Aunt Michelle's kitchen counter

When I was in high school, my "auntie"/youth leader would sit me down at her kitchen counter and teach me all things domestic. The first thing she would always ask was "How was your week?" which usually was followed by "Have you prayed about that?". I'm pretty sure I would then roll my eyes. (Sorry, Aunt Michelle! Love you, Aunt Michelle!) We would spend the next few hours talking about the issues at hand in both of our lives while sewing or cooking or taking care of babies or organizing a home.

It was her presence in the mundane that gave her authority to speak in the personal, and her willingness to be open that invited me to share as well.

 

Fast forward a few years and a fifteen year old is sitting at the kitchen counter scrolling through pictures on her handheld while another girl and I mix together cinnamon roll frosting and filling. She holds up different pictures of boys to us and asks if we think they are attractive. Most of them I cannot comment on without being flagged as a pedophile, so I just smile and nod and tell her not to talk to boys (which seems to be the bulk of what she talks about). She holds up another picture and turns it away from me, towards the other student. "Dani can't see this, but don't you think he's hot?" Something in her tone has changed. I ask her if it's the boy from camp she's been texting who she mentioned a week ago. Her eyes get big. "How do you know? That's so creepy!"

I smile and tell her, "I just know."
 

Maybe it's because I've been fifteen too, or maybe it's because I've had enough girlfriends to gush with before, but I just know. She mentioned the boy a week ago, and I took note of it. I want her to know that the words she says matter and that I am listening. I want her to know that I know her and she matters, whether she's sharing big things or silly things, not so that I can influence her, but simply because I love her.

And I do love her.

 

We move upstairs to watch Shark Week as we wait for the dough to rise. She starts asking me questions about college, my family, my Florida youth group, going to a magnet school, and growing up in a sleepy beach town. She shifts back to talking about boys, and then she starts asking me about my own boy of interest from college. Her tone of voice tells me that she isn't asking to tease. Suddenly our conversation shifts from gushing to very real sharing about insecurities and frustrations and unmet expectations. We empathize with each other over our "relationships" that are going nowhere.

It all kind of sounds silly, but this camp boy matters to her, so it has to matter to me.  

 

We're in small group writing our cardboard testimonies by ourselves in different parts of the dining area upstairs. I finish mine, pray for a few minutes, and then feel uncomfortable, like I have no idea what to do with myself, like I have never done this before. I see her from across the room and feel compelled to go over to her, yet I have no idea what I'll say or do and the risk of it being even more uncomfortable is high.

I walk over anyway and sit down on the floor next to her. She tries to cover her paper with her arm, and I don't know if I should stay or go. I divert my gaze away from the paper and simply look at her, making eye contact, and smile. She pauses, moves her arm, and turns her paper towards me, revealing difficult secrets. I put my hand on her as she flips the paper to the other side that shows how Christ has made her new. I don't know what to do in that moment. I haven't a clue what to say, so I just hug her.

I hug her and I tell her that I am proud of her.
 

The girls gather together for the end of small group, and as we go around in a circle I am not sure that she will share her cardboard testimony - but I put my hand on her again as she reveals her paper to a group of teenage girls.

The night ends and I tell her again, "I just wanted to thank you for sharing in small group. I know that must have been hard. I am proud of you." She thanks me and says "It was kind of difficult, but I've grown up past that." Suddenly, the student is teaching the "master". She's fifteen and she acknowledges the power and necessity in being vulnerable, something that I have made great strides in this summer but still struggle in.

I can't help but wonder if this is what God has been working up to - the coffee date a week ago where she got a text from a boy from Texas, baking in the kitchen and giggling, watching Shark Week and sharing insecurities, and creating a space that invited painful secrets to be shared and redeemed. Mundane and serious; silly and personal; student and teacher; all of these different paradoxes are colliding.

Perhaps at Aunt Michelle's kitchen counter I learned more than domestic skills. 

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.

He is here and He is good

This little gem kept me company on the dozens of ours of train rides during Eurotrip 2013. I couldn't put it down.

One phrase stuck out to me more than anything - more than the recipes of American food, the tales of lakes and summers and sunshine that I longed for, the stories of families and friends that I hadn't seen in months.

There was one phrase:
He is here.
Here is here and He is good.

It'll likely end up painted on canvas in my kitchen sometime soon, overlooking the table.
The place that holds us together, feeds us, and reminds us of our own humanity.
The place of hard conversations with held hands and hot cups of tea, warm laughter over heaping plates of pasta and salad, Pinterest projects and homework projects and glue and string and tomato sauce.
It's a place where food, time, and words all pass, allowing for a community that all can be a part of.

I was in a friend's kitchen last night stirring onions, zucchini, and garlic together in a skillet as noodles boiled and the music blared.

And there it was: an explosion far off, but too close.
Sirens wailed within minutes.
We peaked outside, waiting.
After the events earlier this week, the whole nation is on high alert.

I went back to the stove, back to the comfort of rhythmic stirring and waited.
Waited for dinner to be ready.
Waited for an email telling us to close our doors and stay inside.
Waited for the smell of smoke or an all-clear or anything.

And then through the corner of my eye, I saw my friend running towards the siren wails.
And so we chased her, chased her to a car accident that looked like nobody could have survived.

Completely flipped, crushed in, slid across the black asphalt, loud enough to hear from a block away.
And a girl sitting in the grass, a thin line of blood dripping down her leg.
She stands, seats herself in the gurney, and heads off to the ER.
But she can't be the driver. She can't have actually been in that car.

The tow truck comes.
Flips the car over.
Flips it over and reveals an entirely crushed passenger side, and an intact driver's seat.
A space of safety. A hedge of protection.

He is here.
He is here and He is good.

So we go back to the table.
The place where God always is.
The place where we break bread regardless of what has happened this day, because we still need food and we still need Jesus even when hopes and dreams and relationships and grades and cars are crushed.
And we believe that He is good - even when all goes wrong, even when all goes right.

Why you can't buy grace on the clearance rack at Primark

The following is the farewell speech I gave at the Final Symposium, celebrating the end of our time in Oxford.

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I'm half British. My understanding of the UK though was some sort of strange blend of C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter, and Downton Abbey - as if all three of them had a baby, and the baby was me. I thought that by coming here, I would find some sort of connection to my ancestry. I would discover my roots. I would identify with the British people and the British culture.

 

But I didn't. Although I have loved my time here, I found that I miss Hulu, Pandora, Target, and sunshine. I miss driving a car and serving sizes the size of my face. I found that I am not British. I am an American, through and through. And that's the problem.

 It's a problem because my identity should be in Christ first.

In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer talks about abandoning all that we have and all that we are until the only thing we can cling to is Christ. Christ calls us to a life of sacrifice and suffering, but all I want to do is get some In N Out and lay out by a pool.

I didn't come here to find beauty. If I am honest, I came here because I wanted to. I distinctly remember the chat I had with God that was more like a monologue. I remember boldly telling Him that I was going to apply and I was going to go to Oxford. But like all good Christians, I covered my tracks by convincing myself that I would let God lead my life by allowing Him to deny me to the program. If I was rejected, I wouldn't apply again because I was obedient, yet He and I both knew that it was only because this semester was the only time I could travel.

But our God is a God of grace, and He sent me here and He taught me things that no tutor could.

My blog's title is Finding Yofi. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong, but yofi is the Hebrew word for beauty. Over the last couple of years, I have been actively seeking to find beauty in all the wrong places, all the mundane places, all the places that our chaotic lives and glamorous culture teach us to ignore. It's not hard to find beauty in Oxford. Everything is beautiful here - the shops, the libraries, the very building we are sitting in. We don't have to look far and we don't have to try hard to become settled and content in the magic and wonder.

One of our friends who we have made this term from another school was over for dinner a few weeks ago. My flatmate and I were talking about our time with Mexico Outreach, and this friend asked if Mexico was pretty. I said yes, but it's not a normal kind of pretty - as if there is some sort of secret beauty that only some people are able to understand.

And there is.

There is the beauty of Christ. There is the beauty of the cross, a murderous weapon of shame and pain that somehow has become a symbol for the last two thousand years of grace, love, and hope.

I'm finding yofi here in Oxford, but sometimes I wonder if it is too good to be true.

If it's a faith that is simple that is a faith that is best, then I've got a faith that is much too complex.

I've believed a lie that the more I know, then the better I will love, but the truth is that I am at the mercy of the God from up above.

I try to figure God out like He's a topic to study, like if I read enough books in the Gladstone Link then I will finally understand. Maybe that was also the desire of the first man. Of Adam, the guy who wanted to know what God knew. The guy who lost it all and suffered not because he represented Christ and chased after His grace, but because he identified with himself and bought the cheapest understanding he could find.

In my own life, my faith is one of how much I can learn and how much I can know. It's not the costly faith that Bonhoeffer preaches of. It's not yofi. My faith, it costs me nothing. Sometimes I even think I bought it at Primark.* In my head I have memorized a lot, but in my heart I know little of the suffering that Christ endured, little of the martyrdom that Bonhoeffer was subjected to. My God is a pocket full of sunshine, and although these Oxford skies may be grey and dreary, I risk little and expect all the blessing.

We know that knowledge isn't cheap in dollars. We know that APU charges more for two semesters than the average American makes in a year. But what if we spent the same amount of time, money, and effort on the Kingdom than we did on our diploma? I'm not saying education isn't good, and I'm not saying our school is bad - I am saying that where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also.

I encourage all of you as this chapter of our lives comes to a close to find the yofi wherever you go. Even when the food isn't good and the pub doesn't have enough ketchup. Even when the air is cold. Even when we have to be somewhere early in the morning. I encourage you to seek for the higher grace, the more expensive grace, the grace that costs us yet gives us all the more.

* Primark is a budget clothing store in the UK. Very cute. Very cheap. Very low quality.

Finding yofi

I changed my blog's web address.
Finding Yofi.
Yofi, the Hebrew word for beauty.
Finding beauty.

Finding beauty in that which beauty is easy to see - the mountains and valleys, the oceans and sunsets, the kind people and warm smiles.
Finding beauty in the ugly, in the mundane, in the difficult, and in the trivial.
Finding beauty in whatever happens. No matter what happens.

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I sat in the Lamb & Flag tonight sipping my water with lemon, a bold contrast to the traditional Oxfordian Friday night.
We went through a mental list of the most controversial topics: abortion, gay marriage, euthanasia, capital punishment - everything you would not discuss at an American bar.

"Really, if you're a mom and you are going to put your kid into foster care, I think it would be better to not have been born at all. That's a terrible life." Despite our last few months together, he was completely unaware of my own past, the harsh words my mother had said of her second pregnancy and the reality of my last couple of years of childhood.

I was caught between my desire to crawl under the table and hide, and my urge to reach over it and slap him in the face.

So I spoke.
"I was fostered for two years. Now I'm at Oxford, so..."

Finding yofi.

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"Is Mexico pretty?"

My mind heart races back to the place I haven't been to in nearly a year. 

"Yes. Yes, it is" I tell him. I pause, unsure of how to transfer all that I am feeling and envisioning to him, a boy from DC. "But it's not the normal kind of pretty." He stares at me, as if there is some secret, special type of beauty.

And there is.

There's beauty in that red clay and broken glass and the little brown hand that knows nothing and everything about a guerra de narcos. 

There's beauty in the tired muscles and hot sun and sweaty skin and the hair that hasn't been washed since the other side of the border. 

There's beauty in the people of God who live waiting for the Kingdom more than I do, relying on Christ more than I need to, and finding faith in a barren land.

Finding yofi.

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Mat Kearney is standing on the stage, serenading my heart with a song that speaks right to my soul. 

It's simple and it's cool. There's no pretense; it just cuts deep, speaking what we all think but are afraid to say. 

I am completely glued to the words, the acoustics, the melody, and the gingerly placed allusions to the One I love.  My body, my heart, my mind, my soul - they're all dancing and swinging to the beat, falling in love with the sounds of delight and Truth.

Finding yofi.