The Grace of Gulou Street

I never understood Grace until I went to China. Actually I still don't, but it fueled this immense desire to understand this concept, this beautiful reality that there is nothing I can do that will make God love me any more or any less. I am not sure how it all happened. It wasn't as if I was addicted to porn or I had knifed anyone, it was just that I had wrong ideas of who God was. Grace was something sang about in a hymn, some powerful yet foreign word I knew I needed a real taste of, but I didn't quite know how to get it.

I felt as though people my whole life had described Jesus to me. They sent me detailed descriptions, some closer then others. I had maybe seen a photo, a video or two. I had even had some times where we did meet face to face, but my vision was somehow still skewed. I had ideas about His features that weren't quite true to what He really looked like, or worse, I had conflicting images, as if God was two-faced.

One face, was the long bearded long faced law focused God of the old Testament. He did things like command people to destroy whole people groups, turn poor unsuspecting women into piles of salt, and made sure people feared Him. It wasn't necessarily that He is mean, He just does what He wants. After all, He is God. I saw the justice in this moses look alike and respected that. I couldn't really relate to Him, but He was supposed to be the judge.
I saw Jesus as the friendlier face. God's son, sent to save the world from sin because He loves us. Simple, right? This, I thought was the relate-able side of God. His son was a picture of Grace, love, beauty and all those things my heart longed for. No longer was this God of the old Testament needed. But what I couldn't understand is why people constantly used one or the other for there own arguments and agenda.

"But God is just. He poured out His wrath on so and so. He is Holy and can't stand sin."

"But God is Grace, man. You are covered! Jesus died, don't worry about it, stop being so legalistic."

I couldn't get passed the idea that it seemed so schizophrenic. What did I even believe anymore? How could both these faces be true at the same time?

At that point in my life, I was at a major intersection. Not just in what I believed, but where my life was heading. I had just come off of two and a half years of living on a bus touring across the country, helping put on large youth events for a well-known ministry. I was drained and sick of ministry, wondering what my identity was apart from being on tour, and what in the world God had for me next. The opportunity came up to go to China for two months, and I knew I needed to do it. It's funny out of all places to have a revelation of His Grace, God would chose a communist nation known for persecuting Christians. But China is rapidly Changing, I saw as I made my way from the East to the West with a team of eight, trying to capture the essence of this change on film. As I let go of stereotypes and opened my mind, I began to experience a freedom much like the country I was traveling through was beginning to taste.

I have come to one conclusion: I know next to nothing about life, about the world. I am a beginner in the class room on how to love- but you are the best teacher! My heart is warm… I can feel you changing me rapidly as liquid grace is dripping into my blood stream. There is something about this place. Away from all the noise of my own life, although I am placed in a new kind of noise, it is different. I am seeing my life more clearly. Seeing myself, seeing others. Seeing you. The smog has lifted for one moment and all is blue. Not that I can see the details anymore then before, it’s just that the details don’t matter so much anymore. What does? Here and now, and I know it’s only you. The doors to my mind have been flung wide open, now You can come in however you wish.

As I let go of my life, I let go of the images I had of God and asked Him to re-define Himself in my life. I didn't want to just go by the Sunday School stories or theological interpretations. Nor did I want to go by some emotional experience I had in the past. I just wanted the real thing.

It came in a hotel room on Gulou street in a city called Tianjin, that I fondly recall as our home for six weeks. It came from the starkness of having nothing to hold onto, it came from the relationships surrounding me, and from a book that left me weeping at cussing and feeling that somehow I had been lied to my whole life.

Suddenly, it was as if I had brand new glasses and the whole world was clear.
The God of the old and new Testament is the same God.
God has always been about pouring out His mercy on His people.
The gospel is a love. The gospel is that there is nothing I can DO!
He leveled the playing field. The prostitute and the nun are in the same boat-
maybe the prostitute is actually better off because she sees her need for Jesus.
We need to need God.
Suddenly, it was as if I a strong flashlight shone in the dark corners of the bible that didn't make any sense before. The dark corners of my life. I cried. I cussed. But most of all,
I laughed.
As God began to reveal His Grace,
years of bondage,
of legalism,
of thinking I am not good enough
of being afraid to be happy,
fell to the floor.
I laughed in my sleep. His joy became my strength. I ended the paranoid existence of being
so afraid of messing up, that I don't actually enjoy life.
Freedom came, in this communist country, in a city and street with a painful, bloody past.
On Chinese New Year, after a huge feast of dumplings and other delicacies, at a friends house, I decided to meet midnight alone. I went exited on the roof of the hotel from the vacant third floor, and sat bundled in the fridgid February air. The skyline was on fire, literally. Fireworks covered the sky like bombs in a war zone, the atmosphere energetic and thick with smoke. Color flashed constantly and I laughed like a child on the fourth of July. I wrote this in my journal:

Color. Light. Heat. Explosion. The cold lingers on me from sitting on the roof the past half hour.
From where I sat, I could see Tianjin stretched out before me.
High rise apartments and their multicolored windows shining.
Darkness surrounded me. But in that darkness, bursts of color all around.
Red, green and gold. These are the colors of my new paradigm.
Cold chilled me, but the warmth in my chest far surpassed February in China.
A burst of heat knowing that I am loved and life is beautiful and full and just beginning. Boom! Another explosion and I giggle again. You are full of surprises and mystery, of sudden bursts of light in the darkness. Sitting on a rooftop in China alone on the most important night for them, I am struck by the irony that I should feel alone, yet I am so content, I could explode. Bam!
The brilliance of Your grace intrigues me, fascinates me, leaves me stunned oohing and aahing.

Sometimes the voice of truth comes as a single candle lit in the darkness,
this time, it came as Chinese fireworks.

The Truth Will Set You Free

I spent my life in chains. Locked up in a cage this world put on me, and when offered a key, laughed in the face in the face of the freedom giver erroneously thinking it was too good to be true. I tried to free myself through my own will and I constantly found myself accomplishing nothing but the chains digging deeper into my raw flesh.

A few times someone came along and opened the door, forgetting to lock it. I opened the door quietly and stepped outside to a dark forest full of twisted branches and unearthly noises. Afraid of what I wasn’t familiar with, I quickly stepped back through the door, back to my own bondage. I soon drifted asleep, sickly comfortable in my counterfeit contentment, ignorant to the fact that paces beyond the morbid dark wood, a green valley with fields of sunflowers resided.

I awoke moments or ages later so afraid and so cold; the chains seemed to be growing heavier and sharper as the minutes rolled by. In panic, I struggled like I never struggled before. Sharp rusty metal left deep cuts I watched as the blood flowed onto the dirt beneath me. My breaths became fewer, my body convulsing. Out of my guts I let out a cry that seemed to shake the whole atmosphere. At the end of myself I stopped struggling and threw myself on the ground. Tears mixed with blood, hope seemed unattainable, freedom impossible. Blackness began to surround me, the woods growing darker and darker. My own hands began to fade away. I uttered one last bitter cry to someone, anyone.

Then something in the atmosphere changed. Like a flash of lightening I caught a glimpse of something…or someone… The image was blurry, yet so sharp. I couldn’t quite make out the details but there was brightness about him… hope. I began to cry harder, my tired voice scratchy and aching. He came back; suddenly clear like the lens on a camera focusing.

Standing before me was light itself…. vibrant love in a human form. He reached through the bars of the repressive cage. I drew back, afraid of those unknown hands, their brightness revealing the mangled state of my body. But the fear within me wasn’t the same fear that had haunted me for so long, that turned my insides into knots of dread, but a reverent awe in knowing this power far surpassed the strength of my chains.

A battle raged inside my broken spirit. Dare I trust this unknown angelic man who offered me a hand, who filled me with awe and hope, who somehow saw beyond my dirtiness and despair and showed a never dying love just by the brightness coming from his face?

Closing my eyes I drew a heavy breathe and reached out my bloody scarred hand…

(2004)

Accept The Good

The other night I watched the film "Things We Lost In the Fire."
I wasn't sure how it would be, but it was quite beautiful and incredible. The theme of redemption the world is so hungry for seem to be showing more and more through media. One line in the movie that was actually a theme, a saying that the husband who heroically died said, was

Accept the good.

It seems simple enough. We all want good, why wouldn't we accept it?
Often I think we have a wrong view of God, and this wrong view bleeds into every area of our lives.
We are told so much that being a Christian is hard, that we need to expect trials, make sure we are ready for war, basically always have our guard up.

So when good happens, when peace overcomes war, when love conquers fear, we are so cynical and skeptical, we think it must be the enemy tricking us, this can't happen to Christians, we are supposed to suffer for Christ,

This is too good to be true...

The crazy thing is, when something seems to good to be true, it's usually means it is truth. THE Truth.

A God that knows us throughly and loves us completely, Grace that levels anything good or bad we can do and puts us all in the same boat. Forgiveness, redemption, abundance, our dreams coming true- all these things seem too good to be true...

Yet, this is the gospel. Yet all these things are what make up the kingdom of heaven- this is the heart of God- EVERY good and perfect gift is from Him.

We are so afraid we don't deserve it... we don't... and that's the point.

Accept the Good.

Will My Story Dazzle The World?

Staring at the blank page before me…the rest is still unwritten…

If my life was book, would people want to turn the page?
Would it invoke deep wells of emotion?
Would it keep people up late into the night, laughing and crying and realizing they are not alone in the universe?
If I was the protagonist of a movie, would people care about my plight?
Would the plot twist and turn?
Would it always be filled with highs and lows, romance and tragedy?
Is the main theme about things that matter, about truth, love, justice and freedom?
What is the mountain I need to climb, the climax, the resolution?
What is the story of my life?

I am reminded of times when God whispered so clearly,
This is your life.

A time when I was in the woods, walking back to my tent and sobbing because my heart broke for people. I took it to mean He was calling me to missions.

Another time, when I stood in the middle of a crowd in Canada- thousands of kids in an auditorium, crying out to God to make them whole. I took it to mean I was going to be on ministry team.

I realize now, it isn’t so much the action of the next step God was trying to show me, He was showing me my life would not be comfortable and painless.
In fact, I would be a broken vessel Him to use.
This is your life.

Deep down, I need my life to be broken and put back together over and over.
I need it to be both beautiful and tragic, the stuff that makes up an adventure.

I’ve had this other thought the year, that seems to have been born out of heart break. This thought comes as an eye to a hurricane, a surprise in the middle of wading through some real swampy situation that I didn’t think I would come out of alive.

I am gonna write about this someday.

This thought, seems to defy all logic, shake me up, and in the end make me laugh at the dramatic irony of life.

When I push past the pain, and begin to acknowledge I am broken, the situation sucked and people will failed me again, that’s when the thought comes, and with it comes the beginning of healing.

I am gonna to write about this someday.

Say it to yourself next time through the tears.
I now leave you with this:

Write everyday.
Line by line, page by page, hour by hour.
Do this despite fear.
For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage. Courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure.
As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty,
study thoughtfully, but write boldly.
Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.
–Robert Mckee

Bits of Beauty Out of Heaps of Junk

The other morning I got up at 5 am to go Yard Sale-ing. It was quite the experience. I was dead tired (I worked the night before from 4 pm- 12:30 am) but luckily, I was with some regular yard sale-ing professionals. It was like a treasure hunt, finding something trendy or beautiful among heaps of worthless junk. When we got home, Amanda and I put up all our decorations, our new table and chairs, re-arraged a few things, and were astounded by how different our house looks! Somehow, every little bit seems to fit together, yet still expressing our eccentric and artistic flairs.

I realized, my life is kinda like that. God has to sift through alot alot of junk, but somehow manages to pull out bits and pieces that He falls in loves with and rescues from the dumpster. He begins to put these pieces together, one by one, rearranging them, adding His own touch. Suddenly, I look around and I realize it was not an accident, nothing is. He really did have the final outcome in mind the whole time!

Slowly, one piece at a time, my life is coming together.

Even when it looks like a complete mess, like everything I thought was sure is falling apart, when those I put my hope in fail me, when I screw up, or feel like it's meaningless, God still has a plan.

And I know deep down, no matter what, in the end,

Chocolate Pudding

Life is a complete mess.

I don’t mean this is a hopeless, rip your hair out way, more sweet, like a toddler covered in chocolate pudding.

As much as I think I am this free thinker, this go-with-the-flow let’s see where life takes me, kind of person, I still try to control. I still try to clean up, to order, to try and fix things and people.

I guess that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We are all trying to create some kind of order out of the chaos that it is to be human, but I think the danger in doing so is refusing to see our humanity.

I am human. We are all human. What does that mean?

My burn scab bleeds when I pick it. I am indecisive and judgmental. I long for intimacy and for someone to see me for who I am. I am a bundle of contradictions, addictions, a tangled mess of beauty and ugliness and love and hate. We all are.

I don’t think being a Christian means ignoring that, or somehow thinking we are above all that. Because Jesus is ultimate reality, looking to Him should lead us to complete honesty. We want to be so spiritual, we want to play God, so we control. I do it all the time. I plan out how conversations and situations are going to look in my head. I manipulate to try to get people to see my accomplishments, my “brilliance.” It’s gross, it’s pride. It’s our fallen humanity in action.

I am beginning to see that life is a mess, but the mess is in fact beautiful.

Does parent love their kid any less when they smear chocolate pudding all over their faces? It’s funny, no matter how many times you give a little kid a bath, it’s like they keep getting dirty. It’s almost like they are a dirt magnet.

Being human means we’re gonna get dirty.

It’s inevitable. We’re going to say things we regret, we are going to feel insecure one moment, puffed up the next.

Our hearts are going to break.

I see Jesus in this too.
In fact, I see Jesus more in the moments I am smeared with self hate or chocolate pudding or mud or condemnation.

He’s there... Smiling...
“I love you. You’re beautiful... Now, let’s go take a bath.”

Walking Somewhere New

I have a certain walking path that I follow. It goes out of my house, up Mount Sylvan road, where there is no sidewalks and cars whiz by me, Texas drivers in a hurry to get from point A to point B. My walking path altars when I get to the park. Instead of walking around, I make my way through the park, meandering when I get to the playground shaded by the trees, stopping to swing on a swing or pick a flower from one of the trees just to smell it. When I have had my fill of childhood, and remember something important I need to go waste my time on, I leave the park and walk past a field surrounded by a white fence, followed by a row of identical houses, lined in like soldiers waiting for an order. Then I make my way back up another street, whose name I can never remember, around to the other side of my house.

This is the walking path I have chosen, the one I am familiar and comfortable with. I know the signs (well some of them) the trees that are taller or stand out, the flower gardens and unkempt yards. I am used to the large sign announcing the ironic name of the park I walk through- “Pool Park- donated by Maggie and Frank Pool” Yet there is no swimming pool to be found. (I wonder sometimes how many kids are disappointed in that) I know where the sidewalks end and the road gets dusty, where a good picnic table to stretch out on is, where the road gets a little more steep, and my breathes get shorter. I know this road that I walk.

Often times I get to a point in my life I just don’t know why I am going where I am going. I have this call of God on my life, this willingness to be some sort of a vessel, to advance the kingdom of God, but I so easily get caught up in routine to the point where it all seems meaningless. I found myself at this place this summer. I had just finished four years of “being in ministry.” I was emotionally exhausted, spiritually burnt out, frustrated and bitter. I needed a nap badly. I couldn’t find my joy, couldn’t see past the questions, the suppressing tiredness that had replaced the passion and vigor I started out with. Not to say I had lost my love for Jesus, I had just become so jaded by the system- so tired of feeling like everything in American Christianity was hyped up and hypocritical, everything seems so cliché and corny. I wanted to get away bad. So, I did what any normal human being would do, I tried to figure things out. I tried to find the answers, make sense of the hurt I had experienced, tried to sort out the bitterness to no avail. So I gave up.

I gave up and went for a walk, but this time, I walked down another path. I don’t really know what possessed me to do that, but something in me needed to break the routine. I walked down town, towards the small brick community of country folk with their antiques and odds and ends shops. I walked into one of them, drawn by something or someone. I entered a room, a beautiful jungle of dried flowers formed in artistic wreaths and arrangements. The name of the shop was Heaven on Earth. I began talking to the owner, and as soon as she started speaking, I knew Who had directed me into this shop. She spoke words of truth, of healing out of her own painful experiences and life lessons. I soaked it up like a dry sponge. When our conversation was through, I walked out, my eyes full of tears, but for the first time in a long time, my heart full of hope.

I have a certain walking path that I follow, but sometimes I need to give up and walk somewhere new.