A
man jeered from the cadaveric road where he and two others cut into pipes.
"Hey!
You finished praying, yet?"
Laughter
steamed up from the road's wound.
I
listened for a split-open second and my voice faltered. We'd only just begun
praying, this dear woman and I, her two boys with her- one wildly wrangling an
iron-rod retaining wall beside the sidewalk and the other staring placid and
chubby-cheeked from a stroller.
We
kept on and paid the comment no mind. But it prodded at my heart. Did this man
not see that the Almighty was leaning in to tell this mama- this beauty,
Brooke- that she wasn't what she believed herself to be? That she was a victor
alongside Christ because of His death-defeating Resurrection? That right in
front of him stood a shining daughter of the Most High just waiting to be
unveiled from lies in His Light?
That
right in him, in the middle of a cut road, was coming up a holy moment, gushing
around all things?
We
finished and started walking together towards the end of the block. I nodded smiling to the man; he turned his
hard hat and eyes down and away, stared at the severed pipes instead. His words
hadn't landed, but something else had and it hung over his head. The same
condemning words Brooke spoke before we prayed seemed to be the same sentence
he wore now.
And
what she said was that she was a loser. That's all she'd ever been, would be,
could be.
I'd
asked in return if she knew Jesus and His love for her. Her specifically, right
here out of the billions.
She'd
said yes, but that it was still just so hard to believe Him. That her mother
told her not to believe things that looked too good to be true. That being
anything other than a loser was too good to be true.
But
sometimes well-meaning mothers don't tell us what we very, very well need to
hear- and that's that the Gospel is too Good not to be True, and Truer than any
other news ever tossed on our greying earthly stoop. I know because the one Who
is all Good and all True delivered it Himself by becoming the News, embedding
Himself in our wounds, gushing around all things with Salvation blood and
water, birthing us into New creations.
I
know because I've seen the way it changes everything. Even on the days
everything in me wrestles hard to see past the cut-open asphalt of needy,
grieving souls, I still know.
I
know because I see Him seeking and saving the lost all the time.
I
know because I've seen Him restore dear ones from sin-binding addiction and
warped thinking.
I
know because I've seen Him revive and repair marriages, friendships, families.
I
know because I've seen Him make sickness flee.
I
know because I've seen Him make sick ones incomparably joyful even when they're
not healed.
I
know because His being-here constantly overwhelms my heart when I least expect
it.
I
know.
(Yet
all too often I forget that I do and I say with downcast eyes, "It's just
too good to be true.")
Like this past week when every social forum
and news site felt like an aneurism of outrage and I burned indignant in the
thick of it, furious at fear, angry at viewpoints that dichotomized the Godhead
and diminished the Gospel in being the power to save. Period.
Grief followed the heat. The sobbing, heaving, hard
to hold back kind.
Because
people I loved and brothers and sisters couldn't see that His mind and His Hope
for the Nations IS radical and IS the trumping card, that it isn't a
rose-colored tint, but it IS too good to be true. It IS worth laying our lives
down that others may find physical refuge and eternal refuge in Christ.
That
Christ Himself was cast outside the gates, an outcast refugee of many sorts,
that we'd be drawn inside His Kingdom (Heb. 13:12,13).
So
I pleaded for reminders of the Good News. What He gave took me aback. A memory
from a little over a year ago swirled over and over, one from when He had us go
to the UK and Ireland for twenty one days as a band. On our first day, having
arrived in London, we set out to beat jetlag, visiting free museums and keeping
ourselves moving at whatever cost. At some point in later afternoon we stopped
for necessary caffeine and brought our things to a space with tables,
sandwiched by two, cobbled streets. Things stayed calm, people came and went in
the normal flux.
But
when late afternoon turned to early evening and work ended for much of the
city, people streamed. They seemed to come all at once and on both sides, both
directions. A tall man towered above the collective sea. An older gentleman
deftly swished his bike in and through the movement. University students
lumbered with thirty extra pounds on their backs. Young women strode with
stylish confidence. Colors, skin tones, voices, plans, ambitions - they all
melded at once in this massive blur of movement flooding the street and yet
leaving us dry in the middle.
I
remember there in the midst, the Lord speaking over my jetlag and into the
moment.
"This,
daughter, is the most beautiful thing you'll see this trip. This is my crowning
jewel. This is my heart."
The
Maker of the Universe, Author Who Is the Word, the Alpha and Omega, the
Everlasting King-
*this*
is the pumping of His veins, the beating of His holy Passion: You. Your
neighbors. Me. My neighbors. Known and those yet unknown to us. He sat
enthroned at the Flood (Ps. 29:10), and He sits as King forever over the floods
, now, each flooded street an exposed vein of His flooding heart.
I
marvel and remember.
This
is how asphalt turns holy. This is how we begin to hope in the headlines of the
Good News.
We
look to His heart and see it split open and wildly alive in Salvation
sacrifice.
---"God,
Who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth,
does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men's
hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and
all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all
the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the
boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope
that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one
of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being...Truly these times of
ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent,
because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in
righteousness by the Man Whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this
to all by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:24-28,30,31).
---"In
this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only
begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love,
not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love
one another" (1 Jn. 4:9-11).
