Helen

I've known Helen almost my whole life, off and on. When I was an elementary school student, she worked at my elementary school. As I grew up through the rest of the grades, I kept seeing her. She was a lunch lady and, occasionally, a custodian, and always had that certain way about her. 

When I became a lunch lady myself and walked into the high school cafeteria on my first day, Helen wasn't there. But she showed up a couple of hours later for her shift. Every day. Thirty-plus years after I had first walked through my kindergarten doors, I walked through the back doors of the kitchen and Helen was still there. 

And she knew her stuff.  She had been around long enough that she knew just about everything. And, as with most persons in her generation, had an opinion about everything. She was more the boss of that kitchen than the actual manager. 

At first, Helen made a lot of complaints about me, I think. The manager kept coming to talk to me, telling me I was doing things wrong, or that I should be doing them a different way. It always bugged me that Helen wouldn't just tell me these things herself. I mean, we were both adults. Talk to me like an adult and tell me that you prefer things a certain way. Not a problem. 

But as time went on, Helen warmed up to me, and she started taking me under her wing a bit more. She started showing me some of her tricks. She started winking at me when she'd bend the rules a little. 

One day, I took a heavy load of dishes from my work line back to the dish room, where Helen was busily working to keep up. She took one look at my pile as I unloaded it from my cart, looked at me, and said, with that knowing smile of hers, "You're lucky I like you." 

And indeed, I was. 

Over the next few years, Helen would say that to me often. "You're lucky I like you," then smile a little. Maybe even chuckle a bit. It got to the point where I would beat her to it. I'd run into her in the grocery store, put an arm around her shoulder, and say, "You know, I'm lucky you like me," and she'd smile. 

It's been four years since I worked with Helen, and my life has taken me in a different direction since then. These days, I'm one of the persons at work who has been there the longest, even though I haven't been there very long at all. I've been in the business, though, for quite awhile, and I have a breadth and a depth of knowledge about a lot of things, about how we operate. 

In other words, I'm quickly becoming Helen. 

I'm becoming the person who knows how to do it. Who has the experience to be a good help. Who is the person that all the new persons, all the young persons, are looking up to. Who low-key sometimes kind of runs the place...not on purpose. 

And I admit, there are times I just take these young persons and feed them right up the chain. Tell management that they need to have a talk with the new one. Need to set them straight. Need to get the ground rules right. 

But I warm up to them, too. I enjoy mentoring and teaching and helping. I enjoy working with them, not just for work stuff, but for their lives, too. They come to me and say, "Can you help me with something?" And I think about that little ol' cart overloaded with dirty dishes, and I get a little smile on my face. 

The other day, I might even have said to one of them, "You're lucky I like you," and laughed a little. 

I am so lucky Helen liked me. Truly. Helen was such a tremendous blessing in my life for a very long time - as a student, as an employee, as a friend. And now, I'm becoming Helen. I'm becoming that person. 

Helen's friendship made me feel like one of the luckiest young women in the world. I can only hope my friendship does the same for these young folks around me. 

God Redeems

If you've ever watched horror movies, thrillers, or even true-crime documentaries, you know that the instinct of the captive is to run first and ask questions later. See an opening? Take it. Lost in the woods now? That's still better. Overestimated your endurance? At least you have a head start. 

You always see someone hiding behind a tree, trying not to be noticed by the psychopath who is pursuing them. Diving into a ditch. Ducking into an abandoned whatever. (Not smart, by the way, but here we are.) There's one thing in the captive's mind: 

I'm never going back there.

But what if "back there" is the only place you can ever truly find freedom?

Our instinct in life is to run. To get away. As far as we can as fast as we can. We'll make the rest of the plan later. 

But no one ever found true freedom by running away. You spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, always afraid it's coming back to get you, always wondering what's lurking around the next corner. Overreacting to every little noise, every flicker of light, every change in routine. You can never truly be free by running. 

But you can be free in Christ. 

And when God sets you free, He goes "back there" to make sure it sticks. Micah puts it this way: God goes to the place of your captivity to buy you back (4:10). To redeem you. To set you free. 

God goes to where your body is most broken and starts the healing there. God goes to where your relationships have failed and starts the healing there. God goes to where your life is falling apart, and that's where He starts putting it back together. 

God goes right to where the psychopath who is trying to hold you captive dwells, looks that enemy straight in the face, shoves death back into his hands and declares, "This one's Mine." 

Then He walks you away from that place, truly free. 

It's the only way. 

God of the Ruins

Have you ever seen a weed in the cracks? 

These things will grow anywhere. You're walking down a beautiful sidewalk and right there in the middle of it is a beautiful...dandelion. Around my area, the little maple tree seeds fall in their helicopters and bloom right wherever they land. We've got little tiny wannabe trees popping up in the oddest of places. 

And they'll grow right through the fence, too. See, my neighbor has weeds. But a few of them have reached through the millimeters of space between my fence boards to say hello to my yard, too. Weeds, I might add, that are growing in the 18-inch-wide patch of dirt between his garage and my 6-foot fence, where there's no such thing as sunshine and barely any rain falls and how on earth does anything grow here?

But it does. 

Sometimes, I wonder the same thing about my life. Especially in the more desolate seasons. 

In the times in which I have lost so much, seemingly everything. When the hits keep coming. When the paycheck isn't quite as big as the bills. When the food goes rotten in the fridge long before its expiration date. When the dog gets sick. When the car breaks down. When my health falters. When my faith falters. When it seems like everything around me is lying in ruins and I feel a little bit like Job, looking around for shards of the life I used to know to at least scratch the unbearable itch while my skin and my eyes weep over the troubles of this fallen world, this broken life. 

But then, a sprout. A tiny little thing. A speck of green, of new life, peeking through the cracks. 

Taking root. 

This is what our God does. He grows things in the places it doesn't seem like they would grow. Micah says He plants vineyards in the ruins (1:6), and that's true. It's not just weeds; it's flowers. And it's branches. And it's fruit. 

If I'm being honest, the fruit isn't always a comfort. Sometimes, it's bitter. When I look around the ruins of a life that seems to be falling apart, the last thing I am amused by is some little fig starting to form. Like, cool, I'm starving to death but here's one bite of fructose. Yippee. 

It's like being on a survival show and finding a grub on day 11. Fantastic. 

Yet if I'm also being honest, every time I'm out and about and see one of these little weeds that has popped up in the most unexpected place, one of these trees that's starting to sprout in a weird spot just because it doesn't know anything else to do, one little branch of a vine waving at me through my fence, I marvel at how resilient life is. At how amazing it is that even in what looks like the worst of all circumstances, something is growing here. 

Because God made it to grow. 

He plants vineyards in the ruins and we reap a harvest of the finest wine. 

That's God for ya'. 

God Sees

One of the fun things about being an adult in a middle school was catching the kids in all kinds of moments they didn't think anyone was watching. I'd just be walking down the hallway and end up walking right through some crazy handshake, some weird dance-off, some conversation that doesn't make sense unless you happen to be 12 years old. 

One of the challenges was knowing that no matter what I came upon, I may still have missed something. It's the moment you catch a normally good kid doing something totally out of character, but you missed whatever the bully did that provoked her. You see a kid ripping some toy out of another kid's hands, and it's tempting to want to step in and correct the behavior, but what you missed was that the other kid ripped the toy out someone else's hands first. It can be a lot of pressure to think you're the witness. 

It takes a lot of humility to confess that you might not know everything about what you see. 

(Honestly, I don't even know anything about any of the handshakes that I saw.) 

And I confess there have been many times in my life where I have wanted to defend myself, too. Where I have been caught in half-a-story, in a scene that doesn't quite portray the truth of what's been going on. Where what I'm seen doing doesn't seem to make any sense, but if you only had a little more context.... 

One of the comforts that we give ourselves when the world wrongly judges us is that "God knows." God knows what's really going on. God knows our hearts. God understands the whole situation. 

He saw everything. 

The prophet Jonah confirms this. God sees what people do, he says (3:10). 

God sees the thing that started it all. He sees the quiet moments that put it all in perspective. He knows what one thing has led to another. 

God sees the thing that looks totally out of character, and He knows how you got here. He doesn't have to confess He might have missed something; He saw it all. 

But what's cool about this is that God sees my good moments, too. He sees my goofy moments. He hears the little joke that makes me smile. He witnesses the secret handshake that maybe I'm just working on with myself. He sees the little bounce in my step when I'm trying something new. 

It's cool to think that as many neat moments as I've had walking the halls of a school, God has those moments all the time. And He has them in my life. 

It makes me think about what I want Him to catch me doing. What I want Him to see. It makes me think about what it means to be walking the same hallways of this world as God Himself does and knowing that at any moment, He might see something I wasn't even thinking anyone might be watching. That He might hear something that only makes sense if you've lived my life. 

Impromptu dance-off! 

God Judges

If you're paying attention to the news, you know about Israel and Gaza and you know about Russia and Ukraine. If you've got a little bit wider spread, you might be aware of what's happening to Christians in many parts of Africa. A little bit closer to home, you probably have a keen awareness of how your brother has always gotten away with everything or how your one toxic coworker seems to continue to have a stranglehold on the whole workplace. 

Face it - the world is full of broken things. Upside-down things. Things that make us wonder if God is really good, if He's really in control, and if He's ever going to do anything about the things that are so wrong in our world. 

Rest assured, friends. 

He is. 

As I think about what it means to be a person of faith trying to live in this space, in this already-but-not-yet of brokenness that hasn't been redeemed, restored, or even revenged (wouldn't that be nice?), it's easy for me to be asking the same questions as everyone else. What is God waiting on? 

I'm learning the patience. I'm learning the prayerfulness. I'm learning to wait and to try to live my own life and mind my own business and worry about me. I'm doing the things that I'm told, or that I believe, are the right things to do - trying to be faithful and figure out what faith looks like in this space and take responsibility for what it looks like to be a Christian here and now, but if I'm honest, it feels like that always falls on me. Like I'm always trying to turn these opportunities into ones for personal reflection and growth. Like I'm always putting the burden of "better" on my own shoulders as I try to just keep being faithful. 

And I wonder why it is that the burden has to be so heavy for those of us who most expectantly wait for God to step in.

Then, another verse, this one out of the New Testament, straight out of the mouth of Jesus Himself, comes to mind. "Take care of the plank in your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your brother's." 

In other words, a reminder that God has always had a higher standard for His people than He has for everyone else. A higher expectation of believers than of the non-believing world. 

We're supposed to love each other first, then worry about all the rest of the stuff that's out there. 

And when it looks like the broken world is winning, like things are falling apart and will never come back together, like hate is greater than love, like we'll never find common ground to stand on, like God isn't coming to fix things, remember that we were called to be His people first. 

So yes, what's happening in the world is tragic. It's heartbreaking. It makes us question what God is doing in the world. But perhaps the most troublesome things of all aren't the ones in the headlines; they're the ones in our heart. They're not the ones happening half a world away, but just down the street. Or maybe even in our own homes. 

As Obadiah says, the day is coming. God's judging is coming to the nations (Obadiah 1:15). 

It just starts with us.