It is in the night that the whispers come, lingering in the shadows, still quietly with me when the sun rises. “You are empty,” the voice tells me. “You have nothing to offer. Nothing anyone wants,” it taunts. As I pour my coffee with this uneasy cloud of worthlessness still hanging over me, I glance at the scripture that has found its home there in my kitchen for the past ten years:

"I am doing a great work and I cannot come down."

I think to myself, “I need to take that scripture down. I have no great work I am doing. I have nothing to accomplish.”

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This I must remember. I must tattoo it onto the palms of my hands: ‘Dirty became the new holy when Jesus died covered in his own blood and your sin.’ This is my paraphrase of Andy Stanley in Irresistible. 

I need to spend less time trying to keep my hands clean of wrongdoing and more time with my sleeves rolled up, reaching out to wash feet and carry another’s heavier burden.

There is no other religion that follows a crucified God. There is no natural inclination to wash the dirty feet of others. Washing, not because we are better or cleaner, but because we are servants. Not exactly the best-paid job in the classifieds.  

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I just got a new car. But it isn’t really new of course. We always buy used cars in our family. Excuse me, ‘pre-owned’. It was something my parents did, and their parents did before them. They never bought on credit; they always saved and paid cash and taught me the value of a car drops like a rocket that first year or two and steadies out to a slower decline after that.

As I think about it, I realize we aren’t brand new sort of people anyway. Pretty much everything we have is used, recycled, handed down, or vintage found.

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The fisherman at the edge of the water handed me a small lightning whelk that he had picked up earlier that morning. “I like the broken ones – I find them interesting.” This one wasn’t broken - it was perfect. A fluid curve tucking into itself. “You keep this one,” he continued. I’m here all the time.”

The back bed of his small covered pick-up was filled with fishing gear and sand-covered pieces of recently washed up trash. He nodded in the direction of two other men in four-wheelers who sat chatting in the early morning light; their version of meeting for coffee I supposed. "Those of us with vehicles pick up the trash that washes up,” he said, explaining the odd items of debris in his truck: broken sunglasses, rope, a shoe, a blue shard of plastic.

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From the time I was a little girl, I have loved the pretty things. Sitting on one of the twin beds in my older sisters' bedroom, I would watch in awe as they applied eyeliner and mascara, clothes for the evening laid out on the bed beside me; matching yellow shoes in their tissue-lined box. It was everything I wanted: perfect paint and sophistication.

These days I falter and pause. All the lovely layers are being stripped away to where the skin is raw and the emotions a bit ragged.

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We love our superlatives. We love the warm glow of being the best, the most, the highest quality, surpassing all others, superior in all things, unusually good, outstanding, close to perfect. It is like a 13-year-old girl has high-jacked our brains and we have to create new endings to words to describe how amazing something is. (‘Super-superlative = bestest; as in you are my bestest friend.’ Yes, I found that in the dictionary.).

I have worked with a group of people who strive for excellence and the thought of it wears me out. I have seen grown women cry at the thought “You must always strive for excellence in all you do!” Phooey! 

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Some days fear wells up in me from some deep place. It is quiet in its approach. I don’t realize it has come to visit me until it has crept in through the back door and taken a seat right there in my kitchen. Whispering in my ear. Telling me the saddest stories and the most insidious lies.

I will start feeling vaguely sad. And isolated. And slowly I realize it is because I am listening to this ongoing, monotonous voice that tells me really mean secrets about myself. Secrets everyone else knows already. Secrets about how foolish I am… what people really think about me – or worse, that they don’t think of me at all. I have no talent. I really have no worth. I am mean-spirited. Everything I think about myself is just a delusion, a lie, a big puff of smoke. And mirrors.

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I have had a new revelation this morning. Deep in the beautiful truths of ‘Good, Good Father’ and ‘Is He Worthy?’ sung by Chris Tomlin – those beautiful words washing over me, soothing me as my morning begins, I make a new decision. Michael needs to hear those words, those truths.

Michael is beyond my reach. Locked in a broken mind and a tormented spirit; at the unkind mercy of a broken justice system and sentenced to a life behind bars and in the company of felons. Because Michael is a felon himself.

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It all started in a grave… and a borrowed one at that. Usually, it was the women who bathed the lifeless body, rubbed the skin with rich perfumes and lovingly, carefully wrapped their loved one in strips of linen.

This grave was different. It held a king. A king from a foreign land. Messengers from that foreign land, angels, watched silently from the shadows. All was quiet. They had no songs to sing, no words to say as they watched the two men at their work.

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My sister had a recurring dream in the months before she passed away. She told me about it one day as I sat on the edge of her hospital bed. In her dream, she climbed a long staircase; at the top was a locked door. She tried the door, but it would not open.

I think I shared with her the verse from the Revelation to John; that we are the ones who open the door. Our conversation went no deeper at the time. This recurring dream of hers continued and expanded and there came a time when she opened that door.

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I was ill-prepared when I set out on this little journey. The sun was high in the sky, the air crisp and warm with a slight breeze. At the end of the trail there are waterfalls, clearly marked with an orange star. But I will not make it there. My hiking boots are safe and sound on the other side of the continent in the dark of my closet, as I slip and slide in my black Adidas on the hard-packed snow and ice that carpets the trail.

I will make do with a large granite rock and the babble of the brook intermixed with the occasional car on the road that runs parallel.

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Have you ever found yourself saying no to God? I have. And let me tell you right now; it is the wrong side of the argument to be on.

 I have led an amazing Bible Study for the last 17 years and I started out on that path, at the very beginning with those words of ‘no’ in all their variations choo-choo-ing in my brain like a little toy train going around and around. “No, no. no.”

 God was pretty gentle with me, and patient, putting the bible story about the 10 spies who said no to him outside of the Promised Land into my head, (if you don’t know the story – look it up – it is pretty terrifying!).

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