Painted Scars

I’m more comfortable in my own skin already.  It surprises me how quickly an entire earth has shifted beneath me, and with it, my heart, desire, my very soul.  I’m learning so much every day, but it isn’t the kind of learning that happens at a conference, in a seminar, during an internship.  It’s the learning that comes from tasting life in it’s purest moments and being able to hear the soundtrack of His voice.  I don’t know how to get a degree in that other than right here where I am.  Every breath I take is no longer in preparation for the next; it is for that very moment.  A gift to me, and a gift to those around me.  Giving and receiving. Being present in a full way. I used to stop and play with my daughter, but it was beneath a heavy cloud of impending rain, dense with moisture and a heavy darkness. Now, I can stoop down and color or play with a free heart, in tune to the smallest details I may have missed before.  Because I’ve shown up to the party.  I’m 100% here, and it feels so good.  In some ways, I feel like I’ve returned from a long journey and I’m finally returning home. In other ways, I feel like I’ve made my first arrival in new territory, and I am truly discovering another world, another way of being in the world.  Abiding. 

There’s an awful lot of places to abide in the world.  It’s easy for us to read the words “abide in my love,” meaning “remain and make a home in My love,” and think we know what that actually means.  But mostly I think we imagine it as staying loved, keeping His love, maintaining our place in His love.  And we’re getting it all wrong.  It means nothing of working harder but working less, not climbing up but bowing down, not running long but resting right, and not searching for enough but having found it.  Make our home in it, move in, unpack, stay a while…in the fact that we are wholly, beautifully, from-the-moment-of-creation, deeply, and entirely loved.  There’s a be-ing required that has no place in all the working to maintain.  We’ve arrived, the journey is over, we are loved.  But won’t we be discovering it for the whole rest of our lives?  Remembering it?  Rediscovering? Being reminded?  Sharing it?  Spreading it?  Relearning?  Sinking it deeper into our skin and our soul?  I suppose that is the journey. This sanctification.

I recently asked my husband if some imperfections on a piece of custom furniture he had built and I was painting should be repaired before being painted.  Kind of like the day I had an obvious, rather large scratch on my left cheek and I wondered if make up would cover it up or if the scratch is all people would see.  Would I be talking and the scratch be louder than my words?  His advice was to go ahead and begin painting, that maybe the imperfections would be covered up and not need any repair.  And so I put the make up over the scratch, and the dark red came right through. The smoothness and blend of my remaining skin under the make up almost seemed to make the scratch more obvious.  With every stroke of the paintbrush, too, the imperfections made themselves louder and new ones crept up on me.  Turns out it all has to heal first. 

Living in today, though, we’re all fresh coats of paint and make up and little operation below the surface of bringing real and abundant life.  We’ve decided sanctification, this process of making holy of the unholy and bringing beauty to our ugliest places is for the birds.  We’ve zoomed by it in exchange for speed and “arrival” in life.  But at a great cost.  None of us have actually arrived.  We walk around, all painted up, feeling pretty but it hurts to look in the mirror. Keeping the pace, brushing it off, climbing higher, maybe this will make it better.  We figure if weaknesses can be outweighed with our strengths, then our sins can be outweighed with our goodness.  We become our own gods.  We need no one, but everyone can see the scratches on our face.  So we apply more and more and more to cover it up.  We don’t bring our real self anywhere.  We have a work self, church self, Wal-Mart self, and home self.  Oh, and singing-in-the-car-and-shower self which is probably the closest to the real self, you will see.  But the self under all the paint with all the imperfections stays put.  When we aren’t here, we can’t abide in the here.  When we don’t abide, it’s plastic fruit.  With plastic fruit, the joke is eventually on us.

So, when we meet here?  When I come to the table and you come to join me, let’s make it home. Let’s bring our whole selves.  Let’s strip the make up, cleanse the wound, and apply the antibiotic cream; then, let’s dim the sound of all our scars. Let’s let His love be loud.  That’s what I’ve been doing or attempting to do; making home.  We’ve been living a high-speed life in and out of the shell of a home with memories on the run, but today, we are filling the home with laughter, love, and memories. We’ve shown up, and we are all here. It’s a gift; it is an invitation.  Every morning, I’m invited to abide, and won’t you join me in this journey of settling in?