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Starving to the Feast

The Strength of Dependence

The most effective pulpits aren’t sturdy wood, they are broken people.

A. J. SWOBODA

A few years ago I spoke—no, I preached—and the message was simple: when I am weak, he is strong. I said, “Weakness is a holy invitation to allow grace to do its work.” And I asked, “What if weakness was a spiritual gift?” but what I was really wondering was, Is it mine? Was my spiritual gift “weakness,” specifically? Could that even be a thing?

I’d felt the cost and knew the worth of weakness because I felt the Spirit of God carry me through. I’d been limping for so long.

I sat in my room at JumpingTandem: The Retreat, legs crisscrossed like a little girl. My friend Deidra Riggs had invited me to come share, and I was scheduled to speak about the Art of Truth Telling the next morning. I was getting ready for sleep when I had this nagging feeling God wanted me to tell a different story, a story from my most tender and raw places—not places I was looking back on fondly with tidy lessons learned, but places I was still struggling through. I stayed up half the night rewriting my entire session, knowing I wouldn’t have time to go over it or practice it or polish it to a high shine, and I hoped it was indeed the Spirit of God and not delirium from the prior weeks of near-constant sickness, sleep deprivation, and lack of oxygen to my brain.

I put in my earbuds so I wouldn’t wake my roommate, turned on worship music, and started to type. I couldn’t help but stop to lift my hands like a fool right there in my bed with my laptop perched on my legs and tears that guaranteed to make me look like a hot mess in the morning flowing down my cheeks.

That night God ministered to my soul more than he might ever minister to the people coming to my session. That moment was just for me. God might disrupt my life, draw me to places of unrelenting weakness, pull from me my most vulnerable and tender parts, and then remind me that poverty of spirit is the birthplace of all grace.

Pain and weakness made me keen and acutely sharpened my senses until I began to see it everywhere. It called out to me and demanded to be heard in a world that can’t recognize God’s goodness through its scars. And maybe in this great equalizer, the place where we all feel a little tender and aching, we begin to see each other more clearly. We’re all marked with ash.

I shared about my experience in the middle of the night in a Facebook update. I wanted to hold place and have a reminder. An altar to return to before I’d done my session, before I could be swayed by results or delivery or performance. Before there was any feedback good or bad. I wrote down how good my God was to me, how merciful and kind and abundantly present he was in those early morning hours. I shared about truth telling and how grace unmakes bitter fruit, but the truth that kept coming back to me that night was that my God is good, even in the weary and worn-out places. Maybe even especially there.

In the morning, I broke a vial of asthma medicine into my nebulizer and watched it wisp like the breath of God into my lungs while I prayed for wide-open spaces and the emptiness to be filled. The past few months had been almost comical in how many health crises I faced. Almost.

In the months prior to and immediately following this encounter with God, I would experience two tooth abscesses (one that almost went to my brain), oral surgery, two extractions, eleven courses of antibiotics, two C. diff infections, influenza, bronchitis, severe complications from asthma, a gazillion nebulizer treatments, two courses of prednisone, eight severe migraines, five immediate care visits, three days in the hospital, four CT scans, two X-rays, a kidney stone, two ER visits, three kidney procedures, and two surgeries. And, if a treacherous body bent on betraying me in every imaginable way wasn’t enough, I also continued to struggle with bipolar disorder, anxiety, PTSD, and have horrible split ends, so #thestruggleisreal.

I thought I’d have to cancel my trip altogether, but even though I was on my second round of steroids and a bunch of other medicine at the time, I felt well enough to travel. I hadn’t factored flying into Denver and the effects the altitude would have on my breathing. I also hadn’t known how bad the pollen would be in Nebraska.

I went to the first session and I immediately had to leave because I couldn’t catch my breath. I stood in the bathroom, coughing, bent over the sink, tears straining against my lids. I used my rescue inhaler and still I couldn’t get my lungs to take breath.

I wondered if I’d even be able to do my session. What happens if I can’t breathe? What happens if I start coughing in the middle and can’t stop? What happens if I cough so hard, I gag and throw up in front of everyone? Don’t ask me how I know that’s a scenario to worry about, but I do. Did I come all this way only to be unable to speak? In my desperation, I prayed, Lord, if you will, even the rocks will cry out. Give me breath to share your glory.

I could hear my friend Dana leading everyone into the presence of God with her gift of worship. A chorus of voices sang, “It’s your breath in our lungs, so we pour out our praise.”1 Even though I couldn’t get out more than a few words at a time, I felt God swoop low and near and gather me. It was my anthem to believe. I took a deep breath.

I stood at the podium shaking, with tears brimming and threatening to burst free, and it wasn’t because I was nervous, although I certainly was. It was because my bones couldn’t contain the fire I felt, the fire from these trials, the heat and scorch of God’s refining embrace. My ashes had purpose. I was unleashed.

Witnessing Creation

I once saw creation. I witnessed an old Chinese woman spill shards of sand, soft and pure as milled sugar, into a furnace pot she called the crucible. The heat would melt any impurities that might have gotten into the sand mixture, for without pure ingredients, glass is unstable and useless—maybe even dangerous from the possibility of it shattering or exploding.

Over two thousand degrees later she dipped her red-hot wand and pulled out a sparkling molten orb. She leaned her head low like she was bowing and brought her lips to the other end of the wand before breathing life into what was once a million broken and fevered parts. The glass obeyed her breath, bubbling and bulging and stretching invisible seams. When it was rounded on the end of her rod, she wielded it like a composer, her tiny frame rolling it this way and that to accompany a silent orchestra. And then she stopped and carried it back to the heat.

She told us that while glass is being blown it often cools to the point where it’s unworkable and rigid before it can be fully shaped. Only this time she opened a small crevice that gaped hot-white with a blazing center like a fiery tomb. She told us this is called the glory hole. This is where the glass is heated again to make it pliable. To make it beautiful. And when she pulled it back out of the fire, her assistant held it while she brought in the heavy iron tools. Sharp-edged scissors and giant tweezers pinched and stabbed and slashed into it in ways that looked random and haphazard. It hung suspended and oozing, stretching like a child’s taffy. But she had a vision I couldn’t yet see. Only she heard the notes to her symphony.

It began to take shape in lean branches like arms, no wings. It began coming to life and it was beautiful. Then she placed it into another furnace to harden, this one set at a high temperature that would gradually cool over time, helping to reduce the chance of it shattering. Glass is an amorphous solid lacking any clearly defined shape, structure, form, or function until it has fully set. Only then will that random alignment of weak and frenzied molecules hold shape and be made strong, able to endure the stresses of the world.

I watched this magic, enchanted by her fiery wand. I was seventeen, and I had only just recently passed through the flames and met God. I had big dreams and long hair that escaped my ponytail and blew free in the trade winds. I breathed in the scent of plumeria and soot, but at the time I only focused on the end product, a beautiful crane in flight with wings stretched as wide as my hope. Still, when I went home to shower, the smell of burnt things lingered in my strands.

It’s so easy to remember only the finished form. I forget that it starts with broken pieces. I forget that heat gathers sweat on the artist’s brow and her face flushes as she plunges the already broken pieces into the flames again and again to make her creation stronger. To make it useful and beautiful. To make it sing. I forget that the master’s tools pierce and bind and rip apart, her wiry biceps cording up as she creates.

I forget creation felt the breath of God in the sand, whispered on bones, blown through and expanding our hollow lungs with new life.

I forgot what it feels like to be created. I didn’t know when my lungs burned as I stood at the podium preaching the truth of all I had endured that God was composing my freedom song, my arms finding their wings. We are truly free when we abandon ourselves to the clarifying grace of Jesus with not one thing added. But I’m not going to lie, sometimes those flames burn everything to the ground and we find ourselves amid the rubble and ash wondering what Jesus could possibly be doing.

I didn’t know my dry and weary bones were kindling for a spirit ablaze with the weight of God’s glory. I spoke the words God told me in the middle of the night, and they breathed life back into me. God held the chambers of my lungs open for the entire hour, and I spoke of the hard and necessary places where God meets us, where God knows us, where God claims us, and I knew then that nothing is lost that is surrendered to him. I just had the blessing of seeing it this time. But I knew before I had spoken a single word that morning that something had changed in me.

My deficiency was the strongest thing about me because God was fully present in my lack. I literally had to call on God just for the breath in my lungs and the words on my lips and the strength to stand. And yet we are promised, “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” And then he says, “They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint” (Isa. 40:29, 31 NIV).

Always We Begin Again

That was the session I met my future editor. After my talk, she asked if I had ever considered writing a book. This book. I said yes, but I didn’t feel ready. I felt the message stirring, and I was putting down words, but I didn’t feel it was time and I was in no rush. I thanked her and took her card for someday.

I didn’t know then that I’d barely make it home without my lungs seizing on the return journey. That I’d find myself in a minivan cruising down the highway with writer friends one minute and suddenly having to veer off into a gas station—which, by the grace of God, was the first we’d passed in hours—to hastily plug in my nebulizer next to the nacho machine because my rescue inhaler wasn’t cutting it. I sat there with the vapor wafting into my lungs while I gasped and wheezed, and my friends weighed whether to call 911. And as the chambers of my lungs started to loosen and open, I remembered the feel of fire in my bones and breath in my lungs. I could’ve died there in some random gas station along a highway outside of Denver, but God had more in store for me. Had I known what, I might’ve lain down next to the racks of Doritos and Funyuns and Slim Jims and asked God to beam me up. No one signs up for this, no one wants a life of enduring. If we knew at the outset, we’d choose another route. But this is why our weakness works in our favor. We have no other way home, just straight down the highway, on the open road, hoping to be able to breathe again. And sometimes God gives us back our breath because we’re not there yet.

I didn’t know that days after I arrived home in Oregon, I would be back in the hospital being prepped for kidney surgery that would include months of other complications and issues. That indeed this was just the beginning. Always we begin again.2

I had tasted the goodness of God, felt the weight of glory, and it helped sustain me. It made the unendurable endurable. Pain is not without purpose. Weakness is not the goal, it is simply the inevitable state of our humanity. But the by-product of having God redeem our weakness instead of removing it is that we are made strong in Christ. There are no work-arounds, there are no shortcuts. Like Paul asking God to remove his thorn and being told God’s grace is sufficient because his power is made perfect in weakness, we too inhabit spaces where we cry for God to take away the problem, the pain, the puncturing thorn in our side, but we don’t realize that might also take away the providence of God to meet and sustain us.

I know I am called to a small and humble ministry of weakness. Really, we all are. I know empty and weary and broken, but more importantly, Jesus does.

What if we started to see weakness not only as something to endure but as our spiritual gift? What if we didn’t fight it so hard? What if we stopped pretending? What if we allowed grace to meet us there and resurrect the broken things? What if we lived as though we actually believe God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness?

We want God’s perfect strength, but we don’t want to live with our constant, gaping need.

Everything in me longs to put my hand to the plow and create glory for God until I’m utterly unable and my resources are bare. But God was never interested in my strength; he’s most pleased with my surrender.

Glory is revealed most clearly in desperation, dependence, and discomfort. The very areas we are prone to numb, to pretty up, to run from or deny.

Weakness is my spiritual gift. In my complete and utter poverty, I give up my illusion of control and my weakness becomes my greatest offering of worship.

When lost and adrift, shipwrecked and abandoning dreams like a sailor bailing water from a leaky vessel, I found myself open to the possibility that I am a whole version of me even when I am broken or weak or sick. Even when I am poor in spirit. Even when I feel I’m drowning, even when Jesus seems to be fast asleep through the storm. Sometimes he calms the seas, but sometimes he lets our ship of treasures go down—every shiny jewel and golden idol we thought had worth plummeting to the sea floor. Sometimes our lifeline doesn’t show up until we’re being shipwrecked. He meets us in the storm. I believe in the goodness of God not because life gets easier or tidier, but because in the midst of weakness I am carried by sustaining grace.

But I didn’t always believe that. It takes practice.

A Lifeline

I first stood in line at the Walmart pharmacy to pick up my tiny orange bottle of pills that were prescribed like a lifeline, a desperate measure I didn’t want to believe I needed. After the tears crashed down, and my doctor reached out and took my hand in his and called me kiddo, I couldn’t shake the sadness.

But the sadness made sense then. We had lost our baby. I was unwell. Who could blame me for my despair? And when it didn’t relent, he scribbled a prescription out on his pad, ripped it off, and handed it to me.

I sat in the parking lot as I fingered the side of the bottle and slipped a tiny white pill up and onto my open palm, placing it on my tongue and gulping it down like bitter wine. I tore at the label, scratching at the sticker with my thumbnail. I didn’t want anyone to know I was taking an antidepressant.

I was embarrassed I wasn’t enough. I was embarrassed I couldn’t fix myself with more faith and more prayer and more hours dragged off the clock and spent in quiet seeking. I was embarrassed on God’s behalf. He had made me wrong.

So I searched for sin in the wreckage, a sign that if only I repented hard enough for my lack, the darkness would rise and lift and his presence would fill the empty places where nerves and neurons had long since stopped being receptive and the deep pull of sadness had taken its place. But no amount of repenting for my weakness, for my inability to hold all the pieces of me together and be a good Christian girl who chose joy and fought off the darkness with some well-memorized Scripture, worked. The anguish inside me grew, but I couldn’t surrender to my weakness for fear that this somehow disqualified me from being used and loved by God.

To Hunger and Thirst

I’ve barely survived depression at times. There are nights so dark they wolf down my days—all fangs and bared teeth under a moon thick as a lemon wedge bobbing in a sky full of sweet tea. But all I taste is the bitter. And even still, I thirst.

My tongue was long trained by Sunday school etiquette and polite society never to cough up unpalatable words like depression or suicide or antidepressant in church company. Instead, “fine” becomes my answer, so I choke down the unsavory words for fear of being the guest who fumbles with the finery and dribbles wine down the front of my shirt. Afraid I would forget my manners in the house of God and rip into the bread with white-knuckled fists like it was life and gulp down the wine like my tongue was on fire.

We’ve become practiced at nibbling tiny, easily digestible bites and taking the daintiest of sips, patting at our lips with crisp white linen, but we all come famished to grace. There is no other way to be filled.

We are all beggars here, some of us just clean up better.

This is holy work. Living in desperate spaces, gathering manna and mystery in the desert.

It is always only enough for today. God keeps me hungry, but I’m learning each day brings nourishment. Those pangs, that soul hunger is meant to point us to the cross. To communion. To the fellowship of suffering. To the gift of resurrection and new life.

It’s as though Jesus knew in the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the wine how ravenous we’d be in this world. And of course he knew. He knew exactly how much we’d need reminding that the brokenness of bodies and the blood spilt have purpose, because some days that’s all we feel.

I longed for Jesus in the wreckage. My need for a Savior was as tangible as my stomach’s groaning and pleading for food day after day, reminding me I am not autonomous from this world. I am not a stereotype or a label, a ghost girl or an apparition. I am embodied.

We are bound by our physical needs. But we are also bound by the needs of our body, and our body is always more than joint and sinew, marrow and muscle. Our body is a hungry church.

If you want to know someone’s story, ask them about their favorite food. Food always tells a story. It is a language unto itself. Ask what their mamas used to make them when their noses were stuffy and they were coming down with something. And if there was no mother to bring soup or hot tea, well that tells its own story of hunger, doesn’t it? Ask what they ate to celebrate. Ask what they would have for their last meal. Ask what they would serve you if you came over for dinner. Ask what was the first thing they learned to cook. Ask how they gather and where. Ask why even when you’re full, sometimes you can still feel so empty. Because we all hunger for something.

We were created to be nourished. Fed. Sated. And yet, we are born hungry. We are born dependent and empty, openmouthed and rooting for our place at our mother’s breast. Even Jesus chose these humble beginnings.

Our bodies are sustained by the table. After all, the Son of Man came eating and drinking. On his last night, he didn’t preach a sermon, he poured wine and broke bread. He said, “Eat of me.” And when he rose again, his hunger followed; he went to the table and ate breakfast with his friends. Even his resurrected body teaches us about how we commune and celebrate and see each other.

But I had no energy to scavenge for sustenance. I needed Jesus to come for me. I needed manna from the heavens.

Live with Wonder

That holy hollow, that treacherous ache now allowed space to be interrupted by grace. The days slowed and became monotonous, a managing of sorrow and symptoms. On the days when my body waged war in every cell, I asked Jesus to show himself faithful and present.

I found him in beauty and wonder. An imagining and hoping in glory. A prophetic mindfulness. The awe of a God so big and majestic, we cannot comprehend it but we contemplate it all the same.

We can almost hear the Master’s symphony. The music so thick we can nearly taste it. The violin swooning in a sultry soprano dripping notes from the strings like drops of honey. The sweet psalm pounding in our bones and rising like a fever. The melody reminding us we’re always being created and will dance to a new song.

I lay in bed one night, the curtains wide open like a theater stage hosting an ensemble of stars. The inky-black midnight was thick with them, like tiny seeds of hope embedded into soil as rich and thick as coffee grounds, and I imagined the way that light navigated wise men across foreign lands seeking a King. The hope for us all.

I am a complete version of me, because no willpower or positive thinking or bootstrap mentality will ever complete what grace has already done. And this is the good news I so often missed during those years when holy wonder seemed a notch above me and continually out of reach.

The space illness has made in my life is painful but cherished. It slowed my soul enough to see beauty in peonies blooming by my bedside even though my nightstand was also covered with prescription bottles.

While I was stuck in traffic on my way to the doctor’s office after months of physical illnesses and surgeries, I marveled at how the blushing sunset melted into the clouds like a swirl of rouge swept across porcelain cheekbones.

A wonder-filled life is grateful attentiveness to the awe in our ordinary.

I confess I am undone by the strum of messy chords on a battered guitar, by a perfect red lipstick, by children’s laughter on the first warm day of spring, by the musty splendor of a dusty old book.

I am gobsmacked by the first bite of a ripe summer peach. I am moved by the sway of limbs and swish of hips when that special song comes on, by the old copper roof caught in the tendrils of tender sunlight, the architecture, and the brick walls embraced by creeping vine on the slow walk home. I am touched by everyday kindness—the casserole bringers, the lady in line who smiles in solidarity and lets me go first when my kid is shrieking. The ones who say, “You can sit here” and scooch over to make room. The ones who text, How are you doing? I’m thinking of you.

We are loved by the people and places and things we love. We are loved by the way we take notice when our souls feel alive, and the way we are reminded to live with wonder when our souls don’t. To make contact with the world, to bear witness to the glory of our everyday ordinary. I unwrap my arms and gather my children, and on days when I couldn’t get out of bed, they came to me and offered their tiny hugs, homemade art, and clumsy prayers. And it was glorious too.

They see the poverty in me, the deep, abiding hunger of a poor soul, the desperation for God, and they know it’s not just about some Bible verses and making good life choices; it’s not about having it together or doing more for God. They know there is a holiness I long for but it’s born in the surrender, in the ever-expanding “Not my will but yours.” It’s born on the ordinary days, when I wonder, Am I strong enough to live the life I’ve been given? and God’s answer to me, when I write down the reminders, is, I am with you always.

Pain breathed into me God’s presence both as Savior and as one who is incarnate, taking on the anguish of this world to bring healing and redemption.

A God who breaks into the brokenness is the only One who could ever understand how desperately I need him.

So on the nights when I fold myself fetal on my couch and my body curls like a question mark, when I find myself famished, when the devourer gobbles up all the light and spits out endless midnight, I remember that honesty is our invitation.

There are so many among us who hurt, and we may never know we’re sitting next to someone barely holding all the pieces together when we gather on a Sunday to sing rickety hymns and hear God’s Word cracked open for us.

I can tell this truth because I’ve learned the ministry of honest words, of weak spaces, of holy dependence and admitting our deep hunger. This is not a litany of complaints, this is a lament of love. And sometimes, when honesty is our invitation, we find that those silent ones, the ones among us we never even knew were hurting, the hungry ones who can no longer hear their Savior’s psalm, they come and knock at our door. We pull out a chair and welcome them to the feast.