Why sharing my testimony is terrifying

I shared my testimony last night to a room full of thirty teenagers.

It was the first time I had publicly spoken of several things, putting my shame and fears and hopes and dreams out on the table like a Thanksgiving feast for the skeletons that had been hiding in my closet.

Y'all, I was 63 inches of sheer panic.

A couple of times I paused.
"Something's wrong. Something's not right."
Breathe, kid. Breathe. You're not breathing.
Take in air. Take in new life.
Exhale the shame, inhale the grace, and wait in the wonder of vulnerability.

A really wonderful friend and partner in crime ministry classmate carefully reminded me that my testimony is really not about me at all, but about God and his story.

It is about identifying how God is moving in real time, in a real place, in a real person.

Even a 20 year old girl on the western slope of Colorado in 2013.

I do not own God's story, and therefore, am not entitled to keep it to myself.

God owns my story, his story.

History.

Buechner talks about the bible as this awful, boring, confusing book full of self-righteous toolbags, murderous whores, whimpy leaders, whiny blame-shifters, and a God that seems to want to smite everybody, including himself (let's not get into a conversation about the trinity for the moment), for the glory of himself.

Some book.
Some God.

But that's exactly what it is.
Some book.
Some God.
Some story that keeps telling the story of ourselves.
The story of a people who do every single thing wrong, but are still given grace from a God who sacrifices himself.

Yes, for glory.
Glory hallelujah.

The bible, our testimonies - they're about saying "Me too."
"Me too. I don't understand what all of this means, but I am with you. He is with you. Breathe."

And that is perhaps what makes the story of God so terrifying.
It is the story of us. All of us.

All is fair in love and shame

Mother's Day is a day of hiding.
Can I get an Amen from anyone in the crowd?

This Mother's Day will be the third in my life that I go to church - and two out of three have been because I worked at one.
The first time was a terrible mistake. 15 years old, bright eyed and bushy tailed - until I saw the mothers cuddling up with their doting daughters, my own hand left empty.
It was a rough day for my already-volatile teenage heart.
Mother's Day is now a day of Netflix, closed shades on the windows, and 48-72 hours of Facebook-free time to avoid playing too much of the Comparison Game.
The game where everybody loses.

I struggled with the foster families I lived with, being both included and excluded, constantly reading mixed messages about what it means to be in a "family" if it simultaneously tells me to remain loyal and yet reminds me that I am not one of their own.

"She's the girl that lives with us."
A charity.

I still struggle to call my closest friends "family" because t is an f-word of the most offensive nature. It means deceit, abuse, betrayal, abandonment, kicking, screaming - anything but love.

So when the God of love says I am part of his family, I shudder.
My mind races to a thousand "I love you, but..."s, a fistful of different house keys, and a dozen "mothers" and "fathers" that never were.

As if the One who both created and adopted me is also unwilling to deal with this mess.
Or maybe I am just his charity case, a pitiful face on the side of the road.

Somehow we came to believe that love can't be won.
It can't be won through a pile of paperwork - sometimes adoption just "doesn't work out."
Like the kid is a piddly puppy or a too-firm mattress.
It can't be won through inviting the stranger (or even friend) into our home on a holiday.
Because what would the rest of the family think?
It can't be won through waiting patiently with and fighting passionately for the drunk uncle or the prodigal son.
Sometimes people are a lost cause, like an over-cooked souffle.

This isn't to shame anybody, but our reality of physical family mirrors or image of spiritual family.

Love cannot be won?
If we believe this, then we believe that love cannot (and therefore, was not) won on the cross.
We believe that God creating us, shaping us by hand out of his own vision and image, was not enough.
We believe that God choosing to adopt us, taking us back during our runaway teen years and terrible twos, was not enough.
We believe that God promising to remain our Father forever, giving us his own last name and adding us onto his will, was not enough.

And so we hide.
Shame runs deep.
Or maybe it runs thick. Sometimes thicker than blood.

We feel like charities at best and orphans at worst.
As if God doesn't have a special love for the orphans.

Shame takes the things we enjoy most and turns it into our biggest source of pain and frustration.
Shame tells us to hide in our rooms on Mother's Day because we are not worthy of being daughters, or maybe because we are not worthy of being mothers.

God made mothers.
And God made daughters.
But God did not make shame.

So this Sunday, I'll be making a public appearance.
Partly because I have to teach Sunday school to a dozen tweens and teens.
But also because love wins.

Love wins

The earth - saturated and wet with the mood, appropriate rain falling from the cold, grey sky. The mud reminds me of red Mexican clay, but this ground is stained with a different kind of blood; a different kind and yet blood all the same.

It's the ground that saw the fates of 200,000 men, women, and children; fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, daughters, and sons.

It's the ground that spoke of evil and now whispers of hope, fighting to believe that love really does win.

It's the ground that may forever know suffering as pilgrims leave silk flowers for their loved ones, falling to their knees in the sinking muddy earth from the weight of it all.

It's holy ground.

It's holy not because ti's the earth that Jesus walked on or bears the bush that burned and spoke, but because it is the ground that Christ died for. It tells a story of evil and sin so great that no man can bear it, yet Jesus whispers "You are no better."

It is holy because Christ died for all sin and all people and bore a hope that no man could destroy. A hope that can't be dragged into a gas chamber or buried in a ditch.

It is holy because even in the darkest hour of human history, faith stood tall. Christ, carved into prison cell walls. Men, martyred at the walls between Barracks 10 and 11, falling to their knees one final time. Bibles and communion wafers, smuggled into the gates of hell, reminding all that love wins.

And so it goes, as my feet stand at the door of a young girl's home.
Anneliese Marie Frank.

We share the same middle name and I pray that we share the same spirit.
The spirit of a God who is greater than our greatest enemy.
The spirit of grace for the fallen and forgiveness for the pushers.
The same spirit that never believed evil would win.

A walk through Berlin tells the sale - the tale of a battle fought, lost, and won.
A battle where hope appeared to falter but now stands tall, tall like the pillars that commemorate those who could stand no more, through no fault of their own.

So we remember the fall and we remember the death, and we remember the one who fell and died only to bring hope and life.