Less about me

Humbled.  A word I will use to describe what happens to my heart when God graciously shows how merciful and perfect He is in spite of how inconsistent and self-focused I am.  Humbled and sad.  Humbled and hopeful.  Humbled and all sorts of emotions in between.  But in this moment, humbled and really, really, grateful.   

In my life, righteousness has always meant being good- at least on the outside.  It meant keeping up appearances, focusing on my own sense of moral purity and personal piety.  If I was consistent in my quiet time, attending small group, saying the right things in prayer, reading all of the right books, and for the most part staying away from those big sins that less-good people committed, then I was righteous.  With more shame than I can say, righteousness as I thought of it tended to always accompany a sense of comparison, because if I did not actually feel better than someone else, in my mind, I wasn’t better.  I did not have to be perfect, that I knew, because God doesn’t expect that.  I just had to be better than others, because Jesus liked “better” people. 

It turns out He actually doesn’t.

This image of the good person I held securely in my hands is slowly being stripped away.  Because good always meant that someone else liked me, affirmed that I was gifted at something, or admired something I had said or done.  And let’s be honest, it is nice to feel good, affirmed, or even admired.  In some ways it is motivating and makes us carry our heads a bit higher if just for a few moments.  But what I think I have done is make Jesus the king of my personal self-improvement, the one who makes me good.  And in one sentence I can go from believing I am close to getting it to walking dangerously in the footsteps of the Pharisees, claiming a reliance on God when in all reality I’m only doing so because it is making me feel pretty dang elevated in front of everyone else. 

When God talks about righteousness, He almost always uses it in parallel language with justice.  Thirty-four times, actually.  Amos 5:24: I want to see a mighty flood of justice, and endless flowing of righteous living.  Job 37:23: The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power.  In his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress.  Psalm 103:6: The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.  Isaiah 5:16: The Lord Almighty will be exalted by his justice, and the holy God will show himself holy by his righteousness.  The righteousness of God is virtually synonymous with his justice.  Always right, always fair. 

In my life, I have made these things very, very separate.  Righteousness was how good I am, justice was some outward thing I do for brownie points.  Righteousness was my ticket to Heaven, justice was something only certain people are called to do.  But our God was known by his justice, and if I so deeply want to know Him, that is probably where I should start. 

Jesus was not afraid to get angry at people who, like me, had easily mistaken righteousness for something entirely about them.  He called them hypocrites, liars, and in disgust he compared them to snakes.  “You tithe mint and dill and cumin, but ignore the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.  These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”  So righteousness comes after I act justly, not instead of it.  Justice is a response to Jesus’s life and the example He left, righteousness is the result.  That changes so, so much.

What if my first thought upon waking up in the morning was not about me?  What if I stopped thinking so much about what I can do to look holy, and began simply living justly?  Would that not accomplish the same end?  What if living in harmony with my neighbor instead of being annoyed at how she parks her car actually meant as much as reading a few Proverbs for the day?  What if treating everyone the same really honored God as much as the money I give somewhat-sacrificially?  What if actually mending relationships meant as much to me as crafting the right sentences to describe them?  I can have all the knowledge necessary, but if I lack the same compassion Jesus had, I am empty of every meaningful thing in the world.  Unless I am compelled to act on behalf of another human being, my efforts at righteousness will end there, at the effort.  

I think we have a tendency to complicate the really simple command to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  Everyone is our neighbor. And loving is different than tolerating- it is fair, it is honoring.  Act with justice.  Live with righteousness.  Know Jesus.  And nothing makes more sense of the world than that.       

 “Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than courageously and actively doing God’s will.”  

-Dietrich Bonheoffer

a little extra

Sometimes I dance. Sometimes I am brutally honest with people. Sometimes I buy shoes with a slight heel. Sometimes I give up. Sometimes I fail miserably. And sometimes I start writing with absolutely no idea where it’s going.

Sometimes I fear. And when I do fear, the items previously mentioned creep steadily to the top of what makes me afraid.

Fears:  Debilitating. Tricky. And often undetected in their elusive nature.

It seems as though fear has been the common denominator in every book, every lesson, every casual conversation that I’ve taken part in as of late. Do you ever feel what people might actually mean by ‘the audible voice of God’ is really the same verse, the same sentence, the same concept being repeated so many times that it feels like God is shouting at you? He has to get our attention somehow right? But when *fear* is the topic of choice Tuesday afternoon while talking with my sister, Tuesday night at North Central College, Wednesday morning in class at Willow, covered solely in a conversation I had with a friend Wednesday around lunch, and the subject of discussion at Naperville North Wednesday night… something’s up.

Last night I was spending some time with some teachers I know. These three have become some of the funniest, witty people I’ve been around.  After laughing and joking about how to pronounce falafel and telling stories of what it’s really like being a high school dean these days, the high school counselor among us asked what we were afraid of. Naturally. In the space continuum of Kristin’s crash course on fear, yes, it’s perfectly normal to go from joyous laughter to deepest fear with little to no transition. After sharing some of losing loved ones and trying to articulate what it could be or would be like when we’re no longer alive here on earth, I glanced over at a female teacher among us, currently battling for her life, diagnosed and in treatment for breast cancer. I asked her if she was more afraid before or after she was diagnosed. Immediately she answered after, and then thought for a minute about it. She sat, delicate, but strong and said that she was definitely afraid after, but those weren’t the same kind of fears she had battled before. The little ones seemed so insignificant now with the enormus feat set before her.

We sat in silence for a second, all trying to imagine her battle, her fears, her trust in something bigger than her diagnosed body.  In the next room, high school kids played a game of charades, acting out their biggest fear. Clowns, jack-in-the-box, and bees, were among the lethal bunch.  It made me wish I was fifteen again with nightmares of bees as the world’s worst pain.  And then it dawned on me that being fifteen might just be my greatest fear.  Wish revoked, immediately.

I’ve been studying the book of Judges in great depth.  And by great depth, I mean I read it once, hardly understand it and then, come Wednesday, I  ferociously write down every context clue and application nugget the teacher explains while in a class with my mom and sister. It reminds me of being in school with the teacher that buzzes through Powerpoint slides, novel-long, stopping only to ask, ‘are you getting this?’ Except this time, I am getting this. I’m processing in greater detail the reality of the ordinary mixed with the mystery of the divine.  I’m understanding how delighted God is to use very ‘normal’ people to accomplish impossibly abnormal tasks. I’m finding that being in a place that grips me with fear actually stirs up my soul enough to grip tighter to the hand of God.

I believe God leads us into situations that cause the rational fears in us to crave a supernatural, superrational courage.  Fear definitely causes me to run, but it’s my relationship with the living God that causes me to run directly into the fear instead of sprinting with all my own might in the opposite direction. So, at least for today, I’m gazing upon the scary in a whole new light, an everlasting light that makes the ordinary Kristin a little extra by the power of her extraordinary God.

roots

In keeping with this week of amor, I thought about doing a “things I love” post, but I can actually do that in one sentence: Jesus, Alex, family, friends, coffee chats, books, teaching, learning, writing, and the ocean.  Me in a list of ten.  So unoriginal.  I toyed with the idea of writing about marriage and how wonderful it is and how I think it is one of God’s greatest ideas—those are true statements, but I have been a bride for all of six months and I humbly admit that Alex and I need to put some miles on this covenant before I earn any credibility to speak wisely about it.

But this time of year, everyone’s mind is on it: love.  Whether you have it, are searching for it, have been broken by it, or are celebrating decades of it, I am willing to bet that you’re thinking about it.  I spent many a fourteenth of Februaries hanging out with my girlfriends, pretending that I did not really want to be on a date with someone special.   I was twenty-five when I met the one, twenty-six when I married him—by no means is that old or on the verge of being what I thought was too late to find him—but I happen to have a group of best friends who found their lifetime love years before I did, so I really felt that longing in the wait for the beautiful thing they had, and I made my fair share of mistakes in the meantime.

…in the meantime… it is amazing how much of our lives we spend in those words.  Until the next thing happens, I’ll just get by the best way I can.  Until I meet him, until I get pregnant, until I find a new job, until I lose the weight, until we can move, until our vacation, until I become that person… in the meantime I will just wait for life to start.  And while we stall and wonder and dream about what could be, what is just passes by untouched.  Too often we live for whatever is next, not for whatever is now.

I did this.  I still do it in many aspects of my life.  But I am learning in the deepest ways that while planning, dreaming, and hoping are so beautiful, those things we are planning and dreaming and hoping for should not disengage us from our lives today.  No, this ordinary Monday is so full of potential, as much potential as the skinnier you, the mommy you, the tanned and recently passport-stamped you, the in-love you has.  We were made to love God and people.  Not tomorrow, today.  Not when we are married or have a mini-van full of kiddos, today. 

The roots of my love for Jesus were put down in the thousands of moments I experienced it in simple, un-glamorous ways.  Phone calls, encouraging letters, prayers of genuine care, laugh until we cry moments, three hour coffee dates, weekend visits, a drive along Highway 1.  All of the right now moments I can easily let myself think are not enough, they really are the best things in life.

I don’t want to miss today and all the amazing possibilities it holds.  I want to let the roots grow right here, even if it takes time or more rainy days than I would have liked to sit through.  If God wants to use our lives today, which He does, He is not going to wait until next week or next year to give us what we need to do that work.  We have it, but so many of us don’t love what we have so we think that this is not really it, not the thing that will finally glue the puzzle pieces together.

The story of redemption we are living in is alive and active.  It is so life-giving to discover the places that God is using people to heal, to fix what is broken, to make things new.  But if we stay in our positions of privilege and entitlement, waiting for the better-than-what-I-have-now object of our affection, we keep ourselves out of the places and relationships that do heal, the ones that are evidence of a living Savior and redeeming God.  Jesus gave us love in abundance, in a measure we cannot even take in because it is so much more than we could ask or imagine.  And this love doesn’t start when we finally get what we have been waiting for, it hangs thickly in the air wherever we go, waiting for us to breathe it in and live it out.

Put your roots down here, in the place you are in.  The seasons of life have a way of producing something beautiful out of something willing to grow.  

tossed upside-down

I studied history in college. Beyond the obvious appeal of the professors- whom all seemed to be pushing eighty, hard of hearing and resembling that of Santa Claus, I loved history because it examined people. Choices, responses, tactics, and feelings of some of the most interesting men and women to have walked this earth, each of whom were my constant muse of study. People like me, only with fewer gadgets, more structured dress and unquestionably longer walks. History is fascinating to the sad few of us that find the past something to draw from, ponder about and even, dare I say, learn from? 

I don’t read nearly as much as I read in college of these figures from our humanity’s past, but I do make it a regular routine to learn from one man who walked the earth in utter brilliance. Jesus. The main character of a book found in practically every hotel room and translated in more tongues than Gene Simmons has kissed.  Brutal graphic, I know. I must admit that I read the Bible some, not ever enough and often without the reverence of what it is, what it’s worth and what it’s ultimately capable of.  It was time for me to approach these written words with the knowledge and proof that they actually happened. It was time for me feel the confusion Mary faced when approached with the impossible task in front of her, it was time to process what my first thought would be when my friend, born blind, could see- though blurry- through tears of joy because an unknown thirty-something man had healed him with his spit-covered hands, it was time for me feel the crunch of the sand at the bottom of the Red Sea, damp and cool from the massive amounts of water that towered above me. It was time for me to think of Jesus as someone more than the main character of the greatest story ever told. It was time for me to study him in what he said and picture walking with him long enough to see if my response matched that of the confused disciples, or even worse, the condemning Pharisees. It was time to validate this book as a gift, wrapped up in ancient history and tied together by the unexplainable, unimaginable breath of God. 

The study of this man, and the unthinkable things he said has tossed me upside down as of late. If you’re a common visitor of this blog (bless you, by the way), you might have picked up on a common thread in my tapestry of entries in the recent months. If that thread had a name it would be called ‘the world’ and if that thread had a color, it would most likely be black. I have been struck and churning over the wicked this world can put off. And until recently, I was perfectly fine blaming the unanswered questions, the negative news reports, and the slime-ball type people on the brutality of this world.

Here’s the tossed upside down part: When I study Jesus, he teaches me things. The same words that I’ve had memorized since the early ages of adolescence pop off the page with a punch that makes my head spin. And here’s what Jesus taught me last week…

I’m the problem. It’s not the world, the bad guys, the dark corners, the government, or even the Chicago White Sox, Kristin Stockfisch is the problem. And in the most tender way, the words of Jesus captured my heart in the form of Mark 7 and convicted me as the ring-leader of the blame game. I’ve been tirelessly blaming this world around me for the pride, selfishness, slander, deceit and wicked ways, when really, the root of every malicious issue takes birth and resides in me. And in you. Instead of viewing myself in this world as a basically good creature brought down by dirtier, self-glorifying men and women, I am an active participant in the problem. Because “it’s what comes out of person that defiles them. It is from within, out of person’s heart… (Mark 7:20)” Words like theft, malice, greed, and arrogance are at rest within us. And that’s what makes this world so crazy. It’s not the stadium that’s rotten, it’s the players of the game.

And that realization on a slow-patterned Saturday morning at the start of February on my L-shaped couch made the sweet taste of grace all the more delectable. Jesus continues to save my battered heart day in and day out. His selflessness and humility makes new of my selfish, pride-plastered heart. I am thankful today and in such rest that his one act of love covered the countless ways I regrettably love myself.

So at the launch of twenty twelve I invested in two things. A new Bible and 12 sharpened, colored pencils. I’m studying this book of history. Gleaning insight from this fascinating man, and marking up the pages in a frenzy of thought. Study this book. Be a student of this man named Jesus, and I promise as you’re tossed upside down, the very words will leave you right where you need to be.