gospel; it’s infinitely harder to incarnate the gospel in your life. I want to shake my own hard heart awake.

If Jesus felt compassion more than any other feeling, can we learn?

The word means “together,” com, and “to suffer,” pati. Compassion is about co-passion, about co-suffering. You only have compassion where you are willing to co-suffer.

So, some kid had nothing to wear and the clock was cracking its relentless hands across his back and he dumped out the wet laundry from the dryer before its time, because he and his just washed jeans were running out of time. But clearly, the dog and the squash offender have no credible defense.

Exactly. Exactly how many times have I had no credible defense and a Shepherd had compassion on me, co-suffered with me, suffered alone for me?

The two youngest kids, Kai and Shalom, are on their knees in the mudroom picking up the soggy garbage. The tallest kid’s standing there in the kitchen with his hands stuffed in his pockets, telling me he really doesn’t have time to clean up the puddling rot on the counter.

Of course, son—my words drip with sarcasm—there’s got to be someone else whose life isn’t nearly as pressing who can mop up the stench you’ve let puddle across where we prepare the food.

Why is condemnation so quick in our veins and compassion so sluggishly slow? Whenever faith loses its compassion, its co-suffering—it co-hosts demons. I could weep. Scraping the squash gunk that has dried on the stove and I know I’m muttering it too loud: “Everybody’s got time to change the world, but no one’s got time to help Mom clean up the kitchen.”³

I turn, look steadily into the eyes of my boy. And louder than the fury in my head is the bleating of those sheep when they came down that hillside. “He was moved with compassion.”⁴

Suddenly, the six-foot-one boy looks small to me, broken to me. People don’t have to be good to deserve our compassion; it’s our compassion that serves good to all people.

I rinse out the stinking cloth over the sink. Why do I keep forgetting? Life isn’t overwhelming when you simply understand how to serve in this minute.

Why in the blazes is compassion-that-serves so bloody hard? Why is dying so hard?

It’s one thing to have enough compassion when you’re standing in an oak tree’s island of shaded stillness watching the quietness of sheep, listening to the fractures of your heart re-member itself—it’s another thing to incarnate it. Anyone can have enough compassion to write a check for the needy, but who has compassion for the kid who makes life hard?

Compassion can feel like the right thing when it involves a donation. But when there’s been a violation of your rights? Compassion can feel like degradation.

No one has to holler it too loud to me—sometimes the Spirit speaks the clearest in the quiet. He’s a wind and I’m a bell, rung with conviction. Everyone wants to change the world, but who wants to change the laundry over? Everyone’s passionate about changing the world, but who’s changing themselves to find compassion in their own world?

God help me. Literally. God. Help. Me.

When all else fails, those three words never fail. God. Help. Me. The song of the poor in spirit. He breaks in before I get to the refrain. He comes.

Only communion in the presence of the God of compassion can make anyone compassionate.

“You want me to light some candles, Mama?” Hope’s standing there in the mess. The long lit candle she’s got in her hand, it looks like a staff. She lights the candle at the sink. She looks like she’s come looking for me.

Why do we want to be publicly known in far-flung places for our great compassion instead of knowing a great compassion in the places we live? You can find yourself under your own roof, looking at your own people, and your own mess of unspoken broken, and there it is like a light:

There’s more abundance
in daily giving your presence to one
than daily diligence for the furtherance of hundreds.

It is more like Christ to go after the one than to go after the applause of the ninety-nine. There is more compassion in the giving of yourself in hidden, dying ways to the unworthy than there is in giving expensive things in noticed ways to the applauding.

The dishcloth’s like a hot pleading in my hand, scrubbing down the front of the stove. C’mon, heart—come break yourself and give yourself and die to self, one thousand little deaths, and co-suffer: com-passion.

Compassion isn’t a trite feeling of the heart as much as it’s a willing breaking open of the heart; com-passion isn’t easy, because co-suffering isn’t easy. And compassion is always dying to bits of you because there is no other way for there to be resurrection.

EVIL CAN BE THE CAUSE
OF ALL KINDS OF SUFFERING,
BUT ALL SUFFERING
DOES NOT HAVE TO BE EVIL.

Was that it—compassion asks you to suffer with fools? Compassion asks you to suffer with the foolishness of impossible systems and unfair oppression, suffer with the foolishness of miserable policies and a myriad of complicated people. Hadn’t a Shepherd suffered with my foolishness—for my foolishness? Maybe if your faith doesn’t co-suffer with people, it isn’t faith; it’s cowardice.

I should have seen that, standing there under that stretched-out oak tree, watching the sheep, and thinking of a broken Shepherd: compassion will always hurt. Compassion is a crawling in under the skin of someone else and connecting to their heart like it’s yours. Your heart breaks into theirs and your way is bound to theirs and don’t tell me that’s not profoundly terrifying. But it’s profoundly purifying and sanctifying and God-glorifying and soul-unifying—and ultimately, life-satisfying. It’s precisely through this communion of compassion that a soul finds the connectedness it seeks. Yes, it will hurt, but it will heal. Yes, you must grow weak enough to love the world, and yet strong enough to let Christ carry your cross and all the willing world’s or you will be crushed by all of it. And yes, compassion says there will only be abundance for me when there is abundance for you, so I will be bread broken and given to you so we both can taste the communion of abundance.

I’m standing there scrubbing down the front of the stove, tasting the holy burn of an epiphany, there in the back of my throat, when my phone vibrates. Malakai grabs it, hands it to me.

It’s blinking up and bleeding right there across the screen: “It’s in the bones. Tamara’s cancer—it’s now in her bones.”

I lean against the counter. Where’s a busted staff to lean on when you need it? Where in the name of a good God is the Shepherd?

“It’s Mrs. Kindsley . . .” The words sort of fall out of a crack in my heart.

“Her cancer’s back?” Malakai leans in to read my eyes.

There are voids of light in the canopy of leaves out in that young oak tree by the road, shafts of light where leaves left too soon. I hold my reeking cloth, stopped. By God, why can’t we get all this monstrous cancer to stop?

First, her breast. Then her lymph nodes, then her lungs. Now it’s in her bones. First Elizabeth. Then Kara. Now Tamara. Tamara’s forty-four. With two little kids at home and their dad long gone. It’s staggering how quick the mess in the kitchen and one soggy squash can evaporate into insignificance in the grand cosmic scheme of things.

“Mama?” Shalom steps over strewn garbage to throw her arms around me. She presses into me like she’s holding on for dear life. Her whole little life she’s played on the front lawn of the chapel after Sunday service with Tamara’s kids. She looks up at me. Her hair’s falling into her face and I brush it back so I can see her eyes. And she whispers it to me like all of earth could quake heaven with that one word:

“Why?”

Why? Why has Mrs. Kindsley’s cancer spread to her begging bones, why does she have to tell her Caleb and Emma that the chemo is not working at eating up the monstrous cancer? Why do two little kids have to go to bed wondering what will happen if their mama dies?

And I look right into her and nod slow. Oh, child. I know that howl of why. “Relent, Lord! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.”⁵ Have compassion on us who are but dust, who are weary and desperate to pry open the door in the universe and find You taking all our wrong and making it right.

The broken way begins with this lost art of lament and until we authentically lament to God, we’ll never feel authentically loved by God.

Lament’s not a meaningless rage, but a rage that finds meaning in His outrageous love. Lament is an outrage . . . that still trusts in God’s good outcome. Lament’s this articulation of the ache at God’s abandonment, then an acquiescence to His ache, and finally an abandonment to His will. Go ahead, child. Lament carries brokenness in its hands straight into the heart of God and asks for His arms. In the midst of suffering, no one needs clarifying arguments as much as they need to feel arms close. So He gives an experience of Himself instead of mere explanations, because He knows explanations can be cold comfort and His arms are warm.

What warms us is the wounded, weeping God who doesn’t write any answers in stars but writes His ardent love for us with His wounds. Right into our wounds.

“Maybe the love gets in easier right where the heart’s broke open?”

Malakai drops the garbage bag, leans into Shalom, and whispers, “You want to know why, Shalom?”

Shalom turns to him, her eyes glistening liquid, and he puts his arm around her shoulder. “This is what I think.” He pulls Shalom closer to him, leans his forehead into hers, says it slow: “This is how I always think about it: pain is like a pack of wolves attacking sheep, and it’s pain that always brings out the heroes.”

I smile—I never knew this moved in the boy. I reach out, touch his cheek. He buries himself in my shoulder. Hard things can bring out good things. We don’t have to be afraid. There’s a Shepherd whose compassion, whose co-suffering, works in us to make even the broken into co-heroes with Him. I hold my kids tight in a mess of garbage and who knows what to say in the face of wolves in the woods and nightmares lurking? Do you tell them we don’t need answers to why God allows evil as much as how to hold on to the goodness of God amidst unanswered questions? Do you say evil and suffering do not need to be explained as much as to be absorbed? Love is a roof. The focus of God’s people is not to create explanations for suffering, but to create communities around suffering, co-suffering communities to absorb suffering and see it transform into cruciform grace. This will cost us. This will remake us into the image of Christ.

Do you tell them how it’s taking decades of wrestling with God to know this: evil can be the cause of all kinds of suffering, but all suffering does not have to be evil?

They say our universe is made of atoms, but it is made of suffering. Because it is made of love. I want to tell them this: the world was made out of love and it was made for love, which means the world is the essence of vulnerability and fragility and suffering.

I want to sear them with this, brand myself with this, the woman with chronic soul amnesia, who tries to divorce suffering at every turn, who tries to escape it at first sight. Why do I want to escape love? Evil can be the cause of all kinds of suffering, but all suffering does not have to be evil. To love is to suffer. Instead of flexing His muscle, He surrendered His muscle to the nail. Instead of leveraging His position, He leveraged Himself out on a cross. He made sacrifice His default position. Instead of stonewalling people with His authoritative power, He laid down His authority, lay down in a tomb, lay in a suffering death till the stone was rolled away. The broken way made this cosmos, proving that the greatest power in the universe is the suffering of a brokenhearted love. The greatest power in the universe is the power of the broken way.

For crying out loud, woman. Take that broken way.

Do I whisper it in their ears, right now? Ultimately evil is simply a turning away from good; evil is ultimately turning away from God.

And by God, the evil is in us, in me. One mess in my kitchen can swing this head right around and away from the Shepherd and the faces of these kids. I don’t want to waste it like this, pointing at evil and breaking my gaze from Him. How easily I can become a sliver of the evil instead of a gift.

Evil is always a function of distractions, a turning away from God. Make the ever-present Christ present . . . by being present.

Evil is to experience suffering without meaning, without God. Perhaps the “problem of evil” is more importantly a problem of not seeing meaning, a problem of not seeing God. Hopelessness is what flings one into the presence of evil.

In the trees outside the window, time’s swallowing the light. A breeze breaks through the reaching branches with a defiant rumor of eternity.

This is a whisper that could break the chains around a thousand reaching hands: evil is only that which breaks us away from God. But evil is broken when you don’t let brokenness break you away from God.

The light out in the oak trees and that lone maple, it’s breaking up all the shadows. Leaves cling to the limbs. There are leaves that look entwined—like one.

The answer to the problem of evil is everything that lets us keep loving God—even in the face of evil.

“Mama—” Kai’s voice feels more like an answer than a question. How had I never seen that there are a thousand, countless answers to the problem of evil, countless graces that keep us loving God? “Mama, what’s going to happen now for Mrs. Kindsley?” His eyes are large, searching mine. He’s in the same Sunday school class as Tamara’s daughter. He’s seen the ravages of chemo, the stinging ooze of the mouth sores, the hell of the pain. He’s looking for some steadying staff. The candle Hope lit by the sink, its flame is burning straight and sure.

“For the LORD has comforted his people and will have compassion on his afflicted.”⁶

“Look—” I lay my hand on Kai’s neck, pull him in nearer. He’s warm with the light moving through the trees, through the window, across the floor. “What’s going to happen now for Mrs. Kindsley? Exactly what you said.”

There will be heroes. There will be heroes who keep their eyes on the Shepherd, who let the Shepherd and His compassion live in them. That’s how He makes real heroes. It’s Jesus who fills us up with this light of compassion, with the compassion He’s shown us, and we can become heroes, co-sufferers. The heroes are the ones who carry their broken cups of light into the world to leak His healing light. We will bring her His grace, a listening ear, a meal, an invitation to our table, a bunch of wildflowers; we will give her the gift of presence. We will make Christ present, we will be the GIFT, and we will give her cup upon cup of light.

When you give your broken heart as a cup of His light, all the broken fills with His light.

The candle at the sink flickers, cupping flame, and I want to finally embrace what I keep forgetting: it’s when we truly pay attention to people that we get to co-suffer with people. Paying attention is one of the purest forms of compassion. Had that Shepherd’s eyes ever left attending to His own?

It’s only the suffering that is not shared that leads to a singular kind of insanity.

Suffering need not be a barrier to communion. In fact, it can be a door into its warming light.

Kai laces his fingers through mine, squeezes tight—and I pull him close, kiss his forehead, press my plea into his.

The question of evil does not need a solution as much as it needs compassion. Because compassion is the solution. Suffering is not a problem that needs a solution as much as it’s an experience that needs compassion.

Because the universe rings with just this one song: “Even if a mother might not have compassion on her son, I will never forget you, I will leave the ninety-nine for you, I will suffer for you. Though you feel helplessly lost, impossibly wounded, hopelessly despairing, I will always be moved with compassion for you.

“My name is Compassion⁷ and I will not break you, but I will break Myself for you. I am the compassionate Shepherd calling a thousand heroes to carry the light of My compassion to the broken. I will come across a thousand fields with an army of brokenhearted light-bearers for you. And you are never safer than when you feel Me redeeming your unspoken broken.

“And if you forget this? I will never forget and I will never forget you and this is what My unstoppable compassion does: Behold, I have engraved you, you, on the palms of My hands.”⁸

There is nothing to fear in the wilderness of suffering—it is the land where God woos. The crush of crisis is but a passage into communion with Christ.

I reach out to pick up a torn envelope from the dog’s mess of garbage strewn across the floor. My name’s written across it. Shalom whispers: “Look—your hand in the light right there like that. It looks like it’s a cup of light.”

The child’s grinning like we’ve all been found.

When I wake the next morning, I read it in that Old Book, right there in Isaiah: “. . . still others will write on their hand, ‘The Lord’s.’ ”⁹ And I turn over my hand in sunlight. That fading inked cross there on my wrist. Marked. One of His. To feel His compassion and to carry His compassion, to co-suffer.

My name on His hand. His name on mine. I am His and He is mine.

Is that what I’m doing with this ridiculous experiment of penning a cross on my wrist? With just those two cross strokes, it’s like I am writing my way and my name and my identity: Enough. There is enough. Abundantly enough.

I am enough, because I have enough of Him and He is always enough, and that is enough for anything. I am signing my name and my identity and being signed by the Cross One, the Risen One. I am shaping my life and letting my life be shaped, writing it down into me so it literally forms me: a passionate life is a sacrificial life. A life that wants to embrace Christ is a life that must embrace suffering. A life of giving is ultimately the most life-giving. And every single time I sign that cross on my wrist, I’m guaranteeing I can always find my sign from God, pointing the way forward—given. Broken and given into communion with Him and a thousand ways to reach right out and give it forward into the broken community of the world.

A signed and sealed sign that there isn’t anything I can possibly do to make Him love me more. And in everything I am loved more than I can possibly imagine.

It’s strange how an open hand cupping light looks like it’s rooted to the sky.