free

Off the grid of digital chaos has felt like the safest place of solace this past year, so I have tried to lay low and quiet to not add to the noise of it all. We are bananas in the face of adversity, this remains my word of the year for 2020 and now rolling appropriately, seamlessly, relentlessly through 2021.

B-A-N-A-N-A-S © Gwen Stefani

How skilled we all are at pointing fingers and quickly looking for any group, party, country to hold the blame of everything we feel has unraveled from our tight knit ball of control. A truth spoken by my pastor and a staff counselor at the beginning of this pandemic was that the weight of all the heaviness happening did not create the cracks we see, it simply revealed them. They have been there, the split open places of being part of the human race runs a fault line right back to our very origins in the garden. We’ve cracked this good creation wide open in every way imaginable. This year tilled up some overgrown patches of grass hiding those deep places of brokenness. Some of the ways they have presented themselves to us feel new in form (pandemic, shutdowns, rioting, racial tension, massive revelations of sexual assault within just about every major industry, closely occurring catastrophic weather events), but they reveal the same reoccurring struggles that continue to manifest in us (ego, pride, fear, anger, blame, selfishness, comfort, power, control).

I go back and back again to the experience of living within the confines of this body, this condition, as an education in the awareness I am not in control. Jesus felt that those in the quiet, weak, hungry margins of culture had some kind of blessing that they lived in, operated under. I feel the blessed gift of dependence fresh with each morning and over again in every hour of the day. I need something beyond myself that my body cannot offer, which wakes up a recognition for a greater, stronger source of life. He’s the only one I have found. Much against the tide of some teaching that gives me the hard sell of my faith being the key to unlock all chaos and dis-ease happening in this body, I have found instead this wild body to be a good and welcoming house for a God who seems quite comfortable in the presence of tired, weary creatures. I find Him not demanding I angrily march and stomp and shout right phrases to somehow claim a freedom from this body, instead He says this will make quite a lovely home, may I pull up a seat? We talk and laugh, read and pray, sit quiet and silent, or He lets me rest while He takes watch over the night shift. My body, a humble home for God. When we get invited into this freedom that is within us, we begin to recognize that no external circumstances are capable of removing freedom from us.

It is a good and holy and right thing to fight for justice, for a freedom that liberates and lifts off oppressive and inhumane burdens. The beautiful good gifts of a healthy functioning body, a flourishing source of resources, are all ways that we experience a glimpse of the on earth as it is in heaven life. Still, these gifts are not guaranteed by following the way of Jesus. Instead, we get a better thing. We get a liberation, deep and transformative, that allows us to remain free even when circumstances outside of our control attempt otherwise. We cannot neglect that deeper thing. It is a sustaining source that remains beautifully unattached from the external operating systems we encounter, and also rightly fuels any energy and efforts we take towards bringing goodness and liberation here on earth as it is in heaven.

Lately we have seen full force the marking of individual territory, working so hard to ensure no one steps on our turf or tightens our boundaries of control, autonomy. So many have staked a bold and spicy claim to dare someone to make them conform or cooperate.

When we find ourselves knotted up with fear and a frazzled concern that something may be taken from us, often it is a beautiful invitation waiting to be opened so that we can attend to the ways Jesus is wanting to bringing freedom in us. Once we wake up to that place, this inner little sacred peace party of knowing we are kept and held by God, nothing outside of our control can take that stunning freedom we’ve been gifted.

This frame and form that we get to live in and eat soft warm chocolate chip cookies with, and hold babies with and use muddied hands to plant fresh flowers with is one of impermanence. We’re not making it out of this gig alive, but this little human body still shows that hunger for eternity. We feel it in our bones and say it with our diets and home security systems that we’re trying our hardest to keep this human form and the ones in our care sustained and going. He has set eternity in the heart, dropped straight into our core is that longing for the life we now feel and the life we hope for to keep going. Our ideas of how to keep that life going are so different, and they collide around every corner into chaos because we each scramble to take our own paths of self protection. When we know He’s got us, we don’t have to hustle to keep it all together (because how on earth could we?) those tight little fists unfurl. Generosity blooms. Peace springs forth. We are kept by him. Good shepherd. Flowing, wild River. Bread of life. A fortress of strength.

I have no kingdom to defend, no turf of my own to mark. I’m invited into a kingdom established long before me that will keep on going long after me. And every single seat at the table is an invitation responded to, a feast prepared, a home with open doors. Every glimpse of this eternal tasted here is but gift and shadow of the greater still to come.

I have zero answers on how to be a human in these hard complicated places of life, but I know I have found compassion born from this place of knowing Jesus has got me, more tenderness and trust that I am cared for, which gives margin in my heart to care for who and what I see around me. I still vote and seek medical care and check the Find My iPhone app when I haven’t heard from Chase and it is 3 hours past when he said he would be home, I still grasp and ache and watch the news with monsoon storms in my belly thinking this is definitely the end of the world, but there it is, underneath every panic and longing for control, that place of peace. I am free. Free in this wild body because God says He is with me, free when this body fails because then I will be with Him. No guilt in life, no fear in death. This is the power of Christ in me. From life’s first cry to final breath. Praying you find your way there today no matter what is swirling in or around you. I love being on this planet with you incredible humans, what a gift.