trading self-focus for self-forgetfulness and awe

I blogged over at Desiring God recently on a pervasive problem within women's gatherings and resources - a preoccupation with self-focus instead of God-focus. I hope you find it helpful!

Women, Trade Self-Worth for Awe and Wonder

If you’ve spent much time in Christian women’s circles, you may have noticed that we have devoted many gatherings to exploring our identity.

Retreats, conferences, and topical Bible studies rush to assure us that we are redeemed and treasured, that our lives have purpose, that our actions carry eternal significance. If we just understood who we are — the message goes — we would turn from our sin patterns and our spiritual low self-esteem and experience the abundant life of which Jesus spoke.

Recently I attended a women’s conference at which this message predictably took center stage. One after another, all three keynote speakers took us to Psalm 139:14, urging us to see ourselves the way God sees us, as fearfully and wonderfully made. It could have been just about any women’s event, with just about any typical speaker. Christian women ask Psalm 139:14 to soothe us when our body image falters, or when we just don’t feel that smart, valuable, or capable. We ask it to bolster us when our limits weigh us down. But based on how frequently I hear it offered, I suspect the message may not be “sticking to our ribs” very well.

Why is that?

I believe it is because we have misdiagnosed our primary problem. As long as we keep the emphasis on us instead of on a higher vision, we will take small comfort from discussions of identity — and we will see little lasting change. Our primary problem as Christian women is not that we lack self-worth, not that we lack a sense of significance or purpose. It’s that we lack awe...

You can read the rest of the article {here}.

are compatibility and complementarity at odds?

Owen Strachan has penned an interesting piece in which he states that perhaps nothing has been more damaging to male-female relationships than the notion of compatibility. He opens with this thought: “Compatibility. Has any concept done more to hinder the development of love?” Such a statement must surely have in mind a narrow working definition of compatibility, something along the lines of a Match.com profile and the self-serving search for the perfect soulmate. And I get how that's not healthy. But in complementarian marriage, is the desire for compatibility out of place? In the minds of most, the two terms Strachan juxtaposes would be defined briefly like this:

Compatibility: what is shared between a man and a woman

Complementarity: what is different between a man and a woman

So, do these two ideas live in opposition to one another? We find a carefully constructed story in Genesis 2 that I believe addresses this question directly. It is a story in which God creates man, notes he needs a suitable helper, then commands him to give names to every living creature. The animals parade by: ostrich, camel, alligator. Adam obediently names each one. It must have been a very long line of creatures great and small, as Adam “gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field”. Yet none of them is a suitable partner for him. Though half of them share his maleness, none of them share his humanness. They are beautifully formed, but they are not formed in the image of God.

Imagine Adam’s state of mind as the animals parade past him: “Ostrich: not like me. Camel: not like me. Alligator: not like me.” He becomes increasingly aware that, though surrounded by God’s good gifts, he is in a very fundamental sense, alone. You and I know what the solution to his aloneness will be, but the text takes its time establishing that his state is “not good” before pulling back the curtain. Before Eve can be prepared for Adam, Adam must be prepared for Eve.

And then, after a brief nap, Adam awakes. And there she is, at last.

Adam bursts into poetry:

“Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ishah (woman) because she came from ish (man).”

Don’t miss what Adam is saying. After the animal parade of one not-like-him after another, at last he sees Eve and rejoices that she is wonderfully, uniquely like-him.

“Same of my same, same of my same. She shall be called like me because she came from me.”

The Bible’s first word on man and woman is not what separates them, but what unites them. It is a celebration of compatibility, of shared humanness. Ours is not a faith that teaches “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”. Rather, it teaches that both man and woman are from the same garden, created by and in the image of the same God, sharing a physical, mental and spiritual sameness that unites the two of them in a way they cannot be united to anything else in creation. Before the Bible celebrates the complementarity of the sexes, it celebrates their compatibility. And so should we.

To make how-we-are-different our starting point is to reinforce the tired idea that men and women are wholly “other”, an idea that lends itself neatly to devaluing and objectifying, rather than defending and treasuring. It is the very idea that fuels the cultural stereotypes of the incompetent husband and the nagging wife. I push away and discredit what is not-like-me. I cling to and elevate what is like-me. Compatibility is what binds us together, like two Cowboys fans finding each other in a sea of Eagles jerseys.

No one goes on a first date and remarks, “Wow, we had nothing in common. I can’t wait to go out again.” Same-of-my-same is what keeps man and woman in relationship when differences make them want to run for the exit. Same-of-my-same is what transforms gender differences from inexplicable oddities to indispensable gifts. Because my husband is fundamentally like-me in his humanness, the ways he is not-like-me in his maleness elicit my admiration or my forbearance, instead of my disdain or my frustration.

Compatibility. Has any concept done more to nurture the development of love?

So, no, complementarity and compatibility are not at odds. And it is precarious to pit them against one another. Compatibility is the medium in which complementarity takes root and grows to full blossom. Until we acknowledge our glorious, God-ordained sameness, we cannot begin to celebrate or even properly understand our God-given differences as men and women. This is the clear message of Genesis 2, so often rushed past in our desire to shore up our understanding of what it means to be created distinctly male and female. But we cannot rush past it, any more than Adam could rush past the parade of animals that were not-like-him. As Genesis 2 carefully reflects, a world which lacks the beauty of shared human sameness between the sexes is a world that is distinctly “not good”. But a world in which compatibility undergirds complementarity is very good indeed.

for these, thy gifts

I didn’t want them.

It wasn’t just them, I didn’t want any pets. With a house full of small children, the thought of taking care of one more living thing was more than I could face. The hermit crabs had been bad enough.

It wasn’t a thousand nagging requests from the kids that did me in, it was their resigned acceptance. On a visit to their Grammie’s house to see her new litter of pug puppies, they were stalwart. They cradled them, they giggled delightedly, they stroked their little round tummies and twirled their little curly tails. But not one asked if we could take a puppy home. Not a single completely-transparent-kid-hint was offered. Not even a mildly pleading facial expression. Mom doesn’t like dogs. Case closed.

Covered in the downy fluff of puppies cute enough to break the Internet, not one child asked. It was official: I was a terrible mother. The kind of mother whose “yes” was as peculiar as a solar eclipse, but whose “no” was as predictable as sundown.

Tess and Tilly looking spiffy, Christmas 2014

We brought home two. Two! Based on our child-to-puppy ratio, it seemed like the only safe course. We had more love to give than one puppy could absorb. So Tilly and Tess came to live at our house, and I began the decade-long discovery of the absolute joy of saying “yes” to pet ownership. I doubt there are two more photographed dogs in all the world. They have been dressed in doll clothes, Halloween costumes, wigs and Christmas sweaters. Good grief, no – we didn’t buy them outfits – people kept giving them to us. It was like the whole world was conspiring to make me say and do things I had sworn I would never do.

For ten years, those two comical faces have brought more moments of sheer joy and laughter to our home than I can count. Bred to be lapdogs, their favorite activity has been to loll around on a cushion on the fireplace hearth, bedecked in rolls of fur-upholstered fat, eyes closed to drunken slits. We nicknamed them Gluttony and Sloth. Their constant snoring has formed the white noise underlying the sound track of our home. Their liberal and eager affection has been our welcome at every homecoming.

Last night, Tilly drew a last ragged breath and grew still. The fireplace hearth framed her as it had so often before. Twelve to sixteen years - that was what Google returned the day I checked life expectancy for the breed, the day before they came to live at my house, when I was still trying to talk myself into it. Not ten, twelve to sixteen.

“A dog is all the work of a child, but it doesn’t take care of you in your old age.” My mantra prior to the Day of the Incredible Double Yes. Me, always eager to preach a sermon no one needs to hear. Things I said that sounded good at the time.

Had she been work? I don’t remember that part. I won’t remember that part. But I will certainly remember the rest. I wonder – how many other gifts have I rejected as a burden and an inconvenience, the recipients of my hasty No? I thought she would be a threat to my comfort. In classic last-shall-be-first fashion, she became a source of it. I did not expect the joy of having her; I did not expect the grief of saying goodbye. The grief, or the gratitude. Thank you, Father, for these Thy gifts.

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.

In His hand is the life of every living thing.

Ten years of a good dog. The Creator numbers my days, and he numbered hers as well. His goodness takes so many forms. Sometimes, delightfully, that form has a wagging tail. Farewell, little friend – we feel your loss keenly.

O God, for all creatures great and small, for this small creature we have cherished, we give Thee thanks.

For the gifts you have granted at our childlike request, we give Thee thanks.

And for the gifts we did not want, for the veto of our No, this day we give Thee thanks, O God.

that which i did not sow

This spring he put his foot down: “No more tomatoes.” Gardening in North Texas can batter your ego and empty your wallet. You learn what to plant by taking note of what withers in the summer sun. Tomatoes, for instance. Not many delights surpass that of a home-grown tomato still warm from the vine, lightly salted and peppered. But this year it was not to be. Tired of the futility, Jeff decided to leave vacant our raised bed next to the compost pile.

The compost pile: that glorious chicken-wire structure of rotting goodness. Patron saint of gardeners. Colossal eyesore. A steaming homage to our love of eggs, coffee, and the once-fresh produce we were too slow to eat, moldering three feet deep outside the guest room window. Welcome, guests.

For six summers Jeff patiently nursed my fledgling tomato plants, too kind to tell me that my eternal hope for a bumper crop (and my selective memory of the previous summer) was heading me once again toward disappointment. But August said everything he had not, in capital letters.

It’s been a hard spring for my family. The people I love the most have sustained deep hurt and loss. The kind you don’t blog about or tweet about or share on Facebook. “I’m tired of being sad,” I tell my stepmother. “Yes,” she says.  One unexpected phone call is hard. When the phone keeps ringing, well, it begins to feel like August. We are withering.

I didn’t look out the guest room window the entire month of May. I didn’t walk down the far side of the house. I didn’t want to gaze on that vacant rectangle of dirt, dotted with decaying eggshells, where my hope of tomatoes used to grow. “Come out here and see this,” he said.

Mint, engulfing half of the bed. Two enormous pumpkin vines in full bloom, scaling the fence, breezily and brazenly trespassing the neighbor’s yard. And ridiculously, a tomato plant. Forbidden. Unbidden. Sometimes compost has a gardening agenda of its own. Despite our resolve to raise the white flag of surrender, to the west of the guest room the Lord God has planted a garden.

We stand there gaping, two quitters thwarted in our quitting, the seeds of our disbelief sprouting into uncontrolled laughter. We are shaking with it. He reaches for an abandoned stake and places it resolutely around the tomato plant. “Maybe I can build an awning to get it through that August sun.”

This ruling and subduing, this fruitfulness and multiplication - it is a tough business, punctuated with the losses of many Augusts. Gardeners know better than most that we reap what we sow. But the gospel gives a better word: we reap what we had no hope of sowing, a miraculous harvest of grace, sprung from the rot, grown in the shade of a good Gardener ever at our right hand.

This is where I stake my hope.


"The LORD is your keeper; The LORD is your shade on your right hand." Psalm 121:5

of summer's lease and sabbath-song

Last night, as if on cue, the cicadas began their summer serenade. I love their mechanical, monotonous, lullaby-like whirring, welling up at dusk on a heat-laden summer evening. From my childhood it has been a sound bound tightly to all that is summer – a chorus signifying the return of stillness, an invocation to rest, rest, rest.

After nine months of school, activities and friends, the four Wilkin kids are once again fully present in our home. Our summer will be marked by some travel (cousins who need to enjoy our company), some learning (good books to be read, good recipes to try), and some household chores that never seem to get done during the school year (it cannot be an accident that the number of dirty windows in my home divides neatly by four). But the highest item on our summer agenda, and the one we all look forward to the most, is rest. There will be time to listen to the cicadas.

Here is a remarkable thing about the Christian faith: we have a God who commands us to rest. Our God commands us to hold still, to cease from labor, to actively enter into repose – not merely as a means to regain our strength, but as an act of worship.

The gods of other religions and the god of self, these demand ceaseless toil. To please these gods, worshippers work incessantly at the business of self-denial, approval-seeking, pilgrimage - repeated rites that strive to prove the worth of the supplicant and earn the favor of the deity.

Those who seek the approval of lesser gods commit themselves to a course of utter exhaustion.

But not the Christian. In our obedient observance of rest, the work of our Savior is understood most clearly. We rest not as an attempt to earn his approval, but as an assent that his approval has already been earned in the sun-going-down, Sabbath-initiating work of Christ on the cross. Christ worked that we may rest. He, in a gathering dusk, exhaling the first note of a blood-bought chorus of infinite rest.

The God who grants us soul-repose commands our worship in the form of bodily rest. As with all worship, the worshipper is blessed in his obedience. He finds himself restored and ready to resume the effort of tilling his corner of the garden once again. More importantly, he finds himself reminded that both the garden and the one who tills are contingent and derived, depending every moment on the sustaining breath of the Creator. He is thereby mercifully relieved of his idolatrous, exhaustion-breeding belief that the work of his hands upholds the universe in part or in whole.

This is a good and timely reminder for our family.

Nothing obstructs our ability to fulfill the Great Command like exhaustion.  In the daily busyness of life-as-usual, the love of many grows cold. But the rest the Lord ordains for His people is a communal rest, a rest that places them in company with one another, hands emptied of labor, minds emptied of cares. Because emptied hands can deal the next round of spades, or make a dandelion chain, or pass around the popsicles. And emptied minds can join in the conversation bubbling up from the back of the minivan.

Love grows warm once again in the emptied spaces of rest. We remember our love for the One who sustains us, we recall our love for the ones who surround us. Worshipful rest is that which renews our love for God and for others. It is the rest that restores our souls.

Summer is, for our family, a time when the worship of work gives way to the worship of rest. We will not fill these precious days with more ways to be distracted, exhausted and pulled in a thousand directions. The evensong of the cicadas invites us to join in the worship of loving God and each other with renewed intent, awash with gratitude that our souls find rest in the finished work of Christ.

Well did Shakespeare observe that “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Before we know it, the season of work will return to claim its laborers. So we will heed the invocation of the cicadas to rest, rest, rest – knowing that our rest here is as vital as it is brief, longing for that future rest when our Sabbath-song of worship, once raised, will redouble and reverberate across eternity.

a meditation for the inner room

One of the things I dreaded most about moving back to North Texas four years ago was tornado season. Since my childhood I have held a healthy respect (okay, paralyzing phobia) of high winds and swirling clouds - in 1979 a mile-wide tornado tore through my hometown. I still remember the howling, clattering roar of it. Since then, if the sirens are sounding you'll find me in the closet under the stairs.

Of course, Houston boasted its own scary brand of weather: the hurricane. Last night as I was sitting in my Dallas home (in the closet under the stairs, listening to the sirens) I remembered this poem that I had written a few years back during a Houston hurricane season. On re-reading it I found it to be a good reminder for the fearful and the doubtful, of whom I have certainly been both.

We are literally thunderstruck by the display of God's power in the elements. But are we adequately amazed at the deeper truth they point to? Sometimes I need my eyes reopened to the greatest display of God's power I have ever witnessed. So here's what I'll meditate on as I "enter into my closet" each spring.

reflections on a hurricane

A churning vortex, reeling unconfined -

In wind and water, terror finds its form.
“Behold,” Derision croons into my mind,
“Believest thou His finger stirs the storm?”

“Is it His voice that thunders in the gale,
That roars above the rising of each swell?
Is it His breath that spews the rain and hail?
Speak, little fool, and own thy folly well. “

Believest thou His finger stirs the storm?

A vastly deeper foolishness I own:
Not only doth He sky and sea transform,
More wondrous still, He stirs the heart of stone.

Job 26: 14

And these are but the outer fringe of his works;
       how faint the whisper we hear of him!
       Who then can understand the thunder of his power?"

chamber of secrets

“Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might...he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding; he reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness and the light dwells with him.” Daniel 2:20-22

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to visit an enormous cavern in the hill country of Texas. For over an hour we walked through “rooms” of exquisite calcite formations, painstakingly formed over thousands of years as water dripped down through the limestone into the cavern, growing each formation a mere inch every hundred years. The caverns existed unseen by human eyes until 1963 when the highway department drilled into them by chance.

Visitors to the caverns get to view each stunning formation in all of its delicate beauty thanks to carefully placed lighting. At one point in the tour, our guide turned off all of the lights so we could experience total darkness. I whispered a quick prayer that I wouldn’t scream like a girl, thinking I was about to experience sheer panic. But what I encountered was another sensation altogether: an acute awareness of the extravagance of my God. For those brief seconds of complete darkness I realized that we were “seeing” the caverns as they had existed for all but the smallest fraction of the earth’s history. For millennia the beauty of that place had rested in absolute darkness, silently growing in splendor, for no other eyes than those of its Creator.

Every formation in that cavern, every column and fissure, every flow stone and vault declared the glory of the God who reveals Himself at His pleasure.  Each offered its praise to its Maker: My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. And had humans never stumbled across the beauty of this secret place, its testimony would have been no less truthful, its Maker no less glorious. God delights in glorifying God. And sometimes we are invited to witness the display.

How humbling to consider how much of the splendor of creation lies beyond what our eyes will ever see.  For a brief fifty years this ethereal chamber of secrets has testified to man of the glory of God. The wise marvel at creation and respond in worship of its Creator.The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of (His) law. As creation declares the glory of God, how much more so the Son, who revealed the Father by bringing light into the utter darkness of our fallenness?  The revelation of God entrusted to us is to be treasured. It is a down payment on the full weight of glory that will one day be revealed to us when that which is created passes away.

But while creation remains, may the things which are seen point us to Him Who is Unseen. May they speak truth to our innermost parts as they declare what was once hidden, as they illuminate what was once total darkness to the eyes of our souls.  And may we join in the chorus the creation has sung for millennia: Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.