And they told him, "Come."

The rhythmic cadence was spread thin throughout the vast night sky until it lingered as a faint and pulsing echo. The blanket of stars cast a glorious glow over the hills, a glow more radiant than normal, a glow that caught the wonder of the little boy’s eyes and as he lifted his head in awe, his hands stilled and he and his drum stood in silence. His gaze was interrupted by a group of eager shepherds. Their steps ascended the hill he stood on and their voices brought news to his ears of great joy. His mother had told him about a king: a king who would receive the throne of their father David and reign forever and ever; a king who was good and who would save their people. This king had come, and the shepherds said to the boy, “Come.” They said he was born, this king, a child, in Bethlehem, and they called him Savior, Christ the Lord.

The little boy’s heart fluttered in anticipation as he hastened to keep up with the shepherds. He ran in excitement, down the hill, and toward the city, luminous with glory. They arrived at the stable and the little boy, moved by delight yet slowed by overwhelming wonder, cautiously peered around the doorframe and into the tiny room. He took no notice of the man or the woman or the animals surrounding them or the shepherds who were now laying their gifts at the manger, his eyes were fixated on the baby, he was mesmerized by the king. After a few enchanting moments, he looked at the gifts at the foot of the manger and his little heart dropped. He had nothing. He had nothing of value, nothing that was fit to give a holy king. Looking around, there was nothing he could find but dirt and grass and the gifts already given. Disheartened, he slowly turned to the leave. He did not belong in the company of saints. He was just a small boy, and a poor one at that.

As he bowed his head toward the ground, he remembered: He was not just a small poor boy—he was a drummer, and the drum that he so devotedly practiced still hung faithfully around his neck. Beaming with pride, he came near to the manger and asked if he could offer to the king, a song, on his drum. With joyful permission he began to play. The little boy, bursting with excitement and delight, played with the strength of a soldier and with the disposition of a skilled drummer. He was pleased to offer to the king his very best. And his very best it was. And as the king smiled, the beautifully triumphant song resounded within the tiny walls, echoed over the city, and spread throughout the sky, illuminating the already brilliant stars, for the next few moments, with a pure, majestic and heavenly glory.

Learning to Love the Inevitable

There is this famous prayer that someone once told me about and part of it says something about accepting the things you can’t change and changing the things that you can, or something like that. This idea though, of accepting the things you cannot change, has kept with me and challenged me.

I feel like I’m on the edge of being a grown up. There are significant moments that pass me by when I can feel what it must feel like to have experienced life and to have grown stronger through pain. Accepting the things that you cannot change is one of those things that it seems grown ups know how to do. Life carries with it intrinsic change. Some changes are good, some are hard, some are painful, some are easy, some are barely noticed. Until this point in my life, change has been fun and exciting and adventurous. Some changes have been nuisances and some have been challenging. For the most part, however, those that I didn’t favor were easily avoided and ignored, or quickly conquered. I have pioneered my own path, swam across streams, avoided the poison ivy for blackberry bushes, and brushed the thistles off my clothes and plucked the thorns out of my feet, but none of this compared to the cliff that I now stood before. The dread in my stomach almost came up though my throat when I looked down at the change I was facing, the change that was inevitable with or without me. I hesitated and considered my choices. I could stay at the edge for as long as time would allow and watch change happen, watch it happen without me and be stubborn enough to not be a part of it. I could hope that by planting my feet on the edge, change would somehow feel my resistance, honor my strenuous desire and reverse itself. But that doesn’t happen. I do not matter to change. My other option was to jump. I could leap confidently into the thin and fearsome air, and give my body into the gravity of change. I could love how the wind whirls around me as I fall, as I tuck my head down and grasp my legs tight to my chest, spinning with bold dignity, embracing change, learning to love the inevitable.

As I fall, I don’t know what will meet me at the bottom. I don’t know what these changes will entail. But I feel like this is something of what it feels like to grow up, to realize that there is a story unfolding that I am not the center of. I am only a part of it, and I can choose if I am going to be the part of the story that loves the story or the part that looks at it with bitter, stubborn, disgust, refusing to cooperate. I want to love the story. I want to be the part of the story that runs with the story, in the face of the pain it causes me, because the story is not about me, it is about the One writing it. And I hope that by jumping, by loving the story and running along with it, the pain will only be fleeting and the story that is good and is written by the One who is good, will bring me goodness and I hope that I will truly love what I have first chosen to love: change.

My Life in a Little Nutshell Poem

Every year carries with it more pain than the last.
Yet Jesus becomes to me, more and more precious.
For time allows me to see His gracious and loving hand work marvelously to
Answer me,
Protect me,
Love me,
Heal me,
Perfect me,
In astonishing wisdom and understanding.


He will be my shield and portion as long as life endures.

Listening to a Whisper

I was in the shower, where I do a lot of my thinking, and I thought about my life. If one word could describe it, it would be: rest. In addition to not having school for the first time in 17 years, much of it is due to my having somewhat squelched the plague of guilt that perpetually haunts me. The lingering voice speaks to me constantly. It tells me that I am wasting my time watching Romeo and Juliet. It tells me that I am lazy for sleeping in to nine o’clock. It measures the productivity of my day and tells me that I haven’t accomplished enough. It calls me selfish when I want to make coffee for myself and light some candles in a freshly cleaned house. It tells me that I don’t pray enough, love enough, care enough, try hard enough. The echoing voice I have learned to batter with the grace and love of Jesus. When I hear its footsteps rounding the corner, ready to pound my heart with lies, I quickly divert my ear, ignore the loud words, and speak rest to my soul. It was when I was thinking in the shower, however, that I questioned this rest. Everything the voice speaks to me is true. What if, then, it is not guilty lies that I am ignoring, but the Holy Spirit’s conviction? Then I remembered, as if I was hearing the sound of a soft whisper amongst the turmoil of my soul, when God showed Himself to Elijah. God sent a destructive wind, an earthquake, and a fire, but He was not present in any of these. He was present, rather, in a soft whisper. Our Lord speaks to His children with a gentle voice.

Satan's most destructive lies are those that speak accurately, yet undermine the very heart of God toward those who are His. Today, I am a little more confident that the loud voice of guilt is the voice that I must continue to ignore and that the soft whisper of rest is the voice of my loving and caring Father who gently tells me, in the face of my failure, that He loves me.

(1 Kings 19:11-13)

Confession of a Negligent Blogger

I have to confess, I have been feeling quite guilty and a little like a failure because I haven’t blogged in a while. I was considering beginning this post, which still doesn’t have any real purpose, with “I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while, but…” Those words, however, are a little too familiar. There is an abnormally large chunk of blog posts out there in the blogging world that are commenced in this way. The post is welcomed by an apology for neglect. As I pondered this more, I considered my own blog neglect, and I wondered why I should feel sorry. Instead of blogging, I have been living the situations that I would write about and dealing with the people that I could vent about. Instead of painting a picture of my day, I’ve been adding more color to it by continuing to live it, rather than taking a break out of it. So even though I wish I would write more, I have convinced myself to not feel guilty and to not feel like a failure. Blogging isn’t life; and life is what’s important. And for all the other people out there who feel this same way: don’t feel sorry for neglecting your blog. You’re neglecting it for something far better than words on a computer screen. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-blog, in fact, I love blogs; but I have committed to no longer feel obligated to my blog. Instead, I am going to write as I feel led, not as I feel required. So if I don’t write for a while, I’m not sorry, I’m following the direction of the Spirit.

I’m glad I got that off my chest.

Deception

It was an uneventful day at Starbucks. I was on bar and John was ringing, but with no customers we were finding miscellaneous trivial tasks to make ourselves look busy while Danny forcefully, as he does everything, mopped the floor under us. The silence was broken when a young man came up to the counter and flatly asked John for an application. Taking the paper, he began filling it out, but shortly found himself cotton-mouthed as he returned to the counter to ask me for a cup of water. My aloof impression of him was redeemed when he was somehow excited that I offered ice and he thanked me considerably. As I was putting the lid on his water, Danny beside me focused on the floor and John a few more steps away rebrewing coffee, the application boy slowly reached out his arms and put both his hands over our tips jars. I watched him, in a daze, and quietly wondered at his interesting kindness to push our overflowing dollars back into their rightful place. My natural assumption was quickly dismissed when he started pulling the dollars out of the tip jar and with change flying and dollars in hands, he bolted out the door. Before I could gather my ruptured thoughts, Danny and John were already less than five feet behind him in the parking lot.

I stood over the freshly poured and lidded water, stunned. As I stared at the quarters and dimes interspersed over the floor, I wondered at the stabbing pain in my back, the ache in my heart, and the tears that were slowly making their way out of my eyes and down my cheeks. It wasn’t loss, anger, or shock that pained me so; it was deception. The young man had extended his hand toward me and after short hesitation I extended my hand in return. His deceptive charm lured me to favor; I liked him. I know our interaction lasted five minutes max and carried a total of fifteen exchanged words, but it was a friendly acquaintanceship: the type that is understood between a grateful customer and a generous employee. The shred of a relationship (that was obviously never really there) was shattered, however, when I realized that his seeming flattery was nothing short of depraved malice. His kindness was a tool to inflict pain.

Danny and John made their way back into the store: Danny repeating to himself a seven-digit license plate number while rummaging for a pen and paper, and John heading toward the register to help the flustered and now antsy customers. As I poured Vanilla Bean Frappuccinos and concocted Chai Tea Lattes, I pondered the affect the boy’s actions had on me. I considered the affects of deception, and I was reminded of a similar story. I wondered what it would be like to run into a close friend during the weakest and most anguished moment of your life and to have that friend kiss you on the cheek, demonstrating to you his affection, love, and support, affirming the fact that he has your back. I can imagine that kiss washing over you with warm reassurance, serving to somewhat ease your present distress, telling you that you are not alone. I wondered what sort of unbearable pain would embrace you as you realize that the kiss of your so-thought friend was not one of kindness, but of deception. I can’t imagine what it would feel like to realize that the sign of affection that brought you cherished comfort, was actually a means to cause you great sorrow, a tool to inflict upon you the torment that you dreaded. It is perplexing: the hurt of betrayal, the pain of deception, has bruised even the greatest of men.

(Matthew 26:14-16; 36-50)

A Soaking Heart

For some reason beyond me, during my entire life as a believer I have been blessed by innumerable God-fearing, people-loving, wholly biblical, challenging, and all around really good Bible teachers. This has become to me my greatest blessing and my greatest curse. I won’t go into detail about the entirety of the curse, but only that it has different branches that extend into varied areas of my life and sting each with a different nuance. One of those is the area of life I will call mind-heart connection. The name is self-explanatory I think. My brain is soaked with information, but time hasn’t allowed for the data to flow down to my heart, parched with yearning. As a result, my spiritual life is extremely dissatisfying because when I am sad, for example, I know the answer is easy: love God. But though my mind knew what it sounded like to love God, my heart never knew what it felt like. The worst part was that I was keenly aware of this dilemma because I knew that if I actually loved God then my sadness would leave, but my sadness never left. My sadness haunted me with a reminder of the obvious rift that separated my heavy mind and my thirsty and desperate heart—a heart that needed to love God, wanted to love God, but was instead weighed down with guilt because I didn’t love God.

I don’t how exactly a mind and a heart are reconciled. In my case however, I think time had a lot to do with it. With time comes experience and with experience comes visible and almost tangible manifestations of God’s provision, love, tenderness, and care. Experience illustrates that His lovingkindness is not just for some special holy men who lived in a book thousands of years ago (which isn’t what I thought, but is definitely how I felt), but is for Mallory Smith. When I understand that God’s lovingkindness is not far from me and not even near to me, but is directed specifically toward me, it somehow dissolves the ever-present and familiar rift. In the most recent months, I have experienced for the first time what it feels like to love God. This is different from passion, mind you. There have been short seasons in my life that I’ve felt a passion for God triggered by a cutting sermon or a zealous worship session or a revelatory conversation, but this is different. The constant love I’ve found for God doesn’t express itself in jumping out of my skin excitement. I can’t feel it flowing with the blood in my arteries or moving with the tendons in my joints. Instead it is etched in the walls of my arteries, intertwined in the cells of my blood, and engraved in the tissue of my tendons. It is part of me.

Like in any relationship, time and experience has bound me to the One who is always with me. The truth that once confined itself to my skull has finally begun to seep into my innermost parts and the knowledge that I once only knew how to speak has finally immersed the entirety of my being: the core of my person: my heart.