Summit Fever

In an episode of Everest: Beyond the Limit, we see two climbers come down with what is known as Summit Fever. They are a mere three hundred feet or so from the summit, but they are running low on oxygen. There is no way that they can get to the summit and return without running out of oxygen. Their leader orders them to turn back. He pleads with them. He points out the dead body of a climber who also tried to push himself too hard and is now laying frozen dead in the snow just off of the path.

But the climbers ignore him. They can see the summit. A view from the cameraman gives us their view up the mountain and the summit does look like just a quick hop away, but the view is a lie. It will still take them another two hours to summit and they do not have the oxygen to get them there and back.

Still the men climb.

Watching the episode, I wanted to scream at the men, “Turn back!” How could they be so stupid? But even on bottled oxygen, the -40 degree temps and thin air have turned their brains to mush. They can't make complicated decisions. They can only see the summit.

It is a fascinating lesson on recognizing our own limitations.

When I was a teenager, I taught myself to juggle one day. My mom was at work. I was bored, so I started juggling first two tennis balls and then three and then two in one hand. I was pretty good at it, but I never did master anything more than three balls at a time. Add a fourth into the mix and everything would go horribly wrong, tennis balls slamming into each other like asteroids out of control leading to a cataclysmic end of the universe scenario.

I exaggerate. Still it wasn't pretty

Lately, I've made no secret of the fact that I am finding it impossible to juggle work, seminary and church, each of the three requiring not just time, but dedication, wholehearted dedication. Each thing requiring that I give not just time, not just energy, but my heart and my soul. And I can't get away with only giving a part. Each demands a whole.

It has left me with a mess, with nothing in my life flowing in a way that seems beautiful and perfect and right.

And so I turn to Thomas Merton's prayer. I think we should call it Thomas Merton's gift. He begins the prayer with this: “My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going.”

I thought I knew, but like the men trying to summit Everest I may have woefully overestimated my abilities to get there and what looked like the end was much, much further away than I had guessed and the road there far more treacherous than I had realized.

Merton continues, “The fact that I think I am following your will does not mean I am actually doing so … but I believe the desire to please you does, in fact, please you … therefore I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.”

We have to trust. We have to trust God. We have to trust the people he sends to us, even when they say things like “slow down” or “turn back.” Because trusting God when He holds us back means that when He sends us forth, we will move, knowing without a doubt that the very breath of God is at our back.

I have no idea what to do next. I have no idea how to make order out of my life.

So all I can do is pray.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I’m going.

Shining a Light

Shel Silverstein has a new book out this week.

Hopefully the name sounds familiar to you, but if it doesn’t let me share with you a few of the book titles he’s famous for: The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

I must confess that I have never been a fan of Shel Silverstein. I think as a child I may have been turned off by his drawings which I think have a lot in common with the illustrations in Roald Dahl’s books, in the sense that they creep me out. (I still get the shivers thinking back to the drawing of Mr. Twit’s beard and what he kept there. Ugh.)

But mostly, I think I haven’t been a fan simply because I haven’t read much of his work, just a poem here or there.

Yesterday, though, I decided to buy his new book, published posthumously, and entitled Every Thing On It. Being a Kindle fan, it’s not often that I buy a book in the flesh, but there is something still to treasure in flipping through actual pages.

And as I flipped through Silverstein’s latest work, I saw the same old creepy pictures, a boy with a cat in his stomach, another with a boy with a snake coming out his mouth and somewhere else equally if not more so undesirable. I’m sure it’s probably appealing to little boys and girls.

But mixed in with the craziness were thoughtful poems about life and death, what we yearn for, and what’s truly important in life.

In his poem The Stairway, Silverstein writes, “I climbed the stairway to the sun/To fill my eyes with burning gold.” But once he got there, what he found was something much, much less than what he expected. “And there the air was damp and cold/And down below the earth shone bright.” He resolves to go back down and not climb those stairs again.

It is a lesson on perspective. Sometimes we have to get close to something to see that it is not nearly so beautiful as we thought from afar and sometimes we have to step back to truly appreciate where we are.

Shel Silverstein’s writing always has a message and he doesn’t shy away from hard and difficult topics even as he writes for children. His book The Giving Tree offers a lesson on selflessness. Even though we may end the book angry at the boy who takes and takes and takes from the tree, we cannot deny that the tree who has sacrificed its life for the boy has done a beautiful thing.

It is a lesson that echoes the Bible, from the death of Jesus on the cross to the plea of Paul to the Philippians in chapter 2 verses 3-4: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

And so now I see Shel Silverstein in a different light. I can look past the odd drawings and embrace the message within the words.

Lessons learned in forty minutes

A few days ago one of my students used all of class to change his shirt. We were watching a video on Everest and the lights were out. The boy knew I wouldn’t give him a hall pass to change, so he sat there for forty minutes, first putting on the shirt he wanted to wear over his old shirt and then spending the next thirty-nine minutes pulling a Houdini, twisting and stretching until he had worked the old shirt out from under the new one.

He came into class wearing a white shirt. He left wearing a black one. (At this point I thought I’d pause to answer a question I’m sure you’re asking which is why didn’t I stop him and refocus his attention on the video and all I can say is that as teachers we pick our battles, especially with thirteen year olds. He was quiet and not disruptive. I didn’t even realize what he had done until the end. Periodically I had caught sight of him during class and thought at worst he was having spasms of some kind and that maybe I should send him to the clinic.)

When the video ended, he stood up, produced his old shirt in a “ta-da” type fashion and waited for glory and praise to be heaped on him for his accomplishment.

Instead the girl behind him wrinkled her nose and said, “Your shirt smells.”

Honestly, such scenes are why I’ve kept on teaching 8th grade all these years. I sometimes get tired of what I teach. I never get tired of my students. I never get tired of the hidden life lessons in the most silliest of stories.

Your shirt smells.

All that hard work and instead of being praised, he was ridiculed. But even though he didn’t get the reaction he wanted, he shouldn’t feel bad. That girl’s words cannot take away from what he accomplished. He pulled a Houdini. He accomplished something and that something cannot be erased by someone’s words.

It’s an important thing to remember. Words cannot erase deeds.

I hope he knows that. If he knows that then at least he learned something in class that day.

Even if he hadn’t been changing his shirt, though, he still would have learned something watching the video on Everest. He would have learned something about character and why we strive to do things that seem impossible.

For the past few years, I have been showing the same video on Everest to my students to help them better visualize the novel we’re reading, Peak by Roland Smith. Just above Camp Three on Everest, climbers enter the “Death Zone.” From just above Camp Three to the top of the mountain, the digestive system shuts down and your body actually begins consuming itself. It is impossible to live more than a few days in the Death Zone.

The video shows some spectacular views from the top. The climbers are literally above the clouds. They are hanging out at heights people only see from inside a plane. They are giddy from the accomplishment, giddy from the lack of oxygen too I’m sure and for all the weeks and months of preparation, they only get about a half hour at the top. They’ve risked their lives for thirty minutes.

But it was thirty minutes on the mountain top of all mountain tops.

And I’m sure that what they remember about that day are not the words of congratulations. I’m sure what they remember about that day is the view. To be able to look out and point to a far off speck and say, “That was where I was. This is where I am now. Look at what I’ve accomplished.”

What we do in life is what is important, not what people say to us, not words of criticism or words of congratulations. We must live for each moment and not for the validation.

We don’t need people to validate our existence.

Jesus didn’t show his wounds to Thomas to prove to himself that he was alive. He was Jesus, the Son of God, one-third of the Trinity. He understood his relationship to the world better than anyone in the history of human existence. And he knew those things from the inside out. He didn’t need Thomas to acknowledge him. Whether Thomas believed in him or not did not erase who he was.

So what did I learn that day in class? What did the teacher learn? God put us on earth to do good things, to do beautiful things, to be in communion with Him. And nothing, especially not words can erase those things once they are past. What’s done is done and cannot be taken away.

Or as poet Ezra Pound once said, “What thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee.”

Baptism--it's not for the faint of heart

Tina, this blog post is for you.

I don’t know if you’ll read it but I plan on plastering it all over your Facebook page. Have you seen the pictures I posted?

After church today, you seem surprised that all these people had come to see you baptized. Did you also see all the people who stood with you while it was happening? I’ve seen many children being baptized, many babies, and those have all been special moments, but it something dearer and more precious, I think, when an adult makes that baptismal commitment.

Children and especially babies can’t fully understand what they or their parents are getting them into, but you knew exactly what you were doing. It took so much courage. I know you were embarrassed by your crying, but you shouldn’t be. Those tears were baptismal tears and they washed away pain and hurt and despair as much as the water that P. Deb poured over you.

I can’t even begin to tell you the joy you brought to so many people today. Whenever someone is baptized, we get to renew our own baptismal vows and it is a reminder to us and to you that we are all on this journey together.

And now for your not so random Bible quote of the day. 1 Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

You have a story to tell now, Tina and I can’t wait to hear the whole thing someday.

But more importantly, you have a responsibility to share that story. Hope is catching. Hope spreads like wildfire.

Why did so many people stand with you today? Because they loved you and because they wanted to be in the path of the joy that was pouring from you in waves today.

I apologize if I’ve embarrassed you writing about you on my blog, but your story is just too special not to share.

God bless you Tina. See you on Sunday.

Images of Christ

The other day I was sitting in a classroom at a local public high school. The first thing I noticed was how beautiful and welcoming it was. The walls were painted a light rose color and there was even an accent wall of pale blue. The back wall was filled with bookshelves and along the far wall were two leather couches. It was the nicest classroom, the least institutional room I had ever seen.

But when I sat down, I was in for another shock. On the wall opposite the couches, not visible to anyone just walking into the room, was a giant, practically floor to ceiling, picture of Jesus.

Specifically, it was the face of Jesus as he hung on the cross, crown of thorns in place, blood flowing.

I was staring at it for the longest time when a friend of mine who was sitting next to me, leaned over and said, “Wow, I wonder if she has a problem with cheating in here.”

I was immediately of two minds about this picture. On the one hand, I thought how awesome it was to be able to display one’s faith in a public school. The teacher was the sponsor of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But on the other hand, that particular view of Jesus, Jesus at his lowest point, a broken and battered man, moments from death, is not the most uplifting thing to have in your classroom.

If I ever meet that teacher, I will ask her why she chose it. Perhaps she had another meaning behind it that I couldn’t see.

But it did get me thinking about images of Jesus in culture. Quite frankly Jesus is everywhere. Even an episode of South Park featured a boxing match between Jesus and the devil. For the record, I believe the episode ended with the devil throwing the match. What would you expect from the devil but cheating?

In Christian culture, though, how is Jesus most often represented? Obviously, we see him most on the cross. Occasionally we see him gathered with children or preaching. On rare occasions we might even be treated to the laughing Jesus. Somehow, for me, it is laughter that makes him most human. And it is humanity that makes him approachable, someone I can turn to, someone I can share my deepest heartache and my most profound joy with.

But most often it is the image of Jesus on the cross that is seen in churches. And it is this image that causes me the most distress. I understand that without his death there could be no resurrection. I understand that without his death there could be no freedom from sin. But in the end, the image of Jesus on the cross fills me with sadness. It is as if that image freezes time to the moment where the world felt most hopeless.

If there is an image of the divine Jesus that I want to see that I haven’t yet, it is the image of Jesus standing with Mary Magdalene outside his now empty tomb. That was the moment when the world flipped its axis, when the whole of creation changed forever. That was the moment that made Jesus the son of God.

There is another image of Jesus that has moved me. It was one I saw as a teenager when I was spending the summer with my mom. It was both an exciting and difficult summer. I took Driver’s Ed. I met my would-be boyfriend. I spent the summer hanging out in downtown Binghamton. I did a lot of walking, a lot of reading, and a lot of enjoying the summer. But it was hard too in the ways I suppose that it’s always hard to be a teenager.

Sometimes I would walk down to the park at the end of the street. It wasn’t a great park. There was a swimming pool there, but I didn’t swim. Instead I would walk under the bridge overpass down by the river.

And there above my head, impossibly graffitied on the underside of the bridge, was a picture of Jesus.

No crown of thorns … just a graffiti version of Jesus.

And it was beautiful and somehow every time I walked there, it felt like God was watching over me, watching over us all, the ones who came out there during the day and the homeless and drug addicts who came out there during the night.

Maybe that is why that teacher has the picture of Jesus on her wall, not to deter cheaters, but to remind us that he is there even when we can’t see him.

And he watches us not to judge, but guard and guide and love.

In the Valley

In one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons, Homer and Marge are declared unfit parents and Bart, Lisa and Maggie are put into foster care and placed with the Flanders family next door. The Flanders are devout Christians and when they find out that the children haven’t been baptized, they grab their baptizing kit and head out to the river.

Meanwhile Homer and Marge take a parenting course, get themselves declared fit and race back home to be reunited with their children. But when they go to the Flanders house, they find the house empty and a sign on the door that says “Gone Baptizin’.”

Out at the river, the Flanders have the children in the water. Ned Flanders is about to baptize Bart, when Homer emerges from the trees, throws himself into the river and dives for Bart just as Ned begins to pour the water over Bart's head.  The water hits Homer instead.  Baptism averted.

Both Lisa and Bart run to Homer and embrace him ... and embrace what seems to be a rather anti-Christian message.

Except that Maggie, the youngest Simpson child does not run back to her father. Maggie, just a baby, looks at her father and siblings and sees them sitting in the mud, dirty and grimy. Frogs are croaking and jumping around them. And then she looks at Ned and Maude Flanders and sees them bathed in bright sunlight. They are heavenly and divine. In the days she has lived with them, they have shown her love and kindness, tucking her in bed at night. So when it comes time for Maggie to choose, she chooses the Flanders family.

She turns to go to them, but at that very moment Marge, her mother, appears at the river. Maggie sees her mother and she doesn't even have to think about it. She goes to her mother, who lifts her up and holds her.

I can’t tell you how many times these past few years, I have looked at one part of my life and seen the Simpsons, grimy and uncouth and looked at another part and seen the Flanders family, full of light and love. For example, every Tuesday night I go to seminary to take a class that is all about the call. I leave there feeling spiritually full and filled with goodwill and love. And then I wake up Wednesday morning and know I have to go to work, a place that seems to take more often than it gives. And it makes me bitter.

But in The Simpsons, Maggie reminds me that there is love and wonder and fulfillment even in the parts of our lives that seem less than perfect.

Yesterday God gave me an opportunity to see those things in a spontaneous prayer with a coworker, in a spontaneous hug from the two-year-old son of a friend, in the spontaneous suggestion of a student that we play a real life game of Angry Birds instead of doing our assignment. There is joy and love even in places that sometimes drain the life out of us.

We may want to live on the mountaintops, but perhaps our best work is done in the valleys.

Finding the Path

At first the story of Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark seems like just another one of Jesus’ healing miracles. Bartimaeus is blind. He calls out to Jesus. Jesus heals him. Bartimaeus becomes a follower of Jesus. It’s not an uncommon story in the gospels. Someone calls to Jesus for help and Jesus heals them.

But the story of Bartimaeus is different and that difference is in the details. Mark’s Gospel says that Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus “loudly.” Mark 10:47 says that Bartimaeus “began to shout.” And when he is told to be quiet by the people around him, Mark 10:48 says that “he cried out even more loudly.”

Here’s where the details begin to make the story interesting. Bartimaeus calls out to Jesus. We think we know what’s going to happen next. We always think we know Jesus. We fully expect him to walk right over to Bartimaeus and heal him—but he doesn’t. Instead he sends the disciples over to Bartimaeus to fetch him.

Why? Why doesn’t Jesus go over to Bartimaeus himself?

When the disciples approach Bartimaeus in Mark 10:49, they say to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.”

In other words, they are saying, “Hey, be quiet for a second. He hears you. He’s calling to you. Let’s go.”

The implication here is that Bartimaeus is so loud with his pleas, that he cannot hear Jesus call to him. That is why Jesus sends the disciples.

It was Os Guinness in his book The Call that got me thinking about Bartimaeus. Guinness focuses on the words, “Take heart … he is calling to you,” and that made me wonder how often we pray to God in the same way Bartimaeus prayed.

Have I been praying so loudly that I can't hear God’s response?

Lately, I have not been a good listener. If I were still in Kindergarten, there would be no gold star next to my name for listening skills. I have missed the last two weeks of Centering Prayer and I have not been walking the labyrinth as often as I should.

So after reading about Bartimaeus, I hopped in the car last Saturday and headed to the church to walk the labyrinth. As I stood at the entrance, I made a promise to God. “God,” I said, “I don’t know what it is that I need. You know that better than me, so I promise to be quiet and listen for a while and please show me what it is that I need to be doing.”

And I started walking.

I walked and I noticed all the things I normally do. I saw how several of the Simpson Stoppers no longer needed the green metal brace to hold them up straight. I noticed for the thousandth time how the path always seems to be headed right to the center but then swings out back around for a bit before heading in. I heard the water lapping at the shore. I heard something, probably a lizard, drop through the branches of the tree.

I heard a lot of things.

What I didn’t hear was God.

Nothing profound happened, I’m sad to report. It was just another walk in the labyrinth, just another reminder, if anything, about the point of paths—to get us to where we’re going. But nothing earth shattering.

That was Saturday afternoon.

The dream came early this morning.

In my dream I was driving along AIA, a stretch where I had a clear view of the ocean. A hurricane had brushed the coast and the water had swelled to ghastly heights, twenty-thirty foot high waves churned and rocked the shore. Some of the water had spilled across the highway and before me loomed a slightly smaller version of Niagara Falls.

Ahead of me, a friend of mine began to drive her car to the water. I knew she could navigate it. I wasn’t afraid for her, but I was absolutely terrified for myself. Navigating those waters was beyond me.

So I turned the car around.

But I didn’t head home. Instead, I turned down Berkeley and headed for South Patrick Drive. I would still get to where I was going. I was just going to take a different road. No worries.

When I woke up, I knew exactly what the dream meant. You don’t have to take the same path everyone else takes. Sometimes it takes more courage to realize when it’s time to turn around and find another way, as long as you don’t lose sight of the destination.

What I still don’t know is how this applies to my own life. Is there another path I’m supposed to take? Should I take a different route to work tomorrow? Is it time to call a lawyer about my still broken air conditioning? Or am I missing something in regards to seminary and the fulfilling of my dream to go fulltime?

Take heart … he is calling you.

I feel as blind as Bartimaeus. I can only hope for someone to take my hand and show me the way.

Angels of God

A few days ago, we gathered in the gym at school for a 9/11 assembly and showed a video of that day to more than six hundred students who were too young to remember what happened.

For me, the tears started as soon as the second plane hit.

Five minutes later, I backed up against a far wall, out of sight of my students.

A few minutes after that, I walked out. It was simply too much to bear. I wasn’t the first teacher to have to step outside and I wasn’t the last either.

Walking out was something none of us had had the luxury to do ten years ago.

By the time the school day had started ten years ago, two planes had struck the Twin Towers. We knew we were under attack. We had no idea when the attack would end. I struggled with whether or not to leave the TV on for my eighth graders and in the end, decided that knowing was better than not knowing at that point and so I left the TV on.

I still made my students do their assignment that day. I kept with my lesson plans which ironically had them writing an essay about the most important day of their life.

I remember the few tentative hands that raised.  "Can we write about today?"

I don’t remember sitting down that day. I remember standing off to the side or in the back of the room and watching my kids. More than anything I wanted to crawl under my desk, curl up in a fetal position, and sob.

But I couldn’t.

Every now and then I would turn my back to the kids, to gather myself, but I didn’t break down in front of them. I couldn’t. I remembered how upsetting it was when I was a kid and I saw my teacher crying when the Challenger exploded. Teachers, parents—you need them to be rocks sometimes.

So I stayed strong because I wanted my kids to know they were safe.

Even if I couldn’t be sure that any of us were.

In Exodus, Chapter 14, the Israelites are fleeing Egypt. The Egyptian army is hot on their heels. There is absolutely no way they’re going to make it. The army is behind them. The sea is in front of them.

But the Israelites have something that the Egyptian army can’t handle.

The Israelites have the angel of God. Exodus 14:19-20 reads: “The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel. And so the cloud was there with the darkness, and it lit up the night; one did not come near the other all night.”

What follows in one of the most spectacular scenes from the Bible. Moses stretches out his hand and God parts the waters, driving the sea back so that the Israelites may cross. And after they cross, the water returns, drowning and carrying away the Egyptian army.

But it is this mysterious angel of God who appears as a pillar of cloud separating the Egyptians and Israelites through the night that interests me. This mysterious presence that keeps them safe, this mysterious presence that lights up the night gets lost in the wake of the parting of the Red Sea, but is just as incredible.

The angel of God. A light in the darkness. A light to keep us safe.

Sometimes in this cynical world, we lose sight of that light. We lose faith in God and angels. We don’t believe in miracles anymore. We think we’re on our own. There is no mysterious presence to keep us safe at night.

And whenever you think like that, I want you to think back to 9/11 because the angels of God were with us that day.

And in many cases, we were those angels.

Sometimes the angel of God moves mountains, sometimes the angel of God settles in our souls and a group of people destined to die can gather together to save hundreds as they did on Flight 93 on 9/11.

Every fireman, every police officer, every Port Authority officer, every person who helped someone live that day, every person who gave their life, every person who risked their life, every person who took the hand of someone else and just squeezed, every one of those people was an angel of God.

And every parent that night, who tucked their child into bed, and stayed maybe a moment longer than normal, every parent who held their child so that they would know they were safe in the darkness, every one of them was an angel too.

God bless America. And God bless its angels.

Dreaming

There is a young woman at church who is beginning her first year of teaching. It’s about a month into the school year and I keep meaning to ask her if she’s had the dream yet—the dreaded teacher dream. I’ve known teachers who have left the profession and years later still have the teacher dream.

The teacher dream is always a variation of this: you’re the teacher, standing in front of the class and none of the kids are listening. They won’t stop talking. They’re being belligerent. I had one dream where my kids didn’t even show up to class. I found them in the library with another teacher who had given them cookies.

The teacher dream is always a lack of control dream.

Lately it seems I’ve been having ten teacher dreams a night.

Except now, thrown into the mix, is the dreaded church dream. And every one of my church dreams seems to follow this pattern: I’m late to church. I have responsibilities. I’m the LEM or the Lector. I have to be at church on time and the world is conspiring to keep me away. In the church dream, something is always keeping me from doing what needs to be done.

I’m clearly at a transitional point in my life, a time when I am beginning to make the transition from the profession of teaching to the profession of pastoring. That transition is apparent in my dreams. (Though as I said previous, I’m sure the teaching dream will stay with me the rest of my life.)

I was reminded of that transitional period yesterday when I started reading one of the books for my first seminary class. It’s called Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer. And interestingly enough, Palmer is an author I’m familiar with. When I first started teaching, I read his book The Courage to Teach. It is a must read for any teacher.

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that Palmer’s books should appear in the two professions that have marked my adult life. Both teaching and pastoring are vocations. And without a doubt, the skills that I have learned as a teacher will carry with me when I become a priest.

But while I have at times loved teaching, it has not been a vocation for me. Palmer writes that a vocation is “something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling.”

It’s “something I can’t not do.”

Really these words are what boil down the call to me. There have been a lot of things in my life that I have wanted to do. When I was little I wanted to be a paleontologist and a fireman and a lawyer and an aeronautical engineer. Even in college, I switched majors time and time again from social studies education, to journalism, to linguistics and then finally to creative writing and literature.

But there is no hole in my heart from failing to become a paleontologist. There is no sense of loss from not becoming an astronaut. There was never any compulsion to be those things.

There is a compulsion to be a priest. It is something that I can’t ignore. The only other thing in my life that I have ever felt the same way about is writing and the Lord know that I will be writing up a storm when I am priest.

I know that when I first told my friends and family that I was going to be a priest that they didn’t fully understand it. And that’s all right because they’ve still been very supportive. Even now, a year later, I can only still tell them Palmer’s words.

In the end it’s something that I can’t not do.

Testify to Love

I’ve been listening to a lot of Christian radio lately.

So much so that it’s not even a conscious decision anymore. In the same way I used to flip between channels looking for eighties music, now my fingers seem to have a mind of their own, seeking out Gospel, Praise, Rock, Inspirational or any variation of Christian music.

Most of the music is new to me. Some is familiar from church, but most is new and a treat in its newness. But the other day, I heard a song that was not new to me. Before I recognized it as something I had heard before, my heart was already stirring. This peace fell over me.

Where had I heard this song before?

And then I remembered. Wynonna Judd sang “Testify to Love” on an episode of Touched by an Angel.

I was a huge Touched by an Angel fan in college. It definitely spoke to me, definitely reached a part of me that was aching for some good news. It was a show that was unapologetically joyful and optimistic about the world.

And in virtually every episode, the angel Monica spoke these words, “God loves you.”

And it was those words that brought me to tears every Sunday night that I watched it.

God loves you.

Those words filled a very deep hole in my heart.

It’s a hole that each and every one of us has. It is a hole that has been dug out and beaten into us all our lives. Every time we’ve felt rejection. Every time the world has seemed dead set against us. Every failure. Every tear. Every word said in anger makes that hole a tiny bit bigger.

It is a hole that can only be filled with these words.

God loves you.

Everything else—it doesn’t matter, because God—loves—you.

The other day in my blog, I wrote about that first meeting between Peter and Jesus. I wrote about how Peter must have felt when Jesus first looked at him because when Jesus looks at you, he sees everything you were, are and ever will be.

I wrote how I had seen that look in others over the course of my life, but when I thought about it, really thought about, I realized I had seen that look more than just a few times.

That look that Jesus gave his disciples—it was love, pure love.

And we can witness this same love—we can see Jesus’ love—when a mother holds her new baby, when a couple says their wedding vows, when a child plays with a puppy.

It is unconditional love. It is the essence of who God is.

God loves you.

And like the song says, “For as long as I shall live, I will testify to love. I’ll be a witness in the silences when words are not enough.”