Sending Roots Down Deep

This prayer that Paul prays for the believers in Ephesus is like hearty food for my hungry heart.  I turn to it when I’m feeling weak and lame. Which means I turn to it a lot.

14 For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Eph 3:14-19)

Sometimes when praying through this, I’ll get down on my knees and dig my fingers into the carpet, as if to send them right through the floor, extending my roots into that mineral-rich soil of God’s love.  And I will myself to “get it”, to comprehend, “to know this love.”  I tighten my grasp, rooting myself in so the stormy winds won’t uproot me and carry me away.

The oxymora of this passage both baffle and delight me, almost willfully eluding my mind to go straight for my heart.  Take, for example, this vastly long and high and deep love that Paul describes: just how does one get his hands and head around such a love to grasp it?

I looked up the word from the original Greek that’s translated “grasp” (or “comprehend”), and found this musical mouthful:

kat-al-am-ban'-o : to lay hold of
• to lay hold of so as to make one's own, to obtain, attain to, to take into one's self, appropriate
• to seize upon, take possession of
• to lay hold of with the mind; to understand, perceive, learn, comprehend

Which then brought to mind another verse that paints a picture of seizure: “I press on to take hold (katalabw) of that for which Christ Jesus took hold (katelhmfyhn) of me.” (Phil 3:12)  So, just who is taking hold of whom?  Hmmm.

Another perplexing paradox: Paul prayed for the Ephesian believers to “know this love that surpasses knowledge.”  Can he hear himself, the irony of it?  Isn’t this a bit like like playing tag and designating the smallest child “it”?  He races back and forth on stubby legs, his little arms fully extended, but the taller, faster kids always remain just out of reach...

But then I ask myself, what is the thing to be “known?”  Love.  Is love a fact to be apprehended through reasoning?  No.  One becomes acquainted or familiar with love; experiences it.  So, wondrously, love does indeed surpass being so apprehended.  It is encountered, and abides such that we may become intimately acquainted and familiar with it.  If we would abide in it, that is.

So, there I am, on the floor with my nails digging into the rug, taking hold of that rich soil of His love.  And all of these ponderings causes the camera in my mind’s eye to pan out, and I see how massive is the earth in which I’m planted, how high and wide and deep it is.  And I settle into this truth:  it’s not me that has a firm grip on this plot of God’s love as much as it’s He that has a firm grip on me.  And He makes His love, His very self, intimately knowable.

And I relax, and stretch my fingers wide.  And drink deep.

Fidan i Jetës

The tree metaphor of this blog has in some ways chosen me just as much as I’ve chosen it.

I relocated to Skopje, Macedonia exactly 10 years ago next week.  Living as an ex-pat American lover of Jesus in the Balkans has been such a rich gift.  But that first year was like no other: adapting to this new culture, struggling to learn language, working long hours to keep our fledgling IT company above water, striving to form meaningful relationships with both local people and other ex-pats.  It's hard to find the words to express how very stretching, lonely, and exhausting that season was.

Thankfully I did make friends.  One of the new local friends that I’d made was having trouble remembering my name; every time we’d meet, she’d have to ask me.  Granted, “Beverly” is quite an unusual name here, though thanks to a small shopping mall in town called “Beverly Hills”, most people have at least heard it before.  But this friend lived in one of the villages just outside of the city, so she wasn’t acquainted with my famous namesake. Finally, after about 5 months of this “what was your name again?” cha-cha, she said, “That’s it.  I am not capable of remembering that name.  So I’ll just have to give you a new one.  You’re tall and thin,” and, compared to this short-ish, round-ish woman, I am rather tall and thin. “You’re just like a fidan, so I’ll call you Fidane.”  Fidan? That was a new word to me, so I asked her to explain what fidan meant.  “It’s a little tree, when it just begins to grow,” demonstrating with her thumb emerging from her clenched fist.  Ah, I get it, a sapling.

Perfect.  In so many ways.  Being given this name, Fidane (pronounced fee-DAWN-ay), was a gesture pointing out my foreignness and strangeness (in Albanian these are the same word), while simultaneously expressing acceptance and embrace despite my strangeness.  My heart is warmed and deeply grateful for how openly and generously so many families have opened their homes and lives to this stranger and welcomed me in.  And the name’s meaning, sapling, not only suits my physical appearance, but serves as a great metaphor for how I was feeling (and sometimes continue to feel) as I was struggling to adapt to my new world: weak and bendable, still green and wet and all potential, surrounded by towering giants and struggling to see the sun.

(Hence the URL for this blog is fidanijetes.blogspot.com.  “Fidan i jetës” means “Sapling of life.”)

Keeping the heart alive...

A lot of my ponderings lately have been couched in a tree metaphor of one form or another, so as I take these musings from the privacy of my “burn it when I die” journal to the wide, wide world of blogging, it seems fitting to me to call this place “tree of life.”

This metaphor perhaps first getting its tentacles in to me about 12 years ago, when this verse just grabbed hold of me and just never let go:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick  - Proverbs 13:12

12 years ago I was 30 and living with Emily, a newly engaged, 39-year-old treasure of a friend. Through that last year of her bachelorhood (or should that be bachelorette-hood?), I grew to admire her quite a lot for her authenticity and vibrancy and determination to both relish all things beautiful and to look the pain of life straight in the eye.  We had many frank, heartfelt talks about our longings and hopes: hopes of enduring love, of being known and embraced; hopes of long and healthy life for those we love; hopes of offering something beautiful, of being found beautiful ourselves; hopes of making a meaningful impact in some corner of this wide world of God’s.  And we also plumbed the depths of the heart sickness that accompanies hopes deferred, sometimes not sure that it was really worth keeping hope alive in this life that is sometimes just plain brutal.

Yet I came around to committing to live my life to enlivening hope and longing, seeing that as the way to keep my heart tender and alive.  Yes, and vulnerable to disappointment and heart sickness, but squelching hope in order to avoid the heart sickness just sounded like death to me.

And then, on Emily and Tim’s wedding day, printed on the program for their wedding ceremony I finally saw the rest of the verse:

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
    but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life - Proverbs 13:12

I’m sure I had read those words before, but having grown to know Emily’s tender and authentic heart, and the experience of doing battle together to keep hope alive, reading those words on her joy filled wedding day, it's like all of that had plowed up my heart, making it ready for this seed to take root.  It's hard to find words to express how wonderful it was to see the musings of my own heart so perfectly captured in God’s ancient word.  It was death to kill hope; no longing, no tree of life.

So that’s what brings me here.  Bringing out into the light some of the thoughts I have on what it means to enliven longing and cope with heart sickness, and the great treasure my Savior Jesus is to me in the process.  May these musings take root, grow, nourish....