What a strange place for such a sweet gift of friendship to be given. Watching the grace filled, articulate, sweet sixteen year old peel away brightly colored paper and pull up precisely placed tissue paper. You offered me the seat to your left and I slid in to watch the array of color pile around the blond I use to tuck in bed at night when I babysat.
I ask about the boy writer gifted with words and you tell me. And you ask about my running and I laugh and tell you the funniness of my ambitions. And your perfectly ringlet curls wrapped in black and strands of grey move with ever head motion as you listen and respond and then hug me goodbye.
And now, here, I read your words about the story telling you are about to embark on. The monomaniacs task of putting ink to paper and tell of the couple that gave up freedom for Jesus in Iran and long to give more. And you tell me about the story you hope to read on the other side of the border and my heart it stops for a moment. As I read the weariness the warring has brought to your heart.
And I don't know exactly what to say back.
I want to grab you flesh to flesh and tell you if I were the story teller it never would have happened this way. I want to tell you that you would celebrate sweet sixteen with both of your daughters instead of only one. I want to tell you that if it had been my plot her beating never would have stopped. I would tell you that she would not have been beaten breathless by words from classmates.
I would tell you that.
But we are not the story teller and more than I want to tell you I would change the story I want you to know each line, each dot and dash is purposeful.
When you and I sat in those chairs near the edge of the circle and we talked about the king. The king who was dying and asked for more years and God gave him more heart beats more breath. Then his son led Israel in more evil then any other king. Didn't we say that we are not good story tellers at that point?
And I think about your story and my story and the difference a year can make and the difference words make in creating our story and The Word who came to flesh so our characters could be apart of the kingdom building plot.
And I tell you these things because my story needs to hear them too.
That there is no condemnation (why?) because the Spirit of life has set you free.
The glory that is coming, the place and time and presence that we are longing to be the right now, here, present it doesn't compare to today's suffering.
And I write that tentative... What weight does a mommas heart hold when she can't hold her baby. Can you imagine a filling bigger than the empty? Can you even imagine that... and can you hold even a partial image of how sweet the days coming will be when you've tasted how bitterly days here can pass. What weight of glory is waiting for the weary that is heavier than what we've carried here? And the despised suffering that brings the desired waiting and longing for the coming glory. And your heart knows this doesn't it?
And your heart it knows this that the God of the whole earth would come and adopt us. How? Through loosing his child to death. Can you soak that in, write it on the parchment of your beating heart. He not only adopts you, renames you
"my delight is in HER"
"sought out"
"a city NOT forsaken."
He would do that for us and then would comfort you from a place of knowing, experiential knowing, what it's like to morn the sleeping of a child.
Would give you hope for your child loss through his own child loss.
Why? So that in all these things we can be more than conquerors; in tribulation, in distress, in persecution, famine, nakedness, danger or sword.
How. How do we more than win? One day when the things that have been conquered come to serve us. When creatures and angels and yes, even death one day serve us, benefit us.
There's this thing I come back to this Isaiah promise "Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save."
So while you work to weave words into a story remember the weaving that is intentionally being done in your story. That in your heart there was this rebellion, the enmity and the author had to put himself in the story to undo our rewriting. And as each person frantically works to leave their mark on the pages of life, desperately trying to not be forgotten. To captivate those reading for centuries to come. We bring brokenness and ruin to the plot.
I want you to know the author is not only the masterful word arrayer he is also the main character and we are thankful because that means he is the one who will resolve the climax of sin and dying with his own brutal betrail. I want to tell you that because this story is all about him and at no point in the story do we fear being written off or forgotten. See the author, my friend get excited, the author is not only the resolution to our plot twisting he is the redeemer who triumphs.
But this thing happens and we get to parts of the story and realize there is reading to be done. And I heard about it, about the weeping John did in Revelations because there was no one in heaven or on earth who was found worthy to read.
But this thing happens and we get to parts of the story and realize there is reading to be done. And I heard about it, about the weeping John did in Revelations because there was no one in heaven or on earth who was found worthy to read.
And you and I don't we weep sometimes in this story because of the words read and words not read and the unworthiness to put eyes to paper.
But then this thing happened and the Author steps up and the angel tells John
"Weep. No. More. because the Lion of the Tribe of Judah has conquered and has been found worth to open the scroll and read from it."
"Weep. No. More. because the Lion of the Tribe of Judah has conquered and has been found worth to open the scroll and read from it."
Worthy to read from it and infinitely sovereign and good in his unfolding of ink to paper in writing it.
