Choose Love Over Lonely.

January 26, 2014January 27, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 8 Comments

Throughout my first year living in East Texas, I prayed every time I went to the grocery store.

“Lord, please let me run into somebody I know, and let us discuss the price of lemons, or dish washing liquid or the crushing loneliness that moving twice in four years brings, and if they could invite us over for dinner that would be nice too. Thanks. Amen.”

It never happened. Not one time.

That spring I was in California, sitting by my friend Karen’s pool, drinking wine with three of the world’s smartest women, when I said, “Yah, I’m basically a hermit now and I don’t even care.” Speechless and mortified, they threatened an intervention if I didn’t come back to California and myself.

But thirsty country has a purpose and I know now what it was for me. I also know heartsick and lonely like my own face, but running to California isn’t the answer (ok sometimes it is). Admitting this feels vulnerable and losery, but maybe if we said such things to one another and quit faking it, we’d get out of the desert faster.

So it was no small thing this morning, when I found my kitchen happily strewn with wine bottles, spent candles, flowers and stray forks after not one, but two Love Dinners. One was scheduled, the other was a charming surprise.

Photo Credit: wili_hybrid

Staring at the chaos with sheer gratitude, I thought “this is what building life with Jesus and his people looks like.” It looks like messy tables and open invitations for people to poke around your broom closets and say, “uh hey, what’s this?”

We don’t do this enough because we care too much what people think. We hide, exhausting ourselves with frivolity and small talk, when what we want is to be known and loved in spite of it.

This may be the best part of following Jesus. He knows me and loves me anyway. So I can relax around people and say “yep that’s a jacked up mess and I don’t know what to do about it.” On Friday night, it was fragile and a little heavy, so my friends turned it carefully in their hands and said, “Nope, we don’t either, let’s take it to Jesus.”

And something precious grew between us that someday Jesus will use for his own purposes.

Sure it’s easier to stay home and watch tv; it’s chancy to invite someone into your broom closet. It’s even chancier to invite nine somebodies, but it’s worth it because sometimes one will show up, hand everybody a tiny gift and say, “I know I can do hard things because I have all of you.”

I’m a million miles from the grocery store parking lot, and you can be too. If you’re struggling with loneliness here are a few tips:

1. You are enough for God, in all your beautiful damage. He can and will steady your heart, if you ask.

2. Then he’ll move all your furniture around and invite new people over to sit in it, and that can be scary and hard.

3. But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, just keep walking toward it.

So make the call. Light the candles. Look each other in the face and get down to the way things are.

This isn’t frivolity. It’s legacy.

On Razor Wire and Worship.

December 28, 2013December 28, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 11 Comments

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Christmas Eve, an inmate with a shaved head and a white jumpsuit walked up to me carrying a clipboard.

“Um sorry, I just need you to initial this,” he said. “It tells the State of Texas you’re aware that, if there’s a riot and you get taken hostage, they won’t negotiate for your release.”

“Oh, ok,” I said. Scribble, scribble.

Walking through gate after locked gate topped with loops of razor wire, a guard named Rose told us attendance would be high for our Christmas Eve service because “there were females” – a skeezy bit of information I could have done without. But Rose, I suspect, doesn’t suffer Christian naiveté well and didn’t want a bunch of happy, clappy dopes milling around the yard hugging inmates for Jesus.

“Ladies, these are murderers, rapists and drug addicts and some of them haven’t seen a woman in years,” she said.

What am I doing here? is a fine question to ask when entering a medium security prison full of maximum security offenders, but I’ve found, if I’m really following Jesus closely, I’m bound to wind up in prison or under a bridge in Long Beach, or on Skid Row in LA or in the Zambian bush.

My friend Beth is an author and despite being single, childless and never incarcerated, she co-wrote a book for men in prison, teaching them how and why to pray for their children. She goes to prisons to give her book away, but this unit is a little different, a little scarier, so she asked Sam and me to come too.

“They don’t deserve it,” Sam hollered as I was talking him into it. “Those people have killed people, they are in prison for a reason.”

Of course he’s right and so is Rose. They don’t deserve visitors on Christmas Eve. They don’t deserve mercy. They don’t deserve grace.

And neither do I.

But I got it anyway, and isn’t that the good news of Christmas?

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” says the Apostle Paul. “Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins.” Romans 3:24

Inside the gym, two guards sit above the crowd in something like lifeguard stands. In the corners are cages with doors that open only to the outside. Guards hunch in them with tear gas canisters and rubber bullets in their guns, while a few other guards mill around the room. Should these ten or so people lose control of the nearly 500 inmates, their only choice is to slam the doors and lock the building down with everybody, including us, inside.

That idea was intolerable to Sam.

“Listen,” he said to Beth and me as we sat quietly in the speaker chairs up front. “Nothing’s going to happen, but if it does, I want you to run into the corner by the guard cage. There’s not much I can do but get my ass kicked while taking a few of them out.”

Then he trotted to the back door, where he, Steve and Jeff shook hands with every inmate as they filed in – an experience Sam later described like a dream sequence for all the things he could see in their faces. Their gratitude shocked him though. “Oh my God,” he said. “You can’t imagine how happy they are we’re here.”

Lots of churches, either by omission or design, teach that following Jesus is a long exercise in securing personal blessing – more safety, more comfort, more happiness – but that isn’t really what the gospel says.

Jesus said, six times, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross daily, and follow me.” He also said, “I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.“

Beth is small and soft-spoken but the Holy Spirit swirls around her like mist, and when she took the stage, the room went dead silent. I mean you’ve never heard such silence. She talked so plainly about prayer and the love of God, that when she finished, the men leaped to their feet and roared for her. Many of them sat right down and began reading her book.

Then Steve got up and asked an inmate in the first row his name.

Cory.

Steve read John 3:16 like this:

“For God so loved Cory, that He gave His only begotten Son, that if Cory believes in Him, Cory shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge Cory, but that Cory might be saved through Him.…”

Cory has already been judged and is living the brunt of that verdict, but as the prison worship band played, I watched Cory close his eyes and sing about Jesus, holding his hands over his heart as through it might break. The band got louder and the voices grew stronger until the singing of 485 men got so loud, I couldn’t hear my own voice.

I need you Jesus to come to my rescue, where else can I go? There’s no other name by which I am saved. Oh capture me with grace, I will follow you. – New Song

Can you imagine this? Hundreds of men, the worst of the worst, locked up in one of the unholiest, meanest places in the State of Texas, worshiping Jesus with their hands in the air, creating such a joyful noise that the room was nearly vibrating. I have no doubt we captured ground in that dark place.

I prayed for those men and the countless people they’ve hurt. Then I prayed for the people who hurt them first, setting them up for this heinous cycle of death and destruction – the very cycle Jesus interrupted.

For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death – See more at: http://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Death,-Defeated#sthash.pTKm07Ei.dpuf

He crushed it people. Redemption is here. It’s our choice to live like we believe it.

Merry Christmas.

The Secret of Contentment

December 1, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

Did you know sharks need forward motion to survive? Without forcing water through their gills, they drown.

Anybody else feel like a drowning shark right now?

Currently, I have two nine-foot artificial Christmas trees lying in the living room under eight-foot ceilings, and the only reaction I can muster is, “Nice Clark.” Also, I’m a writer not writing, a reader not reading, and a bible student not studying. I can’t figure out how to fit my square-peg self into a round Christmas hole, and lately I pray like a kid off her Ritalin.

I’m struggling with things I once did with ease, and it stresses me out. If I’m not those things who am I? Author Sarah Bessey talks about “the right now and not yet” Kingdom of God. Wherever that is, I’m there. I’m stuck in the becoming and I need forward motion.

Unfortunately, my Christian friends pray for me then say things like this:

“I feel like the Lord is saying you just need to pause.”

“Maybe just be a still for a little while and wait.”

Worse, that supports what I’ve heard in my own speedy-sleepy, look-there’s-a-squirrel, prayer time.

“Rest. Baby. Rest”

This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. Isaiah 30:15

Are you kidding me? I’m like a dog chasing cars. I don’t know why I’m doing that but I’m loathe to stop because what beating will my identity and self-worth take if I’m not getting my book published, expanding my platform, rocking my job, and making my house look like the cover of Southern Living? I’m supposed to just sit still and like it?

I know, gorgeous huh? Photo coco+kelley

Maybe that’s what the LORD meant by the “you would have none of it” part.

The Apostle Paul said, “For I have learned to be content in any circumstance. I have experienced times of need and times of abundance. In any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of contentment, whether I go satisfied or hungry, have plenty or nothing. I am able to do all things through the one who strengthens me.” Phil 4:11-13 NET

Paul didn’t say the secret of contentment fell on him like rice at a wedding, he LEARNED it, and probably while standing in a Roman prison in ankle deep sewage. What sort of encounter did Paul have with Jesus, either there or on his way to Damascus, to produce that kind of confidence?

Whatever it was, I seem to be taking the long way. Except for two, too tall Christmas trees, there’s not one thing wrong. No prison. No sewage. So what’s with the discontent? Why am I chasing cars?

Because I doubt who I am in Christ and I don’t know how to rest in his strength.

Ouch.

See chasing happiness is easier because it gives us something to do, like the dog. Resting at the feet of Jesus, requires attentive stillness, humility and surrender. It’s where I get ok with bringing nothing to the table.

Rest is the prerequisite for contentment.

Maybe the difference between happiness and contentment is like the Paris hotel in Vegas vs. Trocadero Square. At first, the mini Eiffel Tower jutting out of the Nevada desert with all the sparkly people partying beneath it, makes your heart race because it doesn’t yet look like the hopped up, expensive hoax it is.

But the first time you see the real thing, with the sparkly lights dancing all around it at midnight, it doesn’t make your heart race. It makes it stand still.