Patricia

“Please… come back in 20 minutes…” the dark haired little woman choked while a baby squirmed in her arms and a rangy mutt circled her shoeless feet. We’d walked to her neighborhood from an old rusty overpass just on the outskirts of Harlan. This was hour number three marching through trailer parks; knocking on doors, praying, talking to people, and listening to their stories.

“I live just across the street… I’m watching the baby for her mamma while she’s at the store. Please, I need to talk to you. Give me a half hour?” We smiled and nodded, taking a step back off the broken porch. I glanced over my shoulder to see the house we’d be returning to in a matter of minutes. The dirt yard had covered itself around the bottom of the house courtesy of the thunderstorms that week. Behind the brown, little shades of orange peeked out, though actually, it was more peach as the years had worn the brightness of the palate to nothing more than a dull reminder of its glory days.

Plastic bags and duct tape filled the bottom left corner of the front window where glass had once been. This was it. This was Patricia’s home. There were hundreds more just like it on the streets around us.

As the three of us left to investigate the surrounding streets, we encountered all kinds of people. The bent grey haired man taking out his garbage who wanted to debate the exclusivity of Christ, the mother with seven children who asked us to come in and gathered all her children around to hold hands so they could listen to us talk and pray, even the three old maids smoking on the front porch with their cynical looks, “Hell girl, you go ahead and pray, things can’t get any worse.”

We eventually headed back to that faded peach house with the broken window. I knocked on the door - silence. I knocked gently again – still no answer. A little confused, we turned to head back down the streets when Patricia came rushing from the neighbor’s. “Please come in, come in…”

We stepped into the old house, and immediately upon entrance, it struck me; this woman had nothing. An old shredded couch, a few trinkets, that was all. Glancing back into the kitchen, shards of glass lay spewed about the floor.

She asked us to sit down. As we started to talk, tears came to Patricia’s eyes. She started telling us about her family. Dropping out of school in jr high, she’d come from a rough background. She’d raised two kids alone, only her daughter was still alive. This daughter was also raising a daughter as a single parent… This little girl, Patricia’s granddaughter, had a terminal illness.

Particia’s daughter was going through suicidal depression because of her granddaughter’s illness. They couldn’t afford the hospital bills, and were left without money for groceries, electricity, or a telephone. She wept as she told us of her anger toward God, pointing back to the kitchen full of broken glass.
“I couldn’t take it anymore last night… I broke everything. Everything… why is this happening? Where is God? Where is he?”

My heart broke. We sat for over an hour, I held this hurting woman in my arms and we prayed and talked. I cried with this complete stranger for the pain of this world as we listened to her story. Patricia at one point got up and picked up a little worn Bible off a shelf. She was a Christian, and told us about when she put her faith in the forgiveness and grace of Christ. We were able to get her information about a local church that could help her, and went on to contact the pastor. As the time came for us to go, Patricia held my hand and looked as us.

“I sat in my kitchen last night after breaking everything, and just screamed out to God that if my life mattered at all to him, to show that to me. He sent you to me to show me. He knew I needed you today. He sent you to me.”

As we left, I couldn’t help but stand humbled and awestruck at how God uses people to accomplish his perfect plans, and to encourage his hurting children. It’s been six months since that day, and I haven’t heard from Patricia since then. I pray that her faith is strong, and that God will continue to reveal himself to her.

This isn’t the way life was meant to be. Death, pain, sorrow, guilt; it’s all a result of sin. It’s all a result of the curse that we all must suffer under. The rich and poor, the young and old, the wise and foolish, each life will pass like a vapor. Where our human depravity leaves gaping holes though, the person and work of Jesus Christ offers a redemptive solution. He overcame death. He healed the sick and the hurting.

This life will soon be over… Praise the Lord! Why you ask? Because my friend, there’s another life still yet to come. I’ll cling to the promises of God until then, and enjoy this life he’s so generously given me.

Someday though, I’m ready for heaven.

Being Known

The Romantic era, that time when artists began to see things like poetry and music as a sudden and overwhelming consummation of emotion stemming from an interaction with the sublime. Far different than systematic interpretation of those artists going before, the value of the inner sense of existence and reality, even in its most simplistic and rustic form was enough to be hailed as the new foundation for art.

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, mostly because I have this (as probably most do) love-hate relationship with emotions. Emotions allow one to experience the joys of life in a way that is unmatched by hard formed observations made apart from this influx of feelings. Yet at the same time, when life lacks this elation, possessing emotion means the pain and sorrow of the moment can be experienced at a level of excruciation.

Furthermore, emotions are extremely personal. The feelings you have or the passions that arise from witnessing a series of events can never be duplicated, nor can they be fully explained to another. I have to think, then, that we as human beings can never truly be known by others. Human relationships are funny things. They just are. For some reason, though, as Christians we are commanded by God to interact with people - of this I am convinced.

Scripture absolutely revolves around the message of the gospel, the promises of God, and how we should live in this world in light of that revelation. Many of our commands for living center on interaction with people. Hmm. Curious that God would command us as finite beings to engage humanity, whom we have no ability to ever truly know.

Only God will ever know me or you; because he is the creator; because he is God. In some sense, that realization seems lonely at first - to understand that those individuals I care about will never truly know me, nor I them. How much more exhilarating though, to think that there is a being so consuming that he understands me to my core, even when I don’t understand myself.

One of the things I hear many people struggle with here at college is the lack of deep relationships. Some have a hard time coming into a setting where people know little or nothing about them. We get caught up in conversations of “surfacy crap.” Last year definitely brought that struggle to me, and in many ways, it continues today.

Oh to be known. What a blessing and simultaneous agony. I sense that we as human beings have some innate desire to be known. Not even necessarily to be loved or liked, just known. Humans will never really be able to fulfill that desire for one another. What great incentive that is then to point people toward Christ, the knower of all things. This is a fairly lengthy passage from Psalm 139, but it’s worth the time it takes to digest…

“O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.
You hem me in – behind and before;
You have laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
Too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there.
If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.”

How inescapable. How comforting. How thrilling. How humbling.

I am known by God. That’s more than enough.