Taking Jesus Seriously (& Not Much Else)
WriterCaroline.com - Taking Jesus seriously and not much else
To my brand new kindergartener:
Look at you, my girl! You are so big, so funny, so smart. I’ve been crazy about your from the first moment. You’ve always made me awe. When you were born, I spent hours investigating your little features, considering your tiny frame, wondering about your budding personality. I was so curious about who you were, so curious about who I was, so excited for us to be together.
Read MoreToday is Friday. We all like Friday—Friday has tons of friends. Friday sits at the popular table in the lunchroom. Friday throws great parties.
Sunday is a different story. Some of us enjoy having her around, others of us get prickly when we think of her. Maybe you’re part of the prickly crowd. Maybe to you, Sunday represents obligation and expectation, maybe it reminds you of betrayal from people who should have never betrayed you, maybe it exposes your loneliness, maybe it highlights your failures.
Read MoreThe disappointments flatten me, make it hard to get up. So I don’t get up right away. I know I don’t have to. I know it’s okay to notice when I’m crushed right down into the carpet, know it’s okay to be confused about how to get up, know that God is here in this place, among the crumbs and the footprints, among the pieces of broken hope. So I stay.
At some point in the flattening, I make my way, like a paper doll, to the piano bench and rummage through it. It always smells like my grandmother’s house, thick with nostalgia and gentleness. It’s her piano, her piano bench, her sheet music stuffed inside. The ordinary treasures minister to me sometimes, give me fuller perspective when I get tangled in today. I shuffle the papers that belonged to a woman of faith, and I rediscover a picture of Grandmother at the piano, young but the same. A picture of a woman whose song was unfailingly Jesus.
Read MoreThere’s a whole room set aside for you—
The other two are glad to share.
And right next to the kitchen table,
we've stubbornly kept your chair.
Read MoreEvery so often, I suffer from an extreme bout of cynicism. Maybe that surprises you since I generally come across online as a smiling fairy princess, or maybe that doesn’t surprise you at all since you see me in real life and know that I growl sometimes.
This tendency towards cynicism is something I do not like about myself, and more tragically, it’s something that gets in the way of my delight for the Lord, his Word and his Bride. Because delighting in those things is so important to me (and because I don’t really want to handle rotten tomatoes), I’ve been putting some thought into what causes cynicism and what it’s made out of (other than stale soul pizza and garbage juice).
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