a modified kiss

in The Ragamuffin Gospel, brennan manning relates an excerpt from the book Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer, M.D. it reads:

“i stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. a tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. she will be thus from now on. the surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; i promise you that. nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, i had to cut the little nerve.
“her young husband is in the room. he stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. who are they, i ask myself, he and this wry mouth i have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? the woman speaks.
“will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“yes,” i say, “it will. it is because the nerve was cut.”
she nods and is silent. but the young man smiles.
“i like it,” he says, “it is kind of cute.”
“all at once i know who he is. i understand and i lower my gaze. one is not bold in an encounter with a god. unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and i am so close i can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”

the garden of eden should have been enough for us. we should have been content to walk with God in the unblemished beauty of His creation. looking at the world around me, i can’t help but curse eve for damning us to this mess. but i know, had i been in the position to make the choice to eat or forego, i would have eaten. the grass is always greener on the other side, right? the mystery of the unknown, the tantalizing idea of a betterment of our situation just around the bend, is enough to tempt us all. in the garden before the fall, God’s grace was in it’s most simple form: He communed with adam and eve and there was no evil. once eve made that fateful decision, God had to execute His contention plan. i don’t mean to say that God was caught by surprise by eve’s choice by mentioning a contention plan; God knew exactly what would happen. i simply mean that God knew all along that our decision would lose us our ability to commune with Him directly, and that He wanted to save us from ourselves.

when God was planning history, he knew we would deny grace, so he had to figure out another way to offer it. just as the man in the story had to modify his kiss to accommodate the ruined face of his wife, so God had to modify the kiss of grace to accommodate the ruin of humanity. He did this by offering up His only Son, who lived a perfect life, to become sin. when Jesus was agonizing on the cross He knew all of the awful things that i would do with my life. He died anyway, in order to offer me a chance to serve Him with my life on earth and to live with Him and His father for all eternity.

“for while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. for one will scarcely die for a righteous person-though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die-but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. for if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.”
-Romans 5:6-10

infatuation

i have recently realized something about the way i experience relationships with the opposite sex, specifically when i begin to develop feelings for someone in a romantic sense. in the period of time known as the “crush” stage, i experience butterflies waiting for the next time i get to see or talk to that person; i spend copious amounts of time trying to figure out how a certain word or look makes us soul mates; anytime he shows the least sign of pursuit i experience extreme giddiness that, in a girl my age, is positively embarrassing. don’t even get me started at the opposite end of the spectrum: when a guy that i have been imagining a relationship with shows disinterest my heart sinks into my stomach, i am prone to tears, i seek comfort from my friends, etc., etc. after this realization about the heights of happiness and depths of despair i endure in such a superficial situation, i am left asking myself several questions:

first of all, shouldn’t i feel all of the emotions of infatuation i feel for someone that isn’t even pursuing me for a God that has pursued me since before time began?

secondly, when i find myself stuck in sin, should i not feel as torn up over that as i do over the disappointment of an absence of reciprocated interest in a man that it was plainly not God’s will that i be with?

these are very relevant issues for me right now, and i am currently undergoing a lot of introspection to figure out what the answers to these questions could mean in my life. i’ll try and keep you posted as i try to figure it all out…

simple love

i held a newborn baby today. my emotions poured over as i was confronted with the perfect grace of God while staring in wonder at its perfectly formed ears. i felt the wind caress my face and the sun warm my skin while resting outside, feeling the beauty of the day with the full power of all of my senses. i stared at a tiny flower on a weed growing in my backyard, in awe of its intricacies; that God would take the time to detail a weed so carefully…i was content to eat and drink nothing besides the word of God. i was quiet and still. i felt joy, peace, and contentment flowing through my consciousness as i laughed, childlike in the absence of complexity to my emotions. i lived for others and forgot about myself. i felt my personal plans for my life begin to shift to align with God’s plans for my life. my pleasures were simple and cost me nothing, but were priceless nonetheless.

if i live to be 100 and never experience another day as perfect as this one, i will never stop praising God for revealing Himself to me. i hope and pray that this day will come to the forefront of my thoughts every time satan plagues me with doubt, uncertainty, and fear for the future. His love is strong and beautiful.

too much pride, not enough grace

for my psychology class i’m required to participate in a graduate student’s research. right now i’m participating in a study looking at the effect of friendship on self-confidence. every day for the past 10 days i have filled out a survey about the most positive and negative friendship experience of my day, how it made me feel, and how i feel about myself in general. there is one question that asks if i am feeling guilty for anything. every day i have answered yes.

i never really stopped to think why i answer yes, i just assumed that as a sinner indebted to God for grace, the natural trade-off includes carrying the weight of my sin around for the rest of my life. it’s not as if my guilt is crippling me in any way; it’s more of a nagging voice in the back of my head that causes my heart to sink anytime i think of the things i’ve done, and how i can never repay my debt to God.

i have been a fool.

all my life i have been the broken record, repeating the idea that i am justified through grace by faith. i’ve got the words down. it wasn’t until recently that i realized that living those words, truly believing them and understanding the ideas behind them, are completely different acts from just being able to quote them. so what does it mean to be justified through grace by faith? according to Brennan Manning it means that “i know i am accepted by God just as i am.” it means i am made righteous by an act of God that i have not deserved or earned, simply because i have believed without seeing these things: that Jesus is the son of God; He died for my sins and then conquered death after three days; even now Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God and will someday return.

Ephesians 2:1-10 (The Message) says:

“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing…”

this passage tells me that God didn’t hold grace over my head, requiring that i jump high enough to attain it. He offered it out of “immense mercy and incredible love.” a God that loves like that does not want us to feel guilty for accepting His freely offered grace. my own pride has gotten in the way of being free from my sin. if you have accepted for truth the idea that your sin is just too big to be absolved then you, like me, have let your pride get in the way of God’s grace. accept the truth that the God who “made the stars [and] drills them like an army” is bigger than your sin (Isaiah 40:26). abandon your pride in favor of grace.