It appears… that when God wants all humanity to know something important, He invests all His time and efforts in obscurity.
Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision by Randy Woodley
I’ve been writing a story for teens to talk about loss and grief and memory and history, all under one handy, culturally palatable guise of a fantasy trilogy. The first book took four and a half years to frame. At the beginning of those years, I had the grace to suspect the story would not fully come until I had gotten further along in my own grieving process. How could I write a conclusion of a story I had not seen myself? I had no imagination for the other side. When I got there, the story came easily, writing itself in a (nearly) block-free fifteen months. My twenty-thousand-word draft of the second book, a story about love, has been a struggle from the beginning. It’s coming, but it’s a grind, and I’m beginning to suspect there is something about love I’ve yet to learn.
Novels are invariably autobiographical. From some deep stratum of my subconscious came Finn, a boy without a father, dealing with displacement and alienation and anger, and his journey to finding family, a place, an identity: a one-for-one manifestation (fully without intending it) of my wrestling and my desire—and also my preoccupation with those on the fringes. He was one of the easiest characters to write in the first book and I was excited to explore his backstory in the second; now, with that canvas stretching before me, I find it is a tundra and the words with which I try to populate it, blank-faced and cold-blooded, caricatures of life.
You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
2 Corinthians 3:3
We’re meant not to just tell a story, but to live one, enacting prophetically Father God’s pronouncement that something important is happening here, far from the limelight and fanfare and wisdom of the wise. We’re meant to re-present what Jesus did, how He works: to choose commitment to and love for one heart at a time, becoming incarnate and dwelling with individual people at a particular time and place. Perhaps I need to lay this story down for a season and sketch it, not with ink on paper, but with the Spirit of the living God on a single human heart, and in so doing, learn what I don’t yet know. This is my body, broken for you…
Now, as Holy Spirit tilts of the balance of my heart toward stepping in to care for a Finn, I’m rethinking my craft, wondering if I’m being invited into a change in medium. I’m thinking about love as art. We’re meant to bring the kingdom of God in real, tangible ways: to hold a hurting gaze a little longer, to clean someone’s stove with greater care than we ever would our own, to spend several extravagant, unseen hours on a single rice dish so that it is a thing of beauty, nourishing to the soul as well as to the body.
At the same time, in my spirit I know these images are too antiseptic, too shiny with idealism, too impersonal. They aren’t real enough to me, not real enough to write. They’re a crucial step removed from the messier bits, the scratched knees and late-night tears. They’re a world away from constant, low-grade anxiety (“Am I screwing this kid up?”), from juvie and group homes, from eyes that refuse to look at me, from eyes that—surprisingly, wondrously—do. I’m curious if part of the invitation is to hold hands with them, hold their gaze, and fling wide my whole heart, all for the love of Jesus.
While [Jesus] was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.
Mark 9:3
It’s exposing, and it could take the next few years of my life. I feel as though I were holding an alabaster jar—these years, my hope for the book, my dowry even—and being invited to spend all of it, right now, all at once. I’m scared. There are breakings of the shape of a life such that it can never be put together again the way that it was. There would be no coming back from this. Some doors swing on tiny hinges. Can I entrust my heart to how God works? It takes discipline to draw the promises of Scripture, even on my own memory: He’s been faithful before.
“Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.”
Isaiah 43:5
Once, as I was reading this passage, I felt Holy Spirit whispering alongside it, “I will gather together the scattered pieces of your life…” Is this how He is doing it? Would He work through me to do the same for someone else?
“No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”
John 10:18a
Then I realize: there already is no coming back. I smash my alabaster jar; fragments fan across the kitchen floor; white slivers slide under the washing machine. I shatter mine, exposing myself to shrapnel and greater knowledge of my own shortcomings and leaning on what I know that I know: that God has created beauty from ashes in my own life. I shatter mine to tenderly rearrange someone else’s jagged pieces, submerging them in fierce love so that each has a place, so that some of their edges might not score or scar quite as sharply.
***
I have an artist friend whose medium is mosaic. She brings shattered things—chips and bits and castaways—into beautiful order in the most literal sense. I notice that their many facets catch the light and when I step back, I can appreciate God’s proverbial tapestry. The overarching story imbues the repurposed pieces with new significance. She is making beauty from ashes. It doesn’t make the breaking less sad or erase the need to grieve, but it is a testament of God’s restorative, redemptive power in action: out of brokenness and breaking, He is creating something good, something new.
Fire and Whisper 