Lies and Surrender

Lies, they float on the dust in this house, settle on me as I sleep and sit and wait for babies to grow. They whisper at me in the mirror about my hair that looks too much like a boys and my body that resembles a hot air balloon. They tell me in the moment when he doesn’t hold my hand or when he is sleeping unable to defend the truth that he does love me and he does think I’m beautiful. They lean in on my shoulder as I wave to my baby being taken to be cared for by someone so that I can rest and let my daughters grow. “Not a good mother,” they say, “can’t even play with your son”, they say, so gently in my ear I don’t even notice. And the dust on the shelves and on my dresser tell me yet more lies that I am lazy, that my husband must feel so burdened by my lack of chore doing. How could he be attracted to me? How could he possibly see the beautiful wife he married with long curled hair and beautifully set makeup on skin that had seen no stress of true heart ache only six years ago. I paint it up now each morning hoping he won’t see the shadows that have set in from weeping, the wrinkles creeping in from being stretched, body and soul. Lies of “you’re ugly, you’re fat, you’re a bad wife, you’re a bad mother. How can you send him away from your sight all day? What if someone hurts him? What if there is an uncle visiting or a friend that just “loves baby boys” and they molest him and damage your son for the rest of his life! That will be on your hands, because of your failure.” These are the accusations I war against and lose against every single day.

But there is a fountain of truth. I found it last night in my closet. Mourning always seems to come in the evening when my baby is asleep and the neighborhood is listening. So I go into the deepest part of my house, hoping the hanging clothes and the shut doors and a rag from the laundry on the floor will muffle my screams. Those screams are where the fountain flows. Truth…. truth that death is awful and hideous and the appropriate response to it is utter whaling and screaming, doubled over on the floor. This is truth that ushers in the truths that dust off the lies that have settled in on me. This is the truth that breathes new life in me. I cannot stand without it. I cannot walk on this frame of aching and crumbling bones that hangs with rotting, foul flesh. This truth of my insufficiency is so present as I lay on the floor, my hips aching, and my ribs sore from babies growing against them, exhausted by tears and a weekend of pre-term labor and worrying over the possibility of born babies with lungs that cannot breath on their own and mouths that cannot yet nurse. My flesh is failing. My body cannot endure what God is calling me to. He must breathe new life in me. Holy Spirit must literally inflate this empty shell and walk me around and move my lips and my hands for the glory of God.

 And when I have no more sound and no more hot tears I can begin to pray with whispers through swollen lips. “help Lord, set me free from the lies of the evil ones”. And He does, and I find the truth that began to welcome all these lies. The truth that I didn’t want Gods will to be done this week. The night that my father died I knelt on the hospital floor and said with my whole heart, “not my will Jesus but yours be done!” and it was done. And now I don’t want that to be. This week I don’t want Gods will to have been done. I want my will. And really, is that so bad? I just want Him to return now! I want the rider and the white horse, clothed in a blood drenched robe. Oh how I long to see that killer of the wicked.  And I cannot even pray to Jesus for this, for only God Himself knows when the final battle will fall and the Son will come in all His glory and put death to final death. So I do pray, “come Lord, come quickly”

 So this is faith. This is where true submission begins. When I have been wrung out and nothing false remains. Only a true and honest cry of a selfish crumpled woman on her closet floor “I want to go home Lord……take us home” ………I have a decision to make. I want to never get up from that floor. I want to be finished with the trials of this life. I want the tears and the pain to be done. …….but more than that, more than I want my dad back, more than I want the sufferings of this world to end, more than how much my heart aches to see the slaying and abuse and utter torture of the innocent cease……. Even more than how much I desperately long for justice for children… for the lonely to be set in families ….. even more than I want for the salvation of my own babies……my hearts desire is that YOU  are King, that YOUR will be done. Because you are GOOD and RIGHTEOUS and WORTHY, WORTHY, WORTHY and You are HOLY HOLY HOLY!!!” I bow to the High King of Heaven. I bow with my body and soul and with all that I love. I lay it out on your alter. Lord burn it up or give it back to me. Have your way, for my true love is Jesus.

 “All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give!”

Real Birth

Who are you my maker who makes me and unmakes me?  You formed me in the womb of my mother ; I came through blood and water. Deliberately you made my heart and now you tare at my flesh, at my soul with joys and burdens and sorrows, lessons. You are yet making me. You are yet forming me as I walk and live and birth my own babies. Is death true birth? Are we yet impotent, underdeveloped babes until the day we die? Is the last breath actually the one just before real birth, the first breath, the breath of true life? The last breath of amniotic fluid filled with urine and dead skin before we die, true birth, and our lungs are wrung clean and opened to breath your air, your breath of life? It must be so. It must be so, for in this world I encounter things that I feel I am truly not meant for. I was not built to endure, to understand others dying, sickness or rape. These things of darkness feel so very foreign like an unborn babe laboring against the inhale and exhale of filthy fluid. My lungs were made for air not refuse. You are not making me new, you’re making me still. You promise to continue until the return of your Son Jesus. Oh how my laboring lungs heave up and down under a heavy load. The air here feels like tar some days, ever aware of my foreign surroundings and I feel I cannot endure it. Lord wring my lungs and finish your work. Let me be born unto your side, unto your endless days where there is no night and where the sea will be no more. I long, I yearn, my lungs heave for heaven. 

But let me wait in joy Lord Jesus. Let me wait in Joy! Give me some tonic for this enduring pain in my heart from loss. Wipe my eyes with some salve so that I can see how you see, so I can see your beloved, your people, the ones you died for. Bind my back with a brace to stand and walk and work for you, and shoes for my feet that are ever finding glass and metal. Lord let them stand on ground where few have walked, in a land of indomitable joy in the face of hideous sorrow and grief. Lord let my lips sing praises over sadness, and if tears yet flow, let them flow in wave upon wave of praise. With a lump in my throat let me cry, “Holy, holy holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come, worthy are you Lord Jesus, worthy worthy worthy is the High King of heaven and earth, who endured all things, who suffered in all of our sufferings, who carried the heaviest load, who shed the most blood from His perfect innocent flesh. Hallelujahs to the King, hallelujah to the one, the I AM, the maker of all things, maker of my heart and perfector  of my soul. He is King, He is Jesus, He is Jesus, He is Jesus.”