I’ve got a new blog up that I think will suit everyone a bit better. You’ll find it at:

bealiver.wordpress.com

This blog will be closed in May, so head over there if you want to keep following. Thanks much!

Today is Good Friday. Here are some of the things that happened that day, all those many years ago:

One of Jesus’ closest friends, someone whom he had invested three solid years of his life in, betrayed him. That man decided that 30 pieces of silver were more important to him than Jesus was.

The justice system served its selfish leaders rather than truth and justice. The very people who knew the rules and enforced the rules broke those rules because doing so would benefit themselves. They abused their power. Injustice prevailed.

The leaders that God appointed, those who were to lead the people to him, turned their back on God. They refused to listen to him because he did not serve their self-preservation instincts.

On Good Friday…

One of Jesus’ best friends — a man who shared a special closeness to Jesus — was too ashamed of him to acknowledge that he even knew him, much less was a best friend. He was too afraid to stand up for his friend and turned from him when Jesus most needed help.

Jesus was beaten with a cat of nine tails, a torture instrument that that shredded his back and sides, exposing bones, deep tissue and organs beneath.

God’s people chose injustice and lies. They would rather have anything, anyone, except Jesus. They would rather have anything, anyone, except Truth and Grace.

A judge, the man who had the power to decide Jesus’ fate, chose to please the crowds instead of stand for the truth and justice. He knew what was right and chose instead to give into what others wanted because he was afraid.

On Good Friday…

After Jesus was beaten, nearly to death, he was held before the court and mocked. He’s a king, they said, let’s give him the royal treatment. They placed a robe on his lacerated back, compounding the pain. They shoved thorns, shaped into a crown, into his skull. They beat his face and spit on him.

Then Jesus — in his nearly dead state — was asked to carry a wooden beam up a hill to the place where he was crucified. As he walked, the crowds stared and mocked. The people who just days before had claimed him as their own, rejected him, calling him a fool. They despised him without cause.

On Good Friday…

Jesus was laid on the cross, with nails driven into his hands and feet. Naked and exposed, he was hung in the air for all to see, for all to gape, for all to mock. Besides the pain in his hands and feet, his raw back brushed against the coarse wooden beam each time he pushed up for a breath.

Jesus was crucified between two thieves, common criminals who had done wrong. One of these men was so filled with hate that even in his humiliated and pained and guilty state, he mocked Jesus and challenged his identity and authority.

On Good Friday…

Jesus’ friends deserted him. His mother, John and a handful of others were all who would stand with him at the cross. The rest had abandoned him, watching only from a distance, if at all.

Jesus released his mom into John’s care. Because she was a widow and he was the oldest son, now she had no one. Jesus told John to take his place; his role as her son was now over.

On Good Friday…

Jesus died, drowning in his own bodily fluid, the result of crucifixion.

Jesus was pierced on his side to confirm his death and removed from the cross. He was buried before the sun went down.

On Good Friday…

Jesus, his disciples and those that followed him experienced the hardest and worst day of their life. This was the day when it was all over. This movement that was supposed to end in joy and peace and the establishment of God’s Kingdom, ended in death — and not just any death, a cruel and humiliating death, one of injustice and lies.

On Good Friday…

The story was over. Darkness had won.

—–

My friend Gretchen says that you have to go through death in order to experience the resurrection. Most Christians, she says, skip to the happy part, the Sunday morning when everything was all better. But she intentionally leads her congregation through the depths of agony on Good Friday when death and evil reigned. She experiences the utter destruction of all that was good. It is deep and dark weekend for her and her congregation, just like it was for Jesus’ followers all those years ago. But that’s what makes the resurrection all the more astonishing and miraculous and joyful.

We have to go through death in order to experience resurrection.

Some mornings are a little bit crazy around here. Like yesterday morning when singing “So tell me what you want, what you really, really want — I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want” seemed the best way to ask my youngest what she wanted in her lunch.

She was too stunned at that point to say. (And decided on a cheese sandwich a bit later.)

So the Spice Girls, who we all thought had disappeared long ago, showed up in musical form at our house thanks to You Tube. Incredulous was the word of the morning — my kids did not know how to respond to the whole thing:

Is that a real song?Or is that just on You Tube?Did they actually play that on the radio?Are they British?It sounds like One Direction.

Later in the morning we had a short time of prayer, where I guided them through a simple process of bringing their wants to Jesus. I had them relive their morning and had them pay attention to their first thought upon waking and the thoughts and concerns and anticipations that followed. Then Jesus came to the door and we all greeted him and he sat down and sang our morning’s anthem:

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want?

We had a little giggle, but then go back to thinking about what Jesus was asking: what do you want today? I had them ask Jesus for what they wanted and had them listen for his response.

I sometimes forget to participate with my kids in these things, but this time I sat in silence until I too had told Jesus what I want, what I really, really want. I was feeling overwhelmed and what I wanted was to get ahead of my to-do list. Jesus’ reply:

That’s not going to be enough for you. I am all that will be enough for you.

I don’t like it when Jesus doesn’t say, “OK. I will do you what you want.” And he has never ever said that to me, not like that anyway. But I love how he tells me what is true. What I wanted was for the burden to go away. And Jesus is enough for that, regardless of the to-do list.

Our rabbit likes books. He cases the bookshelf, watching it and us from a distance, carefully plotting the particulars of his next move. When he’s got a good read on the situation, he moves into stalker mode, coming up real close to the bookshelf. He sits, staring longingly at its glories.

And then he just can’t take it anymore. He lunges forwards, straining for even the tiniest nibble of its contents before being shooed away.

The dictionary is his favorite, he is wild about that thing. If that’s a little too far back on the shelf, though, he also really enjoys a file I have full on educational material concerning various forms of poverty.

He knows he’s not supposed to eat the books. I am not certain if he knows they aren’t food — it could be that he is confused because if his people are as wild about them as they are, how could they be anything but food? — but I am certain that he knows it is a joy and thrill which he is not permitted.

He must feel a certain unfairness in the situation because when I scold him and put him in his pen because of his poor decisions, he pouts. He’ll go right to his litter box, turn his back and refuse to acknowledge our presence.

I can’t fault him, he has impeccable taste in his books. There was a certain hardbound number I was reading a while back and when I pulled it out, he would fly across the room to get onto my lap so he could sneak a nibble. The edges of the cover were the best, but the pages weren’t bad.

My oldest brought home a pile of books the other day from school. He had won them in a class activity and most of the books were OK, except two.

One was full of knock-knock jokes which could only have been written by a child or a very annoying adult, neither of which I would invite over to dinner. (That is the measure by which I judge all authors. If I would want to invite the author over for dinner, the book was good and if the thought of sharing a meal with them sounds like torture, it’s not likely I’d recommend the book.) The book will probably disappear at some point, but right now it — unfortunately — is too valued for that heist to come off well.

The other book was a scary-creepy-tragic history events type that inspires nightmares. We gave it to the rabbit to see if he wanted any bit of it, but no. He took a sniff and it sits on the floor next to a pile of chewed up sticks.

As much as I cringe at the nibble marks, I’m secretly a little bit proud that my rabbit likes books too.

Let Light shine out of the darkness —

He spoke from a place of
darkness
emptiness
confusion.

And when it came, the darkness no longer had free reign.
Now, instead, it had limits —
Because something stronger had come.

He who spoke light into that moment
says it again:

Let Light shine out of the darkness —

And Light came
With a face and a name,
With two hands and two feet
That could do nothing but love —
That’s what the nail marks say.

He who spoke light into that moment
says it again:

Let Light shine out of the darkness —

Here, in this place
Of darkness and confusion
Of emptiness and longing
When it seems the night once again is without limit —

The Light comes —
the Presence of glory reveals
As our hearts see what our eyes cannot.

Jasmine was in tears over lost shoes yesterday. I told her that they were probably hiding in a ridiculous place and that when we found them — if they had been in a such a place — we would have a Little Ridiculous Party with balloons and music and chocolate. Fortunately, we found them this morning, in a ridiculous place, so here we have it a Five Minute Ridiculous Party: balloons, M&Ms and One Direction’s “Live While You’re Young”.

What ridiculous thing can you celebrate today?

I just googled “why does my neck itch”.

I did. My neck and shoulders have been itching like crazy for the past few weeks — and not just tickly-itchy, like real-actual itchy and there are even bumps. I am pretty sure it means there is something wrong with me, a symptom of a severe problem that once I diagnose and fix, then I will be all better. All of me will be all better.

I am not one of those paranoid health googlers, who worries that I am probably slowly dying of an obscure disease, I am a fixy-fixy health googler, who believes that if I can eliminate all the subtle issues in my body that all of my problems will be solved.

And it’s totally legit. I have have real health problems, by which I mean, minor inconveniences that, once solved, improved my life dramatically — at least for like, a few days. I have to go to my woo-woo doctor — this is my street name for practitioners of alternative medicine — to get it diagnosed, but I do and then I take funny stuff (including lamb brain and I wish I were kidding but I’m not) and then I feel better.

I love my woo-woo doctor. She’s actually been a tremendous help and diagnosed stuff my regular doctor couldn’t, but sometimes I use her as a crutch when I’m losing my handle on life and I don’t know what to do. She’s like google on steroids because I can bring her my symptoms — like my neck itches — and she cocks her head and types it up and asks more questions and does her thing and she finds an actual problem. It’s google, but with answers! And then she gives me supplements to take to make the problem go away. And usually it does.

But the problem is that my problems aren’t always to be blamed on the functioning of my body. My body and its maladies can be a screen that I hide behind, an excuse and a distraction to keep from having to see things as they really are.

I was obsessing over my latest laments — yeah, the itchy neck was the most tame recent google, the one I could bear to share — and trying to diagnose my condition. And while I was doing this, I heard a voice:

It’s not your body that’s broken, it’s your soul.

It was not what I wanted to hear, but it was true. All these physical aliments, even if they are valid, are just a ruse for the real issue, which is that my soul is damaged and it doesn’t work right. I saw myself holding a valuable ceramic piece, a broken half of it in each hand, looking down in despair. All I could do was hold them up and look at God and ask “What do I do now?”

God spoke more true things, none of which concerned my neck. It was just a reminder that He too had been broken, broken for me so that I could be whole. He replaced my despair with gratitude, but at the end of it all, I was still standing there, holding my two pieces. His words didn’t make it all better.

Stop trying to fix it. Give it to me.

I waited to hear him say that he would take my broken soul and fix it, but he never said that. He insisted on my just leaving it with him. That’s a lousy customer service guarantee, if you ask me, but I had no other options. I handed it over.

And so here I sit with my broken soul in a safe place and a neck that still itches.

Some days I wake up in peacefulness, just totally OK with myself and the fact that I have a day — a whole day! — ahead of me that I get to go live however I want.

By ‘some days’ I mean ‘a few’. I think there were six or seven days last year but there have already been maybe four or five this year, so I am working towards a personal best. We have to start somewhere.

I am a morning person and most days I wake up fully alert and flailing for the panic button, either because I have too much to do or because I don’t know what I have to do, but there must be a ton of it and I haven’t even figured out what yet. My quiet times are called such because my soul is hyperventilating and God has to quiet it down.

As I said, we are making progress here though, and there is a little bit less hyperventilating now then there was a year ago. Especially a year ago. A year ago I was a big over-committed, people-pleasing mess, a mess I look back at with a bit of terror but also gratitude. I don’t really ever want to be there again, but I am forgetful and probably will back to that place someday. But I am grateful because I know God leads us out of the messes we make for ourselves and I am grateful to have seen how wrecked we can get when we give people permission to run our lives.

So we can celebrate that I am less of a mess today than I was at some point in the past. But there is also the truth that I woke up one day last week feeling unrested and anxious because I had a lot I had to do and a lot I felt like I should do. And in those places it’s so hard to tell which is which and who is talking, which is probably how my hard-of-hearing Grandpa feels most of the time, and so, like him, all I wanted to do is turn my hearing aid off and sit in my chair and look out the window.

If only it were so easy to turn off those voices.

I started planning out how I was going to do it all and then, God interrupted with a question:

What would you do today if you weren’t afraid?

I’ve heard that question a hundred times before from people, but it didn’t make sense. Because I would not skydive today if I weren’t afraid of skydiving and that’s all I thought I was afraid of.

But there and then, it was just the question I needed to hear. It felt like I was given permission to breathe. And maybe even to have joy. It was relief and a challenge all at once.

I knew the answer immediately: I had a family member I wanted to go do a quick, ridiculous, fun thing for. I was worried about how I’d fit it in with all the rest of my have-tos, but the question made me realize that this silly act of love was my have-to and the rest was just optional.

I think most days, if we weren’t afraid, we would love.  

We would love people around us if we weren’t afraid of not getting our stuff done or of looking foolish. We would do something for our kids that they need and that only we can do, if weren’t afraid of being too tired and that we won’t have enough left over for ourselves. We would go play with someone if we weren’t afraid that people would silently scold us for wasting time. We would even do something for ourselves if if we weren’t afraid that we weren’t worth it.

So right then, I got on my ridiculous plans. I loaded my kids into the car, along with some “old people clothes”, and we went to the store and bought doughnuts and then we put on our old people clothes and stopped by my dad’s office for a 15 minute “Old Person Birthday Party”. He was turning 60, so we thought we would join him on his first day of oldness. It was the best.

And do you know what? All the rest of the stuff, it got done. It all got down-graded to “low priority” and it still got done.

Most days I ask myself what I need to do that day. If I get around to it, I ask what I want to do that day. But neither of them are really the best question. Because when we surrender our lives to God, when we surrender our lives to Love, those questions don’t even apply.

Probably what surrender means is making those lists of what we need to do and want to do and what we feel guilty about not doing and then burn them. And then say “OK. What now?”

It’s not so much that we shouldn’t do what we should do — not at all — it’s about what’s behind the “shoulds”. There is a lot of fear behind my “shoulds”, fear that I will let people down and that I am in charge of saving myself. My “shoulds” are reacting to my environment rather than proactively creating a space to be fully alive.

When we are afraid, we think about what we can do to make the fear go away. But fighting fear is, as Anne Lamott says, “an inside job”. Fear starts inside of us, not outside. We blame it on the outside and we try to fix the outside, but fixing the outside only gets us so far.

When I am afraid of not getting my work done, I feel a deep sense of urgency (also known as panic) to get it done. And so I hurry to do it. The whole time I’m working is misery because I’m still afraid it won’t get done even though I’m doing everything I can. And then at the end, when the work is done, I no longer worry about getting it done…and start worrying about whether or not it is good enough.

My fear is not fixed by doing. It is not solved by taking action or accomplishing.

The solution to my fear begins inside. I have to see that “not getting my work done” is only a big deal if I am afraid of what people think and of not having enough and of messing up. Once I give up those fears, getting my work done still needs to happen, but it is a friendly mutt to pat on the head and walk around, not a big, scary monster to run from or to fight.

What would I do today if I weren’t afraid?

I would tell you how great it is to not be afraid.

Love is a pansy,
that is what I thought.

It is tu-tus and butterflies and nice flowers
— but not garden roses, because those have thorns.

Love is being nice.
Love is doing what other people want you to do.
Love is for wimps who don’t have the guts to do anything important.

And Jesus wants us to love.

I think that is not what he had in mind, though,
when he said it.

Because love is a pansy.

It is tenacious and tough.
It will grow anywhere, go anywhere —
the vastness of your lawn does not intimidate it
your lawnmower does not intimidate it
your ever so not-green thumb does not intimidate it.

Love is courageous
and dangerous
and adventurous.

Love is a pansy.

I can always tell when I’ve been worrying too much because it gets hard to brush my teeth.

Not because I find my toothpaste scary or because I have emotional obstacles in pursuing personal hygiene, it’s because it actually hurts. When my brush bristles touch on that area where tooth-meets-gum, it’s a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards, even with the kindest of toothpastes.

The last time I was in to my dentist, I asked him about this, because it had been hurting. He said it was because I clench my teeth at night — how does my dentist know about my sleep habits anyway? — and that probably because I was stressed out about something — how does my dentist know about my emotional state anyway?

He prescribed a mouth guard.

I said no. Partly because I secretly believe dentists make things up, but mostly because I’ve spent so much time and energy making fun of my husband’s mouth guard that it just wouldn’t be right for me to have my own.

Also, if I clench my teeth because I’m stressed, maybe I should be taking care of my stress not my teeth. So that’s what I do. When my teeth start hurting, it’s time to focus on relaxing my jaw and decluttering the pile of worries that I let accumulate in my heart.

————–

My teeth have been hurting lately and my jaw feels a little bit high strung. I didn’t know I’d been anxious, but when I sat down this morning to look at the mess, it was a bigger pile than I expected. I wrote it all out — a lot of it, anyway — and gave them to God.

Then my Bible reading took me to the passage where the disciples are worrying about lunch.

I identify with this because I too worry about lunch.

In Mark 8, the disciples are doing a lot of traveling, mostly by boat, and there they are in the middle of the lake and someone forgot to pack the lunch for everyone. They only had one loaf of bread and there’s at least 13 of them in the boat and with no a motor, someone in that boat is burning a lot of calories.

This is grounds for hysteria in my book.

So they’re all talking about what they’re going to do, they’re getting a bit worried. Judas might be thinking how he can make a profit on the situation. A couple are thinking of phoning their mom and having her ask Jesus if they can have a place on Jesus’ right and left, so they will get the biggest serving of the loaf.

And out of the clamor Jesus goes:

Why are you talking about not having bread? Don’t you remember the other day when I fed thousands of people with a few loaves of bread? Don’t you get it?

The story ends there. I think I know why. They felt as foolish as I felt when God simultaneously said to me:

Why are you worrying about this stuff? Don’t you remember what I did just yesterday? How I provided exactly what you needed? Don’t you get it?

I didn’t understand at first, to be honest. I didn’t know what I wasn’t understanding. And I said so:

No, Jesus. I don’t get it. What do you mean?

You will always have enough. I’m here. Because of that, you will always have enough.

Oh. That. Right. Yeah, I think I remember you saying that before. Now that you mention it.

I need to be reminded of this over and over and over. I am forgetful, just like the disciples. I gave my junk to Jesus this morning and here I am two hours later and I can already feel my jaw tight again.

I will always have enough. Jesus is here in the boat with me, in this boat that only has one loaf of bread and a bunch of other people. I will always have enough.