Tell Her This

Tell her from this high terrain I am ready now to fall...

I was 23ish working the closing shift in a small bar & grill in Newport News, VA.  While brushing  cigarette ashes off the side rail of a pool table I held my breath in the game room and felt a sweep of devouring loneliness.  Months earlier I had sufficiently derailed and destroyed an engagement with a perfectly normal wonderful man who loved me.  It was a self-inflicted, self-absorbed binge of insecurity and unwillingness to mature emotionally.  At the time I gave in deeply to selfishness and it cost me the companionship I longed for the most.

There was a song, that in the first moment I ever heard it, froze me in my tracks.  It met me in my happiest and loneliest places simultaneously and spoke the words I hungered desperately to hear. A song that you can hear after years without a trace and begin to sing the chorus immediately.

Despising the duty of cleaning that game room off the main dining area in the restaurant I stopped to look at the songs on the jukebox one night. It was late and we were closing soon but the music hadn't been turned off and switched to the TV just yet.  Like a needle coming off a record there it was, 'Tell Her This'.

Fast forward to right now.  Almost 20 years later.  I see the name of a music artist coming in concert and wonder if that's the one that sang that song.  I was cruising my fb feed in search of news headlines. (I read news after the news about the news, and then the news itself. Follow me?) The name caught my attention and then I remembered how I froze in happiness and then tears when the chorus played long ago.  I would erupt in the last few verses.  Still do but for much different reasons now.

So, I searched the internet with a few lyrics because I couldn't remember the name of anything- song, artist, year- all blank.  Thank you Google.  As I hit play and listened it was the unearthing of a time capsule.  Stop what you're doing, what just happened, where did you come from kind of time capsule. It was like pulling out one happy and then painful memory at a time. In layers. So I listened a second time, and then a third.  The second round I thought of my daughters and how I hoped music moved them like this one day.  (Not the sorrow or bad decisions, and yes I hope they love praise and worship music more, but being held in music when you needed it most and could not communicate otherwise.) Then the third round happened, and it hit me.

Flashback- I was so devastatingly lonely in that smoke-filled room years ago. Blinded. Brushing the ashes off the side of the pool table.  Tired of the smoke. Tired of an empty room at home but unable to share it with anyone who truly cared about me. And, there was a break in patrons feeding the jukebox so I played my song while I cleaned.  Like dancing with an invisible stranger loneliness draped it's arms on my shoulders, but so did the hope that one day someone would sing about me the way he did in THAT song.

Tonight, I found myself lying next to my forever husband. And God just sank into me. Speaking a whisper as the song played on my laptop and my husband softly snored on his side.  "Remember how lonely, how lost, how broken you felt? I heard you." My face got hot and then my chest. "And when you gave me the reins...this great life you enjoy right now...this great love that you have today..." BOY did it sink in heavy right there- God kept whispering saying, "Summer here it is," as the wave of tears and an undeserving embrace of grace consumed me "I love you, I loved you the most, I love you the most. I always will."

Things changed all those years ago.  Ups, downs, victories, failures but everything got better. I never understood the phrase 'beautifully broken' and why women especially would champion it like a banner.  Really, what were they thinking?!? Then you add Jesus.  In Jesus we are made whole so our brokenness is beautiful because our Father sees us as whole.  Because of Jesus he only knows us as whole.

I was beautifully broken. Thank you Jesus.

https://youtu.be/NIiwQnJYhEU

Not Good Enough: A story of silent sacrifices

Originally posted April, 2016

How long can I go before that thought pops into my head?  "Not good enough."

My husband would probably tell you that according to the number of times I have rearranged the furniture in any given room in our new home that I've secretly had a new tattoo inscribed on my body with that phrase. Yikes! This whole Jesus life has me pushing to see the potential of Christ in each human being.  If I'm not supposed to judge people then I'll judge furniture, pictures, and accessories.  They don't have feelings- it's okay I secretly think.

Slippery slope.

As tough as this is to admit there's a reason why I'm so good at blurting out, "not good enough" to the pillows on my sofa. I've been crafting these three words for years. I can slay someone down to shreds with a few short sentences that infer a lacking of some degree. My sword heavy in selfish standards. My sin a delight to the enemy.

For a better part of my life, I upheld the worst kind of comparison standard- the manner and style with which my mother chose to love me. Yep. I'll never forget my freshman year of college when my roommate would receive small boxes of care packages from her mother who was a single parent at the time, just like my mom, and I got upset with my mom over the phone and told her that it'd be nice if she sent even a card to me telling me that she loved me or missed me. Oh burn mom!  Get it right I thought. To which my mother replied with a shaking in her voice, "I'm sorry that the way I do things isn't good enough for you Summer." The reality was that she probably had $22 in her checking account to last until the end of the week and there I was on the phone swinging my sword with no regard for her or my high school sister still at home under her roof.

Mom sent me a card the following week.  As I saw her handwriting on the envelope sideways in my skinny little campus mailbox I heard her whisper in my ear, "I'm trying." That card is still in my possession.  

Fast forward to now. Enter Jesus stage left. Here I am with two young daughters of my own and thinking that by finding my identity in Christ, as a daughter of the King, as an heir to the glory of God that my emptiness in all things would be filled.  That my perception that I needed my mommy to be just right for me would disappear because Christ is all I need- only, I still have such a wanting. Couldn't I learn as a mother myself what was going on in my mother's head all those years I needed more of her? In present day mom would help me or do something for me and have to bolt and I'd think to myself, "You couldn't stay just five more minutes so I could finish putting the groceries away before you hand me the baby and say- love ya, bye"? Knowing intellectually that so many people in this world would cherish anyone in their life that would come to their home for any manner of help and comfort.  My heart still cried a whimper of "not good enough" from time to time with a sadness and stinging.

So, I started talking out this post in my head, about how I wasn't letting God fill the hole in my heart, and how I needed to drench my whole self with the Holy Spirit when God spoke up, stopping me abruptly in my tracks.  I was standing at the sink and he said, "let me play this out for you Summer..." God said, "Have you wanted your mom to know Christ and have him as Lord of her life more than you wished she would step up to the standard of mothering you've created?"

Dang.

Did I long for her Joy in Christ as much as I longed for her to bring me temporary happiness?

Have I prayed for it in equal or greater time? Enter tears. Enter a deafening silence to my wanting. Delete self-appointed standard.

All of the sudden the reservoir where I once found a drought was filled with a flood of images.  Images of all the silent sacrifices my mother had made for me over the years. I saw how God had used HER to get to me. I saw where she had seen MY selfish ways and still loved me with a desperate heart. The only desperation I held was my own, not hers, not in this true joy I had come to know in a life with sin forgiven.  I stopped what I was doing and grabbed my prayer journal.  The last sentence says, "I created a new prayer."

News flash. I'm human and an expert sinner.  God gave Christ and he died because all the prophets before him weren't "good enough" for the people of Israel to see that God was the creator of all things truly good and created in Joy and in one last hail mary God said- see this, know my love, that you cannot earn or lose, as I give it to you in completeness through a perfect man who will suffer the sin of the world.  

No matter how bad or strayed or selfish I have been my mother has always been there for me in some form or another.  We are two imperfect people, experts in sin and still learning the way of love, with one another to cleave to as we make the journey back home. Thank goodness God didn't stop with, "not good enough".