What is eternal must always be complete, if my understanding is correct. So it is possible to imagine that time was created in order that there might be narrative – event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation.

– The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, Marilynne Robinson

This is something I have thought about quite a lot this past year: how eternity is the natural state of things, and how the temporal is part of creation. Time did not exist until God decided to make it. He decided to divide our lives and experiences into separate moments, each of which must pass away before we can experience the next. Why is this? What was His purpose behind the creation of linear time?

It is obviously a big question to ask, one with an infinite number of answers. But my favorite answer is this: story. In order for story to exist, progress must exist. In order for progress to exist, time must exist. I love this idea that God is not merely an author; He invented story, and He invented it because story is the best way of expressing anything. Which is why Jesus chose to speak in parables. Which is why the stories we tell hold so much power: they express universal truths better than any other form of communication that exists.

Music also requires time and progress in order to exist, in order for one note to follow another. Music is itself a form of story, one that everyone understands regardless of what language they speak. Our lives are narratives that overlap with everyone else's, threads in a tapestry so enormous we cannot yet see the image they combine to make. And every story we tell, every song we write, is an attempt to glimpse and echo that greater tapestry.

I think that love, in order to be properly and wholly expressed, needs this grand narrative of the Earth and the universe: in order to act out its capability for reconciliation, redemption, and rebirth. Even the darkness is beautiful when seen in this context. In the end, the deepened shadows in the tapestry only serve to make the picture all the clearer, the colors in it all the brighter. Darkness serves a greater purpose even when it is deliberately trying to undermine purpose.

What is at the very bottom of the universe? What is the bedrock of existence? If what I said above is even close to the truth, then the answer is "Love, expressed."

The more I think about it, the less impossible it seems.

The absence of God is not just an idea to conjure with, an emptiness for the preacher to try to furnish, like a house, with a chair and sofa, heat and light, to make it livable. The absence of God is just that which is not livable. It is the tears that Jesus wept over Lazarus and the sweat he sweated in the garden and the cry he choked out when his own tongue filled his mouth like a gag... The prophets and the psalms all speak of the one who is not there when he is most needed – not to mention Noah and Abraham, Gideon, Barak, Samson and David, and the rest of them who, if they did not speak of their anguish, carried it around in their hearts and grew whiskers and wore robes and armor and ephods and stovepipe hats to help conceal it even from themselves.

– Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Frederick Buechner

I think Christians too often try to make excuses for God's absence. We try to mitigate it, explain it away, as if it's our duty to perform damage control on God's behalf. In reality, this absence should be affirmed. It should be spoken of, questioned, felt deeply. As Buechner points out, the Bible is full of people doing this exact thing: asking God where He is, desperate for Him to show Himself, almost demanding Him to make an appearance.

This divine absence is at the core of why I do trust Christ – because He, too, felt the emptiness of God's abandonment on the cross. Through Christ, God Himself felt what it was like for us, forced Himself to feel it by failing to save Himself. He experienced the shadow of His own face turned away. It is a strange sort of masochism, when you think about it. God was determined to step into our shoes, to become a man at a man's lowest point – and then go even further down. For none of us have ever been spiritually abandoned to the extent that Jesus was on Calvary: left to experience the depths of Hell on creation's behalf.

If we despair at our Father's absence, at not being able to feel Him, Jesus not only listens: He understands. He understands better than we do, because He went through it to a degree we will never have to.

I'm sure God could have rescued humanity in any way He chose. But He chose to become like us. He gave us Himself not just in death, but also in life. He chose to bridge the gap by living as we live and suffering as we suffer, so I can never say He doesn't understand.

This is why I am certain of God's love even when I do not feel it. Because Jesus remained certain of His love for me when all he could feel was emptiness.

This knowledge lights the darkness of God's silence, and I will walk through it without fear because I know Christ walked through it before me.

He is both the rest and the storm, both the victim and the wielder of the flaming sword, and you must accept him or reject him on the basis of both. Either you'll have to kill him or you'll have to crown him. The one thing you can't do is just say, "What an interesting guy." Those teachers of the law who began plotting to kill Jesus at the end of this episode in the temple – they may have been dead wrong about him, but their reaction makes perfect sense.

– King's Cross, Timothy Keller

I am tired of Christ being watered down by people, for people. (I do not exclude myself in that statement.)

God is not politically correct. God is not tame. God is not going to change Himself to fit my pre-conceived notions of who He should be, how He should act, what He should stand for. Do I call Him unjust? Am I indignant on another's behalf, crying out for justice and shaking my fist at Him for not providing it? God is Justice itself. I do not feel a thing for another person, outrage or otherwise, that He has not felt already: a thousand times more deeply and more truly. He gave me the capacity to feel a small fraction of what He feels. Anything more would destroy me.

His love is not an affectionate feeling; it is a force that made the worlds. His justice cuts cleanly, his grace forgives completely – he is the lion and the lamb, all at once.

This is paradox because it is truth. Every true thing has at its core a contradiction, because all truth brings us to the end of ourselves, to the very limits of our understanding; we strain after truth and in our strain see it double, see its shadow, not knowing how to reconcile it, trying to fit it inside our minds when it was not made for our minds to know. It was made to be known through story, through life, through relationship.

And how many times has a story or relationship brought me to the end of myself, shown me the world more clearly than anything before: and yet when I am asked to explain precisely what I see, I am at a loss for words?

Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking, "But I never knew before. I never dreamed..." I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology: "It reminds me of straw."

– Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C.S. Lewis

I spent so much time outside this weekend. Spring is peeking its face around the corners of winter. Out where we biked (and fished) the snowcapped mountains stood like testaments, reminding me of all it's taken to get us here – of all I have, and how unbelievably rich life can be.

We rode by pastures and fields filled with cows, horses, and sheep lazily drinking in the sun. There are few things in the world that calm me more than watching a horse shuffle around in a ranch pasture, pricking its ears at the sounds of cars and trucks going by, but not caring one whit about them. I want to be that way. Aware of the madness of life, but not affected by it. Basking in God's sunlight and letting my soul rest in contentment with what I have.

I am absurdly, absurdly blessed. When I worry about anything lately, I just feel like an ungrateful wretch. I think I'm beginning to get better about it, finally: I'm beginning to see that anything surrendered to God, whether it be a day at work or a chronic weakness of my own, will see transformation. In that surrender is my freedom. I will never know peace until I make this my first art every morning. Until I learn to do it in my sleep.

Lately, Solomon's words in Ecclesiastes keep returning to me:

I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil—this is the gift of God.

– Ecclesiastes 3:10–14, NIV

I feel that burden of temporal beauty. I feel that frustration of not being able to see and understand everything God has done, and is doing, from the beginning of the world to its end.

And yet, in the midst of this divine restlessness, God tells us: "It's okay to simplify." There is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. The doing good part I get, but wait: God wants me to be happy?

Yes. This will never cease to catch me off-guard; proof that my own theology is sometimes twisted, and that my own guilt far too often gets in the way of me seeing and accepting God's love.

Isn't this the goal of all social justice? Why would we attempt to help people in poverty if we didn't ultimately believe that it is good to be happy, and that it is not good to suffer? That God wants us to take joy in life, not wander through our days in misery?

That said, it is not good to cling to happiness and define ourselves by it; it is not good to attempt to duplicate it apart from God. In fact, this is not only a bad idea, it's impossible. We can never satisfy our own souls with man-made happiness, for true joy only comes from God, its author.

And this is the secret. This is Solomon's wisdom: if God is the source and center of my life, then joy and doing good will be born of each other.

I want everything I do to feed this cycle.

We matter. Our actions matter. When we pretend like we don't, and act like we don't, the universe spins out of balance.

The most recent Fringe episode (3.10, "The Firefly") illustrated this in a beautiful way, when the Observer told a despairing Walter:

"There are things that I know. But there are things that I do not. Various possible futures are happening simultaneously. I can tell you all of them, but I cannot tell you which one of them will come to pass. Because every action causes ripples - consequences both obvious and unforeseen. For instance, after I pulled you and Peter from the icy lake: later that summer, Peter caught a firefly. I could not have known he would do that or that because he did, a young girl three miles away would not. And so, later that night, she would continue looking, trying to find another one. I could not have known that when she did not come home, her father would go out looking for her, driving in the rain, so that when the traffic light turned red, his truck skidded through the intersection at Harvard Yard, killing a pedestrian."

The third book of Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, also comments on this truth:

"Ananda," Mrs. Murray said thoughtfully. "That rings some kind of bell."
"It's Sanskrit," Charles Wallace said.
Meg asked, "Does it mean anything?"
"That joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse."
"That's a mighty big name for one dog to carry," Mrs. Murray said.
"She's a large dog, and it's her name," Charles Wallace responded.

I wonder if that isn't the real reason we reject this notion that we intrinsically matter. Not because it's hard to believe that small things can affect large things (it's science, natch) but because we don't like the thought that we're responsible for anyone but ourselves.

Because holding the universe together is a mighty big responsibility for us to carry around.

And yet, it doesn't matter how much we deny it.

The state of the world today proves our power, mis-wielded though it may be. It's because of us, and us alone, that we've gotten to this point. We're the Earth's bane, when we should have been its protector. Our selfishness and pursuit of individual, temporary happiness over the well-being of others (and our world) has caused disaster after disaster. With our eyes turned inward, we're able to ignore these disasters and go on igniting them, one long chain of cause-and-effect with a list of collateral damage that no single human mind can follow to its end.

And so the axis keeps on wobbling... while we keep repeating to ourselves: It doesn't matter.

The most difficult thing to let go of is my self, that self which, coddled and cozened, becomes smaller as it becomes heavier. I don't understand how and why I come to be only as I lose myself, but I know from long experience that this is so.

– The Irrational Season, Madeleine L'Engle

I am far too self-conscious.

This is probably my greatest fault and stumbling block. I don't know myself, and yet I cling to the parts of me that I can define, and that I want others to define me by; I get paralyzed when I think that others might see past the mask I so carefully place over my face every day. I give up on creating, because I can't shake the certainty that the inevitable criticism will undo me, will make my every effort worthless.

I am always aware of my audience, fearing them.

I fear too little what God thinks of me.

And there's the great irony: God thinks more of me than people ever will. God died for me when my face was still turned away from His. I build my identity on little lies while He holds my true self hidden in Him, beckoning me to trust that I am worth His blood, that He died to give me a face, to make my potential limitless, to join in creating with me. To make me whole.

I can never do anything to make myself worth less in His eyes.

Shouldn't this very knowledge destroy my self-consciousness?

I need to learn how to lose myself again. I need to admit that I have no idea who the hell I am, but I know I'm more than the pathetic half-life I try to resuscitate every day. More than the mask.

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

– Jim Elliot

I'm going to miss Moment Church. So is Luke. In the four or five weeks since its soft launch, it has been challenging us in powerful and uncomfortable ways. God obviously had a purpose (doesn't He always?) in placing us there right as this big move came into the picture. I don't know if we would have been able to face the overwhelming repercussions of it otherwise.

Leaving does one important thing: it forces us to internalize what we've learned in our short time there; we can't rely on every Sunday to give us a new shot in the arm. I need to stoke this fire on my own, through prayer and trust. I'm learning what it's like to throw everything I have – the trash and the little bits of gold I cling to so tightly – at God's feet each morning. I'm learning how to shrug off my dead skin and say: "This is Yours. Do with it what You will."

We're leaving behind our safety net: emotionally more than financially. Being surrounded by friends and family that love you, having neighbors that are your best buddies and always there for you, having a church that keeps you honest – it's become something I depend on. To some extent (as horrible as this sounds), it has crippled me. I say this not to diminish these incredible people and the invaluable support they've given us, but to chastise myself for making it my world. I should not be content with fluffing up a little bed in a patch of grass and sleeping through my life, ignoring the desert all around me. I should not be content with pointing at beauty and marvelling, like a tourist; I should be out in the world working to dig beauty out of the mire, to carve it from the hardness of others' hearts. God's work. God's story.

I know my loved ones would agree.

But the Father makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and our love, if we are to be sons of God, must not be limited to friends and to those who favor us or give us joy.

– Love and Living, Thomas Merton

I'm scared, but my heart is full. I can no longer crop God out of the corners of my life; He hasn't left me that option. I can no longer talk about Him without trusting Him to provide, to finish His work in me, to change the hearts of those around me.

I will risk for Him. I will step out blindly, reach my hands out for His steadying grip, and let it guide me through the dark.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.

– Mark 9:24

The scandal of the Old Testament – Genesis, for instance – is to some modern readers the fact that so many of God's acts are perfectly ordinary and seemingly trivial: the choice of a wife for Isaac, or the skill with which Jacob becomes rich. These are hardly what we would call "divine" acts in the sense of having a special and marvelous character about them. But they are nevertheless the acts of God. Hence, there is a disconcerting aura of secularity about much of God's activity as recorded in the Bible, and uneasiness with this has generally led certain types of philosophic religiosity to improve on the concept of God, seeking to make it more spiritual, more impressive to man's mind, in a word, more "divine."

– "Seven Words for Ned O'Gorman" (III - Divine), Love and Living, Thomas Merton

It's often disturbingly easy for me – along with other Christians – to fall into this pseudo-Gnostic mindset that divides the spiritual from the physical along a definite line. It's easy to think that God is much too "divine" to be concerned with the banalities of my day-to-day existence. Other people don't care; why should God?

But where did we get this idea that God is too big to be conscious of the little things? Being infinite, wouldn't He have – quite literally – all the time in the universe to be concerned with the little things, whereas we do not?

What if the acts of God aren't always grand and sweeping, but more often so small and ordinary we can hardly discern them?

God called the physical world "good" when He created it. He calls the human body His temple. Everything we touch and see (and even things we don't) is made of matter that was brought into being, however long ago, by His spoken Word: His breath. Surely there is no more profound integration of the physical and the spiritual than this. God choosing to express Himself through creation. And then bridging the gap by entering it Himself – becoming incarnate. The Word made flesh.

Why do we insist on dividing what He has brought together?

Was meeting Luke (my husband) God-ordained? I absolutely believe it, but sometimes it sounds so fanciful to say out loud. How about this new job offer that might take us out-of-state? Should I even bother God with my anxiety over it?

The answer is, of course I should. He wants to be bothered. How else should I interpret the fact that He decided to become a dusty, sweaty carpenter and experience human life for Himself? Isn't the fact that He used some dirt and spit to make a blind man see again proof enough that He doesn't mind – even treasures – the ordinary grime of our existence, the ordinary struggles?

This is the God I believe in: the God that loves His creation in all its messiness. Emmanuel, God with us. His plan is to renew and redeem the physical world, not to destroy it. His plan is to mend the broken bonds between body and soul, Earth and heaven, the seen and the unseen. And He might just use a bit of dirt and spit to do it.

Who am I to argue?

The shadows exist in the painting, the dark corners of grief and trial and wickedness all exist so that He might step inside them, so we could see how low He can stoop. In this story, the Author became flesh and wandered the stage with Hamlet, offering His own life. In this story, the Author heaped all that He loathed, all that displeased Him, all the wrongness of the world, onto Himself. Evil exists so that He might be demeaned and insulted, so that the depth of His love and sacrifice could be expressed as much as is possible in the small frame of history.

We could say He cares nothing for our pain. We could say He is not good. We could say we don't understand why the sky isn't all rainbows and why the common cold exists. But we would be fools. And somehow, He would still like us.

– Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl, N.D. Wilson

Some days, the world as God's expression of Himself makes perfect and beautiful sense to me. When I see a loner strumming his guitar on the beach, singing quietly. When I'm laughing uproariously with friends. When I stand marveling at some unspeakably beautiful scene of nature, shaped by millenia. And when I sit marveling at some unspeakably beautiful scene in a story, shaped by human souls.

But some days, it is difficult to see how the shadows fit. What purpose they serve. Why our loving Father would allow them to pierce us so deeply.

Do I realize what the cross really means? Can I really say that this darkness weighing on my heart does not weigh more heavily on His? What of His suffering? Is it not more than I will ever have to endure? Does it not prove His love for me more profoundly than anything else could?

I say, "I love you." God made those words flesh by walking them to Calvary.

I believe God's allowance of evil is His way of defeating it. He tells Satan (as in Job): "Take your best shot. There is no suffering you can inflict that I cannot turn to good in the end. There is no darkness you can cast that will not draw My children closer to Me in the end. Watch and see."

God knew the world would fall. He let it. Why? Because His love is made perfect in weakness. Because the shadows draw us closer to Him – closer even than the angels.

The cross makes it impossible for me to say to God, "You don't know how I feel." If I do, I'm a fool.

But He still loves me.

But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.

– 2 Corinthians 12:9, NIV

Yahweh, teach me to love as You do.

There is something pleasing to a mystic in such a land of mirrors. For a mystic is one who holds that two worlds are better than one. In the highest sense indeed, all thought is reflection. ...Man alone is able to see his own thought double, as a drunkard sees a lamp-post. Man alone is able to see his own thought upside down as one sees a house in a puddle. This duplication of mentality, as in a mirror, is the inmost thing of human philosophy.

– Manalive, G.K. Chesterton

It's been said before in other ways, but – as usual – I feel Chesterton says it best.

The fact that we are only creature on Earth with self-awareness is fascinating in and of itself (especially because there is no real practical use for it – it allows us to act against logic and our survival instincts). But I think it's also a clue about the nature of the multiple worlds we inhabit daily: we are body and spirit, mind and soul, driven by both reason and impulse – and we overlap everywhere. Rationalism itself requires faith; intiution makes sense of a illogical situation; art speaks in a wordless language that is nevertheless universally understood.

When people ask me why I believe in God – and particularly why I believe in Christ – I am usually assaulted by too many possible responses to pick just one. But I think the key thing is this: that God's existence and Christ's reality account for the whole of the human being. And there is no other philosophy, worldview, or religion I have encountered that does this (IMO). Some of them do a compelling and insightful job of addressing certain aspects of humanity, but they leave other things out (or claim those other things don't exist). Only Christ accounts for all of it – engages the whole of the human being without leaving any part of it unspoken for.