why the name Norma rocks

There’s this woman. Her name is Norma. Yes, Norma. She’s in her seventies, her hair is the most uniquely blended red-orange color, and she grazes into the carpeted lecture room each week in a fur vest, trimmed with more flair than Elle Macpherson and more dignity than Grace Kelly. She is petite in statue, humble in speech, but ferociously fiery in spirit. Somehow she’s managed to age in wisdom without weathering from the harshness of life.  I’ve known Norma for a little over a month and I am already better.  She is the mother of four, and grandmother (some great) to nineteen and the encourager and servant to countless blessed passerbies along the way.

I spoke two weeks ago of a class I’m taking that covers the book of Judges. I sat by Norma at our table on the first day and can remember thinking how deeply I desired to be a grandmother one day with a ever-increasing thirst for my God and his word.  Later, she sat, almost pristine, in our small group and waited for the silence to grow long enough to lovingly clue in us in. We, spiritual youths, still and attentive to see what real trust, persevering prayer, and true gratitude look like, embodied.

Norma reminds me every Wednesday from eleven- noon that a life spent with God, surrounded by his promises and saturated in his spirit generates the most grace-giving well, which beautifully overflows into this world in a way that washes away fear and sorrow with the divine simplicity of the gospel.  Operating daily in the freeing truth and illuminating radiance of the good news of Christ is not only trickily simple, it’s profoundly possible.

Tonight,as my eyes bounce from photograph to photograph around my desk, melodies in the background lengthen each moment with enough vivid memories to make me feel like I’m in my own, personal, musical montage.  I stop to stare at the places and people that demand the simplest reactions out of me. Simple in the form of faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these, the simplest of these is love. This loving relationship with the living God has a tendency to get over-complicated. In all my intellectual rebellion, I am naïve to think that unpacking the complexities of God lead to the greatest spiritual discoveries. In reality, it is nights like tonight, accompanied by nothing more than a flickering candle, the instrumental station on Pandora, and the gentle buzz of my computer that tears the veil of complicated to reveal a simple truth. The covenant that God made available to me is more than enough.  It’s enough of a promise to fill up countless entries on a blog, and yet simple enough to tie every closing paragraph. Jesus came to rightly route all my wrongs. He counted me worthy, he beckoned me as his own, and to this day he’s crazy about me.  And that is a delightfully simple truth I will never grow weary of living out.