And on another happy note, I am getting really good at solving algebraic equations.

Let my mouth be full of Your praise and Your glory all the day long. Psalm 71:8

In the messy, Jesus whispers, “What do you want?” and in the ugly, I want to cry out, “I want to see–see You in these faces.” He speaks soft, “Seek My face.” I want to answer with David, “My heart says to You, Your face, LORD, Your face do I seek,” but I am desperate to grab someone, anyone, and shake hard, ”How do I have the holy vision in this mess? How do I see grace, give thanks, find joy In this sin-stinking place?” –Ann Voskamp

You would be very ashamed if you knew what the experiences you call setbacks, upheavals, pointless disturbances, and tedious annoyances really are. You would realize that your complaints about them are nothing more nor less than blasphemies­‑though that ever occurs to you. Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet (God’s) beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is. -Jean-Pierre de Caussade

A blasphemer.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Psalm 51:11

And my verse for today’s fixed prayers: Be still, then, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.  Psalm 46:11

And my prayer for myself on Wednesdays has more profundity somehow today: May I not lean on my own strength and understanding, but in all my ways may I acknowledge you and have a heart of thanksgiving and be filled with Your wisdom and grace.  And may I live in the joy of the Holy Spirit.

And that joy of the Holy Spirit carried me under His wing all tumultuous day long.  Through some very dark stuff and a few shining celebrations. A veritable shield of faith turning away every flaming single dart of the Enemy. And I am quite sure that this shield of faith is being wielded not by me, but by my prayer warriors who are standing in battle with me, even as my knees are buckling under the onslaught.

And Nicole is leading the singles group at her church tonight through the Lord’s Prayer. And what does it mean for Him not to lead us into temptation? Why do we have to ask that of our loving Father? So I turned to my friend Mr. Google with my question this morning and found lots of insight. John Chrysostom teaches that this petition encourages us to be prepared for anything and everything, “suffering of the body, illnesses of the soul, the plotting of others, the uprising of enemies, the guile of false friends, hunger, torment, mistreatment, legions of demons, and the frenzy of the devil.”

Yes, deliver me, O God.

I know that frenzy first hand.

And when I slid into my car this dark morning, Audrey Assad once again greeted me, and I joined her in this prayer:

From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me O God

From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

And I shall not want, I shall not want

when I taste Your goodness I shall not want
when I taste Your goodness I shall not want

From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

So every day is chock full of the ugly beautiful that both Ann Voskamp and the impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin, encapsulated as, “Le laid peut-etre beau…” Right now the kids are getting yelled at again. With words like crap and exasperation. And I have difficulty making eye contact with all of those student eyes in their general sense of powerlessness and hopelessness. What does anything matter?

But Ann encourages me: Because, somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. With Jesus eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness.

And during one of my parent teacher conferences the momma with pink and purple hair wept a lot. Life is pretty hard. But she said that the little haphazard note I wrote to her child for Christmas about how much joy it brought me when his eyes lit up with the answer, well, her child has posted the note on the refrigerator and reads it out loud to every single visitor. And another kid raised his hand yesterday during the discussion, the kid whose mom just got out of prison and makes all kinds of bad choices all day long, and said that even though he had three F’s last quarter he was feeling optimistic because he and Miss had a good plan in place for this semester. And I showed the guy who has scrawled hate and death onto his forearm with black marker how to use the free version of Sketch Up and his “student desk of the future” looks so cool that it is getting posted on the school website and he has worked on it two straight class periods, rocking his head back and forth to Slipknot, his favorite band.

I shall not want.

Grateful for the startling graces of God today.

The ugly beautiful.

How much larger your life would be if your self could just become smaller in it. –Chesterton

But it is good for me to be near God; I have made Him my refuge. Psalm 73:28

Focusing Prayer: The God Who meets all of my needs according to His glorious riches in Christ

What I desire: To learn the secret of contentment, trusting God for all things in life and death.

These souls love God’s will and find it equally sanctifying, no matter in what shape it comes. They do not speculate about the way God’s will comes to pass; it is enough that they know the Source to give their assent to whatever comes. –de Caussade

Ah, this is the vantage point from the edge of the Grand Canyon, looking over the expanse of timeless shifting colors and shapes that bring so much peace.

Ah, this is the vantage point from laying on the big rock above the Mt. Lemmon cabin where the air is clear and light energy sweeps across inconceivable distance to bring me peace.

Perspective. To look through it.

Jesus whispers to the Surprised by Joy, “God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth.” The humble are the laid-low and bowed ones, the surprised one with hands open to receive whatever He gives.

He hands them the earth.

But is it any wonder? The word humility itself comes from the Latin root humus–the kind of earth that grows good crops. God gives the earth to the humus-people, the humble ones.  Humility is that good humus that grows gratitude that yields abundant joy.

In the upside-down kingdom of heaven, down is up and up is down and those who want to ascend higher must descend lower. And so “anyone who becomes as humble as this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of God.”

Ah, this is the vantage point of little Everette stepping through the door of the Big Kids Sunday School room for the first time: Four rooms crammed full of all-of-this-is-for-me delight.

To receive God’s gifts, to live exalted and joy-filled isn’t a function of straining higher, harder, doing more, carrying long the burdens of the super-Pharisees or ultra-saints. Receiving God’s gifts is a gentle, simple movement of stooping lower.

Again, always, and always again: eucharisteo precedes the miracle. And you’d think I’d know that by now. But I forget. The Wounded Warrior is achingly tender with the broken ones and He has all the patient time to gently lead those who seek and He keeps leading me back to euchaisteo. –Voskamp

And I consider the word speculate. And going around Spanish curves. And it did absolutely no good to try and see ahead in my mind what lay ahead. It messed up my thinking, my presence in the now, my awareness of Him surrounding me with sunshine and wind.

How to rest in that mental sweet-spot, that nestled-into-the-breast of my Abba Father, taking captive over every thought, so that I may pray. That I may pray: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Certainly today has enough cares of its own. Take no thought about tomorrow, for His eye is upon the sparrow.

Small and helpless in His bigness and potency. Consider it pure joy.

And this morning the round moon was in the West, sailing on an ocean of rain

Praise the LORD, for the LORD is good; sing praises to His Name, for it is lovely. Psalm 135:1

Focusing Prayer: God who knows me better than I know myself and who loves me better than I love myself and who guides me better than I can guide myself…in You alone I trust.

So I carried the question of trust to my ladies last night. The ladies who are faithful and honest and wise and have lots of their own stuff to mess with, but who are giving me every Wednesday night for as long as it takes. 

Because every which way possible God had been saying, “Trust Me.” And really, that has been the Big Question of all of this pain and upheaval and long weary nights and long weary days. 

Do you trust Me?

And I can look back over the journals from the Camino:

Whether I am curving up or down the road, the one clear thing is that I have absolutely no idea what lies ahead, except for His presence, and

But it doesn't matter, really, because He is faithful through the winds and the flames. And I have committed to follow Him. No matter what the cost. Which is a scary thing to say, as I have lived and learned in the past and

But then Jesus came, speaking of a peace that took root inside a person. This peace was impervious to any form of opposition. You can do away with the body, Jesus said, but never the soul. His was a radical idea: that all things start in a person's heart.

And the thing about these ladies is that they pause and listen well. And then they speak of one accord. And what they said last night was that trusting God might look different than I imagined.

And after I came home after some quesadillas and salad sorts of things, I picked up Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell.  And he too spoke of one accord, He and the Spirit, from his spot in the closet on a chair, just like my little closet here.

And Jesus is not about some golden gates and paved streets in the future, but right now. Salvation is now. Jesus wants to heal my soul–now. And as long as I am going and going and going I don’t have to stop and face the pain. Stopping is just so difficult.

Usually we can just go on. We put on the mask, suck it up (or in the Coverdale verbiage: pull up my britches) and keep going. We only change when we hit the abyss.

And last night the moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas. A huge perfectly round globe, preparing for an eclipse somewhere in the world.

And Voscamp has a thing about full moons, as being part of the joy of the LORD. Joy that fills her under the full moon is the joy that always fills God. This is His endless experience because this is who He is, beauty overflowing. Her moon wonder is but a glimpse, foretaste, of what God always sees, experiences.

He is not bound by space or time.

The glory of God is the human being fully alive and the life of the human consists in beholding God. –Irenaueus

And this is what the ladies had to say last night, in perfect agreement with Bell and Voscamp and the LORD God Almighty: One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD, and to seek Him in His temple.

One thing.

And of course, my friend C. S. Lewis: We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

Yes, and God has beauty for me, me, created for His purposes, for His honor and glory forever.

Heavenly purity!

Blessed Emptying

Unreserved submission!

Through these, God is welcomed into the very center of the heart.

Everything is Yours,

Everything is from You and for You.

I no longer have anything to be concerned about,

I have no hand in the arrangement of one single moment of my life.

It is for you, LORD, to regulate everything,

Directions, humiliations, means of making us holy,

Perfection, salvation–all are Your business, LORD

Mine is to be satisfied with Your work,

And not to demand the choice of action or condition,

But to leave everything to Your good pleasure. –Jean-Pierre de Caussade

And my chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

And It might just look a little different than the long and winding road I have trod so long.

Amen.