Can a woman forget?

I can be forgetful.  I forget to pick up my dry cleaning, or text people back promptly, or write something important down on my calendar.  I feel like I used to remember and sometimes I stop and ask myself  ”when did I start to forget?”  Of course at first I’m thinking about how forgetful I seem these days with the small daily details of life, but if I sit under the weight of that question for a little longer and pull back a few more layers, that question can easily apply to my identity as well.  When did I start to forget who I am….as a woman…as the child of a loving Creator…when did it slip my mind?  I don’t know the exact moment…but I know remembering who I was created to be has been lost on me lately.  Sometimes I feel like the Lord has forgotten about me, looked over the desires of my heart, maybe been too busy with someone else’s life.  Every now and then I want to wave wildly, jump up and down, clap my hands, whistle….do something to grab his attention and let him know “hey I’m still here!”  If I don’t gloss over those moments and really think about what lies beneath that fear, doubt, and insecurity…I will realize that my gaze has been too steadily fixed on my circumstances and not my loving Redeemer.

A friend text me a verse today out of Isaiah 49 and it goes a little something like this.

14 But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me;
my Lord has forgotten me.”
15 “Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
16 Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are continually before me.
17 Your builders make haste;
your destroyers and those who laid you waste go out from you.
18 Lift up your eyes around and see;
they all gather, they come to you.
As I live, declares the LORD,
you shall put them all on as an ornament;
you shall bind them on as a bride does.

Can a woman forget? My heart answers a solemn yes because I know this woman forgets all the time.  Life is hard…and as women sometimes we get so easily entangled in our own doubt and insecurity.  It leaves this residue on our lives and sometimes if we let it remain there we begin to believe that the Lord isn’t cognizant of us at all.

The beauty of his passage is that a woman cannot forget her child, nor can God forget His.  Sometimes when my life feels like a quiet hallway that echoes each step as I walk through it alone…this is a truth I find easy to forget…one I’ve forgotten recently.  Not only does the Lord not forget us, but His word says He has engraved me on the palms of His hands in perpetual remembrance.  He knows the number of hairs on my head and collects my tears in a bottle….he remembers me….he notices me.  When my flesh seems eager to take over, I must remind myself of these words.  When we miss these truths, especially as women, we must “lift up our eyes and see” that before us is a righteous God whose love wipes away the residues left behind by the fear, insecurity, loneliness, and doubt and provides for us intimately and completely.  When my eyes are fixed on my circumstances and I am longing for my own happy ending, I become forgetful and lost.  It’s the sweet mercies of being reminded of who you are that let you know that God is in the details and while you may forget sometimes…He never does.

It’s harder to love.

Love is a funny thing.  I’ve thought a lot about love this week.   I feel like a lot of people I know have experienced loss lately and it makes me think about how vulnerable love can make you. It’s harder to love.  Life would be so much easier if we kept our heart in glass boxes where they were visible, but untouchable….then our hearts would never break.  But I think there’s something to be said for the breaking process.  When a bone breaks, your body begins this healing process that “knits” the bone back together.  When the bone heals properly it  can actually be stronger than it was before.  Sometimes love can be like broken bones.   Our spirit finds that while we sit amongst the rubble of what seems like a dismantling of our hearts, it is in the shadow of that moment that we find our quietest strength.  Strength we didn’t know we possessed, but comes and sits alongside us and slowly helps us piece back together the ripped fabric and broken threads of our life.

When you love you open yourself up to the great heights of joy, but also the depths of heartbreak.  When you love you are vulnerable…. you carve out this space in your heart for other people to come and reside.  That can be scary and wonderful all in the same breath.  We are not always the best caretakers of love and often forget the fragility and vulnerability that walk hand in hand with it.  Our souls become enmeshed with others….we share our highs and our lows, our celebrations and our secrets, and it sometimes seems that in that we bestow people with the power to hurt us or heal us by their love.  That is the nature of love.

So if it’s harder to love why do we do it? Because we were made by a Creator that loves deeply.  He wired us to imitate that love…to be the things that He is.  We were made to love, to have faith, to forgive, to hope.  We weren’t made to keep our hearts in glass boxes and spend the remainder of our days on this earth attempting to avoid the dismay of loss that accompanies a fractured spirit.  When you love something rare and beautiful is created.  To truly love makes you more honest, more loving, it brings out the best version of yourself.  When you love you stitch together stories of beauty, loss, joy, tragedy, faith, and perseverance that create this beautiful display of a life cultivated by a devotion to others, which is a reflection of Christ’s devotion to us.

Our love is not always reciprocated, and sometimes even when it is, it doesn’t come in the form that we expected.  Throwing off what hinders us to love freely is unnatural and frightening, but in those moments when we don’t let fear have a place at the table and we love beyond what our flesh tells us is safe, then we will find true reward because we will no longer be thinking about what is at stake, but what we have to gain.  In the end….whether we accrue a strength birthed from the breaking of a spiritual bone during a season of heartbreak or intimacy and depth that overflows from a life-giving source of love …we are moving forward.  Taking the bitter with the sweet and accepting the change that both bring.

Let’s gather ’round the dinner table…

The other night I went out to dinner with several friends.   We sat around a long rectangular dinner table that was the perfect size to allow everyone to blend into the conversation easily.  The night started out with clusters of different conversations, but as the time progressed we all seemed to get entangled in one big conversation together.  It was like a scene from a movie where the ambience is perfect, wine glasses are clinking, laughter is flowing back and forth from both ends of the table, the low buzz of other people talking at their tables and waiters bustling around is heard in the background….and in that moment I couldn’t help but withdraw from the conversation and become a mute observer.   In that moment I felt thankful.  Beyond that though I started to think about what it means to share a meal?  How often do we think about that?  It’s something we do so often that we easily take it for granted.

Historically, we use having meals as a focal point to gather together and commune with others.  I think in the hustle and bustle of today’s world this is a lost art.  The dinner table is this forum of sorts where ideas are exchanged, thoughts are expressed, intimacy is nurtured, arguments are explored, laughter is shared, and hearts are woven together.  Even when you share a dinner table with the same people over and over, like the sunset, it never looks the same.

That time around the dinner table is a place where the world spinning around us comes to a halt and we grasp for those minutes or hours and cram them full of conversations and memories.  The dinner table is where texture is added to our friendships and our family.  There is a depth that is fostered around the dinner table that we must recognize as one of the biggest intangible benefits of a meal.

Fight for these times with your friends and your family.  Drink them in.  Deeply inhale the goodness of the moment with those around you and exhale graciousness for these moments you’ve been given.  They aren’t promised to us, but they profoundly enrich the time we have here on this earth!

(Ps. I did not take this photo…I don’t know who did, but I just thought it was cool…and blogs are always more fun when a photo is involved

Playing Paparazzi….

Shot I got while in NYC in August.  Love Drew…would hate being a paparazzi!

Imagine this with me.  You’re one of twelve children, but you’ve won first place in the heart of your father.  Jealousy runs rampant among your other siblings to the point that they can’t even muster up a kind word to say to you.  Your siblings make a plan to kill you, which luckily for you, ends up taking on a different direction when they decide to sell you into slavery.  They lie to you dad and tell him you got killed.  Meanwhile you end up a slave to a powerful man whose wife repeatedly tries to wear you down and seduce you.  You finally try to flee and his wife ends up lying and getting you thrown in jail.  How crazy does this story sound??  How outrageous!  What kind of family does that??!!

Yet this is the story of Joseph.

Genesis 37-50 unfolds like a soap opera.  It will keep you glued to the page.  How many of us have a story remotely identifiable to that of Joseph?  Probably not too many.

Yet what my heart loves about Joseph is that his faith in the Lord is steadfast.  God never spoke directly to Joseph and gave him the play by play of what He was going to do so Joseph knew there was going to be a greater purpose.  Joseph trusted the Lord.  He didn’t whine and complain.  If it were me I probably would have pouted in my jail cell and plotted my revenge on my 11 brothers.  That’s not what Joseph did.

In fact, if you read on you will see that Gen 39:2 says the Lord was with Joseph and He prospered him.  Joseph found favor with Pharaoh and he put Joseph in charge of the entire land of Egypt!

Now this is where it gets good.  Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt when a severe famine hit and they had to buy grain.

Let’s think about this for a second.  It’s been years since Joseph has seen his brothers and the last encounter they had wasn’t so great.  What do you think Joseph is going to say?  What would you say?

I thought about what I would say.  It wouldn’t have been very nice, but I feel like I would have been entitled to say it because my brothers were a bunch of punks who sold me into slavery.  Even though it turned out ok and I had some pretty nice digs now I still would have been a little angry.  By that point I would have probably played this moment over and over in my mind.  I would have been armed with all of my cutting statements that were meant to evoke horror and guilt in their hearts over what they had done.  I would have definitely made it known that I was doing pretty well for myself now. I would mask my pain over what they had done to me with a wall a mile thick so that it wouldn’t appear that they had even the smallest effect on me.

The funny thing is…Joseph did none of that.  He said “hey you guys, don’t be upset or angry for selling me because I saved a bunch of lives today! God sent me ahead of you so I could save your lives! Come live near me and I’ll provide everything you need for you and your families.” And then he kissed them and wept for them.

Wasn’t what you were expecting?  I have read this story several times in my life, but it wasn’t really until I was put in Joseph’s shoes that I fully understood how hard forgiveness is when you’ve been hurt.  It’s painful…especially when it’s your own family.  I didn’t handle my situation as gracefully as Joseph did, but as I was pondering this story the other day I pleaded with the Lord to give me a heart like Joseph.  Luke 6:45 says “ A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Joseph’s heart was full of good things.  Over the years he hadn’t been hating his brothers in his heart, devising some plan of vengeance, and then just turn around when he saw them and speak these words.  He trusted the Lord.  Regardless of what situation he was in, Joseph trusted the Lord was in the center of it.

I can’t say that’s where I’m at.  That’s where I want to be though.  I want a heart like Joseph.  I want to react like Joseph when someone has wronged me or offended me.  I want my reactions to be characterized by peace, grace, love, kindness, and mercy.

I think this is very heart revealing story when you put yourself in the middle of it.  The beautiful thing about it all is that it’s this perfect picture of God’s mercy and grace.  We turn our backs on him, idolize ourselves and other things, seek His hand and forget about his face and even though God may discipline us through that, He is still saying “Hey I love you…I want to give you life!  I have good things for you!”  Let His undeserved love settle on your heart and saturate the depths of your soul.  He is good.  He does good.  He wants good for you.  Even in the midst of hard circumstances…He is still all those things and more!

A heart like Joseph comes from seeking the heart of Christ.   The way he lived his life communicated his trust and faithfulness in the God!  I hope one day my life is a reflection of that as well.

Lord give me a heart like you!