24 February 2023

Dear Grammy,

It is 7:41 a.m. on a Friday as I begin this, and suddenly I feel at a loss for words. They were spilling out one after another before, during my quiet time, but somehow an empty document seems more daunting than a blank page. No one will see the scrawlings and scribbles of my filled-up journal, but if this goes anywhere, people may actually read it. Yikes.

I will begin by telling you about these days. 

These days have been filled with waiting.

These days have been scattered with unfulfilled desires, and the struggle against spiraling towards them. It feels like magnetism, sometimes – me, and the proclivity to rush headlong into something that may be good, but is not meant for me right now. Did you ever feel this way? Misplaced desires getting the best of you time after time? 

Lately I have been brought back to memories of early college days and reading Augustine’s City of God for the first time. I think of you often when I read or write, especially the classics. Your love of the written word has blessed your kids and grandkids more than once. Your interest in learning, creating, and wordsmithing is a piece of your legacy I hold dear. 

Looking back at City of God, I find it absurd that I had prided myself on speedreading such a dense theological text, but despite my freshman foibles, at least one phrase stuck with me from this work: rightly ordered love. It’s strangely comforting to know that even Augustine wrestled with questions like, “what does it mean for the objects of our affections to rest in their proper places?” 

He wrote that “the definition of virtue is the order of love.” These words fell on fresh ears. As collegiate recitations continued on City of God in our professors’ living rooms, with their dusty libraries and tobacco pipes, it was nice to feel deep and theological and significant, unearthing the great secrets of the past.

I look back at that time and feel shame. My ego was continuously boosted through the rituals of intellectual self-aggrandizement. The class wasn’t just about diving into a theologically rich text to learn from it; it was about being the kind of person who would read such a great work.

What was the point of all that? And in retrospect, I wonder: is there a way to be hungry to learn without the pomp and circumstance? Without the conceit and snobbery?

Yet ten years after my first encounter with Augustine, this phrase on rightly ordered love keeps coming back to me. Maybe that was the point. Maybe “rightly ordered love” is a phrase to hold onto. A gracious gift from the past, in spite of the spiderwebs of airheaded superciliousness that entangled it.

Augustine was right: when our desires are in their proper places, and we acknowledge that God is sovereign over our lives, everything else falls into its place.

Easy to say, and maybe said too frequently to dismiss people’s grief and sorrow. Easy to say when your life isn’t a trainwreck in a given moment. But true, nevertheless.

“…the bride of Christ, the city of God, sings, ‘Order love within me.’” (City of God XV.22) 

And so I sing. Pray. Plead. Order love within me, Lord.

Maybe it sounds overdramatic, dear Grammy, but these days, many of my prayers have begun with this cry. My heart feels all discombobulated, like there are bits and pieces of love flung across the corners of my life without a consistently grounded pursuit of the Creator.

And yet, I keep crying out, because I want Him to really be first. Another “easy-to-say-ism.” But I don’t mean it in some lip-service-y, feel-good sort of way. When love is rightly ordered, I don’t think the topic itself needs to be spoken of at length to everyone who happens to cross our paths.

When we acknowledge Christ as Lord of All Things, it just shows. Not through waxing eloquent, but simply in living. Love expresses itself naturally: in words, in communication, and in time spent with another. In giving and in serving another. In mutual enjoyment of the same things, and in those lingering-eye-contact sorts of ways, when we both realize we are soaking up the beauty of the same moment together. 

For some reason, this makes me think of cutting pansies with you from the flower pots along your front deck at the dear old Upland Way house. I can almost hear the wind chimes and see the dance of the sun through the cedar canopy above…the corners of your eyes crinkling into cheery delight as you taught me to cherish the smallest things with you.

Why should loving God be so different? Set apart in its own box of attempting holiness on our own and self-righteous rule-following, with all the fun taken out? Can’t loving God be enjoyable? Fulfilling? Ocean-breeze-in-your-face-as-you-run-on-the-beach kind of awe-inspiring?

This idea of love flies in the face of so many of my internalized perspectives about what love is, and what it is not. I have frequently thought of love as work. As self sacrifice alone. As a joyless slog through with the mindset: “if we want this badly enough, we’re going to make it happen.” What a perversion of something so true and beautiful! Yes, sacrifice is an outflowing of love. And yes, love is far more than a passing passion that sweeps you off your feet. But isn’t there an element to love that is playful? Pleasurable, even? Carefree, and delighted?

Why is it so hard to approach God this way, with this kind of wonder? With sweet rest in being His beloved child? With hope for uncertain days, and joy in the knowing and the being known? 

You reflected this kind of peace so well, dear Grammy. Yet I know there were struggles for you as there are for me. Sin continuously claws at me, trying to rip the rug out from under my feet. Trying to steal my trust in a God who longs to be merciful to me (Isaiah 30:18). 

I so quickly forget how much I am loved, not because there’s a lack of evidence, but because I have forgotten how to look for it. I forget that I have a Savior whose grace for me is unhinged. Spending time with Him is not some dry, meaningless task to check off my to-do list for the day. It’s an invitation. 

I can imagine you smiling and saying in that kindly-teacher-questioning voice, “And who doesn’t like to be invited?” 

—

These days, while I wait and wonder, I will hold onto the faith of my grandmother: I will trust, as she did, that God is working, even in the uncertain and mundane. These days are not meaningless, because He is in them – crafting, molding, and shaping. Nothing left undone; nothing catching Him off-guard.

Only the God who rightly orders His purposes has both the power and tenderness to rightly order my heart.

My reading this morning was from Isaiah 64. It reminded me that God plans the details long before each day has begun. He knew where I would be in His Word this morning, and it wasn’t an accident.

Isaiah 64:4

From of old no one has heard

or perceived by the ear,

no eye has seen a God besides You,

who acts for those who wait for Him.