Sing Cause You Mean It

A few weeks ago I was having church in my mini van in the middle of the day, belting out "You! Are! More than enough", feeling so happy and so dang free.

A few days later, same scene, different song. "You're all I need!" Oh, I sang it. Yes I did.

But I started to wonder, do I really mean what I sing? Because it matters, right? 

Earlier this week Calvin made up a ridiculous, outlandish, untrue excuse for why he "couldn't" do something, when really, he just didn't want to do it. He opted for the easy lie and that's a problem. We value the truth. Lying is a sin. Blah blah blah.

And then I turn right around and get all goose-bumpy alone in my mini van or with all of my friends at church, I close my eyes and my heart smiles and everything feels right in the world while I'm saying things that aren't really true. To Jesus.

I'm guessing he knows the truth, which is this: You! Are! More than enough as long as my health and the health of my family and financial stability are automatically included!"

Just doesn't have the same ring.

You're all I need God, but I'm assuming all of my basic needs are part of some kind of a package deal.

I started freaking out, because I didn't know how to fix it. I was all wound up for weeks. I wanted the words to be true without my addendums, but thinking of God and nothing else was hard. How do you distill Him down? Impossible. I kept trying to picture it and all I could see was myself, alone in a dark cave of a room with a tiny window and a giant Bible.

I'm being totally honest here, it didn't seem like enough.

Then I went to a meeting at church and heard a friend talk about turkey hunting. It should have been a run-of-the-mill hunting story, the kind I partially tune out because I'm just not huntery. It should have been cranked up on testosterone and painted a garish flourescent orange. But instead, his eyes got soft as he spoke poetry about the way the sun lifts up over the horizon. He took us to the moment when the silence and the dark collides with the glow of a new morning, how all the turkeys start in with their turkey business. He made me see that it was beautiful. More than that, he made me see that God is the gobble of a turkey, at least to my friend. It's worship to him. It's communion.

Maybe it goes back to our favorite homegirl theologian, Ann Voskamp. I think she's on to something with her "All's grace" message. There is no "plain, ol' God". We can't entirely separate Him from all that He is, all the little things He uses to love us. He owns it all. It does what He wants it to do. It gobbles because He tells it to.

The turkeys, the sunrise, the canvas, the song, the perfect fluted bowl of a single rose petal float God right down to where we sit. Maybe a watermelon that makes me want to weep for its crunchy ripeness and the ache in my buns after an extra-fast walk, all of these gifts, every little one, bring us closer to His heart. He whispers to us in ways that we can't help but hear, because He is the tuner of our ear. He calibrates our eyes to see, our hearts to feel. Maybe as we begin to see past all these gifts and into the heart of the Giver, we become conditioned to lean on in when the gift looks like heartache or loss or just the dreariest day.

Want to wig yourself out in a really good way? Take a slow look around you, all three hundred sixty degrees, and see God work in and through every bit of it. He's out there, beyond the darkened room. He's evident in more than the soft cheeks of our babies. He's everywhere, but He's especially where He created each of us to see Him.
 
His love and his grace flow through the capture of light through the shutter.

It's right there, in all the colors of the produce section of Meijer.

He's in the hind paw of Charles, right there next to Silas's cheek when a little comfort would be nice.

He knows just what we need (and what we don't). He's more than enough, even when it's hard to handle.

Sing on.