Love in the Temple

Psalm 48:9 We reflect on your loyal love, O God, within your temple.

This brought to mind something I emailed my friends recently, in reflection on what God's been doing in my life:

God's been working on me lately. And today for the first time I saw the brokenness as a blessing. A real hard-core, hard-won, wouldn't-trade-it-for-all-the-tea-in-China blessing.

The girls at church are young and innocent. Which is beautiful. But they also can't connect with brokenness, real hardcore brokenness, because they still have that innocence. And I pray that they can keep it. I don't want anybody to go through the kinds of things we've been through. But I've seen how God uses us, our brokenness. I can't keep track of the times I've reached out to y'all in my darkness and felt your loving hands in mine, and wondered what I'd do without y'all, only to have y'all respond that you consider ME a blessing. I couldn't see it. ME a blessing? Fragile, broken me?

And I see it now. I see bits of each of you, all of you, in me, and the bits I see are bits of Jesus. And that floors me. How all that time, when I felt so utterly forsaken and alone, in the darkness that was engulfing me and overwhelming me and leaving me so desperate and despairing, He was there. Not beside me. Not above me. IN me. And that's a scary thing. Because it's a connection to a Something and a Someone so much beyond me that I can't fathom it. Something that dwarfs me as the universe dwarfs a grain of sand.

I never really got Jesus before. People'd be all gushing about how they loved Jesus, and I couldn't connect with that. God I could get, in a fashion. The Boss. The Guy in Charge. The Hand Behind it All. But where Jesus fit in, really fit in, I had a feeble intellectual grasp of, but I didn't have heart knowledge. I didn't get it.

I get it now. Or at least a bit of it. I'm beginning to get a feel for how much I don't get. How could I have been so blind to something -- SomeOne -- who was working so hard in me? How much am I blind to now?

He's doing something. And it's gonna be an adventure but it was only recently that I started to understand how scary that is. Like the disciples in the boat, when Jesus calmed the storm, and it freaked them out. And how can something happening inside a human soul, something that nobody can see, be as impressive as a man standing in the path of a tornado and saying, "Knock it off!" and the tornado dies?

How can something be inside me and so far beyond me at the same time? There's not room in me for this. But there He is. Funny, I used to think in terms of "Where is there room for me in This?" and now it's "How is there room for This in ME?" And I wanna get out of the way and make more room!

You know how I am for metaphors, and my life is one. I remember how surprised I was to find out that I could deal with the intimate needs of the retarded folks I worked with. I rejoiced, outright rejoiced, in being sent to the home with the ladies who needed their incontinent briefs changed several times a night. That home was a joy to me. A home where I was finding opportunities to connect with people while, quite literally, dealing with their shit. And that's my gift. Or one of them, anyway. Discovering that I connect with people best when they're the deepest in their shit, in one way or another.

Inelegant, I know, but I get the feeling y'all get it.

Thank you so much for being there, for being you. For being Jesus for me. I don't have the words to tell you how much I love you. How much you mean to me. How you've blessed me.

1 Corinthians 6:19: Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?

I, myself, am one of the temples in which God's unfailing love can be seen.

I need to remember that.