I’m seven years old and there’s a note in my jeans pocket, a letter folded into a square. The laundry was left in a heap on the bathroom floor no doubt, but in the sorting and washing, my mother finds the note. She pulls it out, a last minute find before turning on the washing machine. She unfolds the notebook paper, smoothing out creases, deciphering the childish scrawl.
It’s a love letter, of sorts. But not to the boy I like who is a year ahead of me in the third grade. It’s a letter of love to Jesus. Maybe she smiles and tosses it, maybe she keeps it somewhere. I’ve never seen the alleged letter, but I’ve heard there were more than one.
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I am twelve, with a Bible in my lap, the pages open to Exodus. What I am I doing out here on our front porch at 5:30 in the morning? I read stories that are familiar because of church, but unfamiliar because I can’t quite connect what I am seeing with what I am living. How does a group of enslaved people in Egypt a thousand lifetimes ago bear witness on my friendships at school or my fear of tornadoes? I watch the morning mist burn off with the rising sun, the chill of an early spring morning chasing me inside to get ready for school.
I don’t know what I am doing. I only know I am supposed to be doing it.
______
I am sixteen and trying to figure out my life. There’s so much pressure to know what you’re going to do after graduation, to have a life plan, to know so many things that just cannot be known. I am high on a mountain in Central America, shoveling a trench with my peers for the future site of an orphanage. What am I doing here? Later, when I am putting my hard-earned but halting Spanish to work in the open market, I’m freer than I’ve ever felt. Alongside a missionary, I do my best to talk about Jesus and the way everlasting, though my poor execution of the language must be a great hurdle to anyone with ears. I hand out free Spanish New Testaments that are immediately taken to the corner and hawked for a few quetzales. I have never seen poverty until now. Internally, I wonder if I would have done the same to feed my future children. After spending two weeks in the orphanage, I know I would. I pick a purple bloom from a flowering tree and press it in the pages of my Bible. Psalms, of course. I don’t know what you want from me, Lord, but I know that nothing will satisfy me in this life but serving you. You get my whole heart. The whole thing.
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I am twenty and changing my major again. My parents are going to have an opinion on this, I think, as I resign from my social work major and step into my first upper-level English course. Write poetry. Read plays. Discuss novels. Write short stories. Pick a part your peers’ essays. Recite Chaucer but only in Old English. Your writing is too schmaltzy, says a boy with a bit too much self-importance. I sink low in my chair, but in a round table discussion with ten other writing majors, you can’t hide from peer reviews. Back at my apartment, I open my laptop and write all the things I wish I could say in a round table peer review, but I save it in a file labeled “journal” and move along to Francis Burney’s epistolary novel, Evelina. I haven’t read my Bible in weeks. I can barely find the time between British Lit and Christian Doctrine. Do you know how long Augustine’s Confessions is?
Lord, I feel most myself in words, but what about the orphanage? How does mission meet this internal sigh of relief in my soul when I sit with books and words and a blank screen? What was I made for? Third world countries or rooms full of words? I want to walk in your ways but I don’t know what they are.
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I am thirty with a husband and a three-year old. I am in more pain that I thought humanly possible, and it’s been going on for a year. I stopped sleeping months ago. Then came the anxiety, the quick, paralyzing spiral. Am I dying? What if I am just living and this is the only kind of living I get from now on? Then come the questions about life, and truth, and does God even love me. How can love allow such pain? Do I even know who you are?
I open my Bible, wondering if any of it could still be true when the heat of a blue-flamed pain sears the along the axis of my spine. Who are you, Lord? I write in big bold letters at the top of the spiral notebook. I open the Bible I used to love so much and I read. And read. And read, read, read. I write everything down, every last word and detail, desperately searching for the God I used to love to show Himself to me in my pain.
And He does. Oh, comes the deep soul sigh I’ve held in for so many years. There’s no orphanage and no academic towers. There’s just an ordinary woman, a mom, a wife, a life wrapped in a different ministry package than the one I envisioned a half-life ago. I write and I write and I write, words spilling out into piles of notebooks, the pages are smearing with tears, and what am I even doing here with all these truths bursting out of my heart? If I don’t tell someone I might explode. Oh, that my ways be steadfast, Lord. I see you now!
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I’m forty-five and sitting on the couch with a lined journal in my lap, the day’s entry both a visceral download of the dissonant feelings in my heart and a prayer to God to please, please help me untangle my emotions and see my circumstances with wisdom. I want to do what is right, the ink in my pen declares. I want to obey, it says. Why is obedience so hard? The internal wrestling of the day has been largely triggered by the open Bible next to me, the words on the page underlined, highlighted, starred. Don’t just be a hearer of the word, be a doer. In the moment, the conviction is almost too heavy to bear. Whoever knows what the right thing to do is and does not do it, for him it is sin.
For my whole life I have wanted to seek the Lord with my whole heart, but sometimes, the call to obey Him with my whole heart pierces so sharply. Do I even know what wholehearted worship is? Do I even believe He is worth whatever I have to give up to keep His word? But there is blessing in obedience, if only I will say no to me and yes to Him. Lord, help me to walk in your ways.
And He does. He does. The painful absence of worldly loves fades into the background of longings that didn’t need to be satiated. And I know that He is always right.
Wherever I go, there He is. Calling me, wooing me, pulling me in with His words to remind me that He is the one who grabbed me young and He is the one who will carry me old. The letters, the words, the pen, the ink, the notebooks, the typing, the pages and pages of declarations…they were always going to be for Him. For I am always going to be His.
Aleph
Blessed are those whose way is blameless,
who walk in the law of the Lord!
Blessed are those who keep his testimonies,
who seek him with their whole heart,
who also do no wrong,
but walk in his ways!
You have commanded your precepts
to be kept diligently.
Oh that my ways may be steadfast
in keeping your statutes!
Then I shall not be put to shame,
having my eyes fixed on all your commandments.
I will praise you with an upright heart,
when I learn your righteous rules.
I will keep your statutes;
do not utterly forsake me!
Psalm 119:1-8
Author’s note:
This is the first essay in a series of reflections on Psalm 119. Each article bears the title of the stanza of the psalm from which it draws inspiration. This is 1 of 22.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
