Arch Support

Yesterday’s ponderings continued in prayer this morning.

Here’s the inner-dialogue that I don’t mind publishing (the kind where the words of the Spirit came rather than those other words I sometimes use).

Thank you for walking through the ugly with me.

Thank you for the beginning of an understanding that it’s worth it – even in the midst of all the broken.

Jesus, you restored bodies and souls before your work was even finished.

Can I get my heart, my expectations and my faith in the right place today?

Not for perfection but for peace? And for walking with joy in the “worth it”?

Help me to love like you love.

To walk in that kind of love.

To drink it in and pour it out.

It’s the kind of love that loves all the way – without holding back – even before it gets “good” or “worth it”.

The Love that risked dignity, life, time, space, tomorrow and parts I don’t even know how to count.

Will you keep resurrecting me in that kind of love – even when I dish it out imperfectly?

Will you keep moving stones in the name of everlasting life when I have a tendency to look for life in all the wrong places?

You keep pouring out Living Water into these jars of clay. Broken cisterns.

And you never run out.

Because you say it’s worth it to keep pouring.

And I suppose that’s all I need to know.

Let love break loose in me.

Let me love You with my all.

And learn how to love everybody else that way.

I can’t swallow it.

I can’t measure it.

I can’t even behold this love.

This so loved that He gave His only begotten son.

It keeps flowing out perfectly into the imperfect.

Does it wrench your heart, Beloved?

Is it the same feeling as when You washed Judas’ feet just before he betrayed you with a kiss?

You always poured perfect love in him. Clean water over his dirty feet.

And you knew the whole time.

And then You used that ugly, dead, murderous tree to fulfill a promise, kill death forever, and bring your first-born and your newly-adopted sons from their crosses, nail-scarred hand in nail-scarred hand.

Would you –

Could you –

Actually use all of this death –

The crosses of poverty, injustice, starvation –

The betraying kisses of disease, neglect and abuse –

For a glory story?

I cannot and will not believe this is the way you’d choose it.

If the people weren’t worth it to you.

And if you weren’t completely incapable of breaking a promise.

A rainbow painted a promise a long, long time ago.

Your favorite colors said you love us, you respond to us, and you would choose to keep pouring Living Water into leaky vases over pouring out a flood for an eternity of do-overs.

You don’t want do-overs.

You want us.

New creations – again and again.

You didn’t want your son to ever experience a moment apart from Your Presence.

You don’t like sickness spreading and hands raising.

But the justice, the love and the mercy you chose on Rainbow Day is the kind that arches over flood damage.

It promised that the beauty from up there can and will and does reach down here.

In the beginning and in the end.

And even in the middle, especially in the middle, it can make a landscape of destruction unnoticeable when heads tilt up to the heights of unexplainable extravagance.

The arch is really big.

The curve of Your Hand goes far.

Some days it makes the space between the mess down here and the beauty up there seem impossible.

But today I want to walk and talk and know that it was worth it to You to get out that paintbrush of promise.

I want to lean into the worthy arch  - that led to a worthy lamb.

And an empty tomb.

And a promise that You really do have it all in Your hand.

You have to.

Or it wouldn’t be worth it.