I have been sitting in a coffee shop this afternoon, doing my last big study/cram session before the final exam of my undergrad life. I was feeling stressed, about studying and about life, and then I overheard the woman sitting beside me. She was a lovely woman in her mid-thirties, who was making phone calls to various women's shelters to see if they would take her in for a few weeks. Her husband had left her, and she had just completed a rehab program for alcoholism. As she explained her situation to various shelters, she sounded so sweet and so genuine. Some time later, a friend came into join her, and they both began to talk about their experiences with alcoholism and recovery. All of my petty anxieties seemed so small in the light of these women's lives, and I wished so much that I could just jump into their conversation and ask to hear their stories.
"The great surprise of the Bible is that God always uses the unusable, changes the unchangeable, and loves the unloveable. He chooses a murderous coward to lead his people out of Egypt, a young shepherd boy to become the king of Israel, an unknown teenage peasant as the mother of Christ, a group of dirty shepherds as the bearers of angelic tidings, a woman formerly possessed by demons as the first witness of the resurrected Jesus, and a vicious persecutor of the early church as a zealous apostle of the faith. In both the Old and New Testament, God's actions continually defy human expectations of behaviorally based favor and love."
My essay exam tomorrow is for my Literary Study of the Bible class, and it's on the subject of surprise endings. Over the past few days, I've been thinking about surprises in the Bible, and my mind has been overwhelmed with the fact that the entire book seems like a continual series of surprises, twists, and subverted expectations. As I was overhearing the conversation between these two women, I was writing this paragraph as a rough draft of what I want to write tomorrow on my exam:
"The great surprise of the Bible is that God always uses the unusable, changes the unchangeable, and loves the unloveable. He chooses a murderous coward to lead his people out of Egypt, a young shepherd boy to become the king of Israel, an unknown teenage peasant as the mother of Christ, a group of dirty shepherds as the bearers of angelic tidings, a woman formerly possessed by demons as the first witness of the resurrected Jesus, and a vicious persecutor of the early church as a zealous apostle of the faith. In both the Old and New Testament, God's actions continually defy human expectations of behaviorally based favor and love."
The women beside me began to talk about their faith as I wrote this and I was overwhelmed with this real life picture of what I was writing. I bet their experience of Jesus' love and mercy is so much richer and deeper than I can even imagine. I think there is something beautiful in the utter darkness and horror of an addiction: it makes that false infinite, that sweet poison, that substitute god so clear and tangible in its destructiveness. An addict knows their utter vulnerability, brokenness, and weakness in a way that very few of us are willing or able to admit.
I think we're all addicted to something. One of my (many) addictions happens to be approval, which is particularly destructive when it leads me to believe that I can earn the love and approval of God. The realization that I cannot lose God's love is a daily one, always pushing against the voice inside that tells me I am a failure, or against the pride that tells me I deserve every possible happiness the world has to offer. Freedom lies somewhere in the balance, in knowing that I am desperately broken and yet freely, lavishly loved and delighted in. I think that balance is resting in grace......grace upon grace upon grace that I cannot understand or deserve or lose.
