do you love me?: John 21

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 21. One of the hardest things I know to do is to pray before acting. It goes against the grain. It produces an almost visceral feeling of annoyance in us to have to STOP right in our tracks, go off and get quiet and ask God about something – instead of charging once more into the breach, guns blazing, sure of ourselves and our sheer rightness and the stubborn wrongness of everyone else – even though experience tells us, over and over again, that we’ll end up flat on our face, ammunition spent, with nothing but the scent of napolm in the air, and the battered, bruised, bloodied bodies of the people we have wounded littering the ground beside us.

It’s hard not to believe we can be Batman.

I think it’s in that vein that even after the risen Jesus has appeared to the disciples, when Jesus seems to disappear again, Peter declares: “I’m going fishing.” Because that’s what we humans do. Even if we’ve glimpsed the transcendent reality of God, we return to the thing we know – the thing we did before God reached down and singed our hair with the heat of His love – even though, as it does for Peter here, we invariably end up catching nothing all night.

I love the fact that six disciples fall in right behind him. You get the feeling that none of them can figure out what to do with themselves. Fishing sounds good.

But what is it we plan on catching when we go charging back to our old watering holes? What restlessness drives us to what AA calls the “people, places and things” we’re supposed to avoid because we associate them with our demons? What are we chasing when we revert to our old ways? What are we looking for?

I think that most of the time we just don’t know. All we know is that we’re restless. We want something. We’re not sure what. And when the pathway to God seems hard, opaque and murky; when God’s ways seem designed to deprive us of Mick Jagger’s kind of satisfaction… we climb back into those same old rickety leaking boats, hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they’ll take us where we really want to go.

But if we’re not sure what we really want, they can never get us there. Jesus once asked Peter to leave the fishing profession with the simple words: “I will make you a fisher of men.” That promise spoke to something deep in Peter’s heart. After this encounter with Jesus in this, the very last chapter of the last gospel, Peter becomes an evangelist so powerful that people were healed just because Peter’s shadow fell on them. So what happened in this chapter? What was the turning point? Where’s the big transition?

Strangely, at least to an English major whose been slapped on the metaphorical wrist with boatloads of spilled red ink for the slightest hint of mixing metaphors… the transition has something to do with Jesus moving Peter from a fisher of men to someone who feeds sheep. Sheep don’t eat fish. So what is it that Peter, the fisherman, is supposed to feed Jesus’ sheep with?

The hinge, or focal point, for this about-face seems to be Christ’s question to Peter: “do you love me?”

Here’s the setting: before Christ asks this question, the disciples are returning empty-handed after a night of fishing. Jesus calls to them from the shore and tells them to throw their nets on the other side. The seven disciples don’t know who Jesus is, John says, but they obey Him. Stop right there. Why would anyone listen to someone they don’t recognize, especially after an exhausting fruitless night of fishing? Is it just because they figure – “hey, what do we have to lose?” Maybe. But maybe this is a stunning example of what Jesus meant when He said earlier in the gospel of John: “my sheep know my voice.”

It’s like all those people in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind who start building the same mountain, obsessively, out of clay, garbage, shaving cream – anything they can get their hands on. When the mountain is shown on t.v., those people jump in their cars to get there. They abandon their families, jobs and homes just to get to the place that calls to something deep in them. They go. Here, too, these seven men seem to know the voice of God – because they listen to Him, almost with their hearts not their eyes. Deep calls to deep.

The moment they throw their nets on the other side – a metaphor I’ve always loved for how God turns us in opposite directions – they catch so many fish the nets almost break. This has happened before. Immediately, John says, “it’s the Lord.” This is the same John who has written this gospel and who has no shame here describing Himself as “the one Jesus loved.” Perhaps this confident belief that God loves John was the source of John’s incredible power – the one that carried him through the writing of this gospel, three moving letters about love, and the Book of Revelation. When you KNOW God loves you, how could you not have confidence and power? Isn’t being loved like that what we all want?

Peter, always impetuous, jumps in the water. The rest wait it out on the boat. Peter takes time to put his outer coat on – which has always struck me as the kind of thing we do when we’re excited – we grab an umbrella even though the sun’s shining – we put the milk in the oven and pour orange juice into the dishwasher – we smile, broadly, foolishly, for no reason, except that the one we love has come back, when we least expected, and we’re so happy to see them we’re beside ourself. It’s the kind of reaction dogs have all the time when we walk into the kitchen – they wet the floor, spin in circles and wag their tails so hard they almost fall over.

And here’s the most incredible part, done so quietly that I missed it until I sat down to write this blog. Jesus has just been crucified. He’s gone to hell. He’s experienced all the wrath of God – the punishment we humans deserve for our sins. He’s come back from the dead – and who knows what kind of a drain just that feat alone entails. And after all this – He has breakfast waiting for the disciples on the beach. He’s got fresh bread, and he’s been cooking them fish over a fire of coals on the beach. Is Jesus really that kind? Can He possibly be that thoughtful? Is he that long-suffering with our fruitless pursuits? Apparently the answer is yes. Apparently He has the kind of love that enables Him to endure far beyond the worst we could imagine, and rather than wallow in self-pity about it, wait on a beach to serve the very people who scattered like grapeshot at the first hint of trouble.

Jesus waits until Peter has eaten before He asks Peter, three times – the same number of times as Peter had denied Him – if Peter loves Him: “do you love me more than these?” Peter says he does. And each time, Jesus tells Peter to feed his sheep.

I’m not sure what the “these” are that Jesus is asking Peter about- the other disciples? The fish? The beach, sand, sea and breaking dawn? Maybe it’s all of it. Maybe Jesus is asking Peter if Peter loves Him more than Peter loves anything else in the whole wide world.

Peter, being Peter, says of course. John says Peter is “hurt” that Jesus asks three times. But does Peter love Jesus more than these? There’s one more telling detail. The Greek language contains four words of “love”, a nuance lost to English speakers. You can listen to C.S. Lewis – in his own voice no less – read from his book The Four Loves if you want to learn about it at length. But the brief summary is that in Greek there’s eros, which needs no explanation. There’s storgi, which is love for the familiar – C.S. Lewis talks of the “thump of the dog’s tail on the kitchen floor” – which we miss when it’s gone. There’s philios, which is brotherly love. And then there’s agape. I almost don’t want to translate agape, because here’s where all humans – Greeks and English speakers alike – fall short. Agape is the kind of love that meant that from the moment God made Adam, He knew He’d have to send Jesus to rescue us. Because agape is God’s kind of love. It’s sacrificial, patient and perfect. It’s the kind of love that can return from a grave and serve breakfast. It’s the kind of love we long both to give and to receive – because we’re made in God’s image – but it’s the kind of love we catch only a hint of, a scent, a single elusive note – the kind of note that makes a man who hears a mermaid sing wander down to the sea to listen for her plaintive haunting melody the rest of his life. It’s the voice that we listen for our whole lives, straining to hear it in as the wind whistles through the trees and the mourning doves coo.

Jesus asks Peter if Peter “agapes” him, and Peter replies that he “philios” him. Jesus asks Peter if Peter has God’s kind of love for Jesus, and Peter replies that he has man’s kind of love, a brotherly love. Twice. Finally, Jesus asks if Peter has a brotherly love for Jesus, and Peter replies that he does. Peter has that kind of love.

Hold it. This seems to be a new Peter. Because the Peter who betrayed Jesus was full of bravado. The old Peter would have proclaimed: “absolutely. Of course. No. Problem. Of course I love you with God’s kind of love. I’m a great guy, and you can count on me to cover your back.” Peter DID say that at the Last Supper. He said that even if EVERYONE else betrayed Jesus, he, Peter, never would. That was the cocky Peter – the one, therefore, who burst into tears when the cock crowed. I love that it was a cock that spelled Peter’s doom – it’s a fitting animal to testify to the shortcomings of being the kind of strutting, puffed up, cocky person that Peter was.

But the cross changed everything.

As it always does.

The new Peter recognizes his shortcomings. He acknowledges his limitations. And boom – just like that – in as much time as it takes a spark to fly from a fire of coals kindled on the beach – God restored Peter to sainthood. Because sainthood – despite the casings we give it in English – has nothing to do with perfection. Sainthood, in fact, is the exact opposite. Sainthood comes when we recognize, and hate, the gap between our limitations and God’s perfection. Sainthood comes when we, humbled and full of nothing but our human kind of love for God, admit that the best we can muster is philios, and that we long for more, and ask God for it – and that is when finally, at last, heroically, God can fill us with His agape.

And so we sing.

Until we don’t, all over again. Because the very next thing that happens is that Jesus explains to Peter the kind of martyrs’ death Peter will suffer, and Peter turns around and asks of John, the disciple Jesus loved, – “what about HIM?” The moment Peter is restored to sainthood, he displays a completely human moment of jealousy.

Jesus meets Peter’s jealousy, as we would expect, with the words: “what is it to you?”

It’s a good question. What IS it to us what happens to other people? Why DO we care? Why DO we feel badly, sometimes, when other people seem to have nicer houses, clothes, children, spouses, parents, toys, jobs — you can fill in the blank with whatever your personal Covet Poison happens to be? What IS our problem?

Who knows. It must go back to pride, to wanting to be God, instead of trusting that whatever God gives us is the right thing for us, at the right time, and our job is to just love Him – with gratitude – because this is a God who wants to give us His agape kind of love when we can’t agape Him back – and who is willing to give us an agape love for Him and others, over and over, if we are willing to ask for it, because He knows we run dry, over and over.

And that is how the four gospels of Jesus Christ end. With a moment of jealousy. And then John adds the beautiful words that he supposes that if all that Jesus did were written down, the whole world couldn’t contain those books.

I’d like to read those books, though. I guess that’s what happens when we read the Bible. Each time we read it, the words get richer and deeper, as they resonate with our own experiences, and what grace and circumstances have made of us, lashed against the masts of those experiences. Just as Jesus moves Peter from someone who fishes for fish; to someone who fishes for men; to someone who feeds lambs – so Jesus can change us, if we’re willing, from people who spend all night fishing for we know not what; to people who start feeding others - because God has so filled us with all that He is, it’s as if there’s light bursting from between our fingers.

But we don’t feed others with OUR light, or out of OUR perfection. If we waited for that, we might as well bar the doors and wait for the Grim Reaper. We feed others out of our imperfection – because we’re not giving them ourselves. We’re giving them a gift given as freely as fish grilled over a coal fire on a beach at dawn – at the very moment we’ve returned empty-handed, because we’ve been up all night fishing in the wrong places.

And maybe that’s when we start to pray. Not because we have to. But because we find that even when we don’t love God, He loves us. We discover we can go to God to get filled with a deep joyful satisfaction that nothing else can give. We can go to God whenever we want, no matter where we’ve been fishing, and we will find there the peace that passes all understanding, the love that defies the boundaries of all our languages, and the joy that comes from the deepest murmurs of waves crashing onto a beach from a sunlit sea.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on August 10, 2012

who can we trust?: John 20

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 20. ”Never trust a man who TELLS you to trust him,” my father used to say. As if to prove Dad’s point, one of my most sketchy suitors showed up once with a button pinned to the lapel of his shiny Armani suit that read: “TRUST ME!” The irony was exquisite – I already knew I couldn’t trust that particular man (he had a rap sheet a mile long on the fidelity front). So why, one wonders, was I even with him.

Good question.

Why do we try to put our trust in certain people when we know, deep down, we can’t trust them? Here are the possible negative reasons: it might be some sort of savior complex. Perhaps they express a dark side we sense in ourselves but are afraid to express. Perhaps it’s as simple as they’re attractive, and we blind ourselves to the truth because they seem to offer something we think we need.

But perhaps there’s a positive side to trusting people. Maybe there’s a sense of doing what we are called to do in 1 Corinthians 13 – to “believe all things” of other people – to assume the best about them and keep assuming until one day, finally, magically, they rise above and beyond our (and their) expectations so that we’re both left scratching our heads and marveling at their transcendence? Ernest Hemingway said: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to have concurred: “Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.” I like this concept. It affirms the 1 Corinthians 13 idea that if you assume the best about people, they rise to our expectations. We can help bring about their best self, by assuming they will reveal it. In other words, we treat others as we would like to be treated, because we hope that others will assume the best about us, too.

Perhaps the nuanced distinction lies not in not trusting humans, but not putting our trust in them. The idea is that if we put our trust in God, He fills us even when others disappoint. We are not crushed to the point of despair when the Madoffs run off with our money – because we didn’t keep our deepest treasure with any money manager. Similarly, we are not crushed to the point of despair, or shame beyond the hope of redemption, when we disappoint ourselves – because we didn’t put our trust in ourselves, either.

And when someone disappoints us, the answer lies not in condemning them with a blanket negativity: “you just can’t TRUST that person!!!!” The answer lies instead in acknowledging that we are all flawed. We all have limits. We all have places where we are generally trustworthy, and places where we’re not so reliable.

The answer, therefore, lies in humility, not pride. It lies in putting our trust in God, rather than in ourselves. King Solomon said we shouldn’t lean or rely on our own understanding, but instead rely on God. Proverbs 3:5. The idea is that we humans can rationalize anything; our thoughts get twisted; our “false gods” – such as thinking we “have” to have something other than God – can trick us. And through trusting in God, and relying on His strength, He redeems our mistakes; He unmixes our motives; He brings good out of our bad; and He enables us to love others, and ourselves, even in the midst of our humanity.

Job once said he would trust God, even if God killed him: “though He slay me, yet will I wait for and trust Him.” Job 13:15. That’s exactly the kind of sentiment that people like Jim Holt, who’s just published a book called Why Does the World Exist: an Existential Detective Story revolt against. It gives them a visceral reaction. It makes them recoil. Holt writes that he thinks the world was created by a being 100% malevolent but only 80% effective. And Job makes it sound like God calls us to trust Him even when He’s being “malevolent.” For how are we to trust a God who might slay us?

The short answer is that God who allowed Himself to be slain in order to give us imperfect people life. There are worse things than death – there’s spiritual death. The piece missing in a statement like Holt’s is that there is a creature who is 100 % malevolent, but it’s not God. It’s Satan – the enemy – the liar – the accuser – whose evil stems from pride. He wanted to be like God. He wanted to be in charge and to make the rules. Putting our trust in anyone but God, therefore, isn’t just bad judgment. It’s the source of evil. God knows that – He knew when He made us that if He gave us free will, we would choose to disobey Him – so He knew the cost, before the foundation of the world, and He chose to make us anyway – out of Love.

Jesus’ sacrifice is so backwards to our way of thinking that it’s the kind of thing we have to discover over and over again – daily – hourly – minute by minute – in order to be awakened to new life, to God’s way of thinking, to a place where we learn not to put our trust in anything but God, but to love everything, including God.

Because God loves us. He’s the gardener who lovingly slowly painstakingly pulls out all our weeds. He’s the one who disappears the moment we think we’ve laid Him to rest in a tomb. He’s the one who rises again. He’s the one to whom we run, and cling, and who then urges us on – tells us not to hold on to Him – but to go and tell others, to reach out to the lost, to be healed by Him. He’s the one who comes to us even when we hide behind closed doors – afraid of Him and other people. He’s the one who calls us by name, twice, when we’re weeping – because He knows the first time He says our name, we’re crying too hard to hear Him. He’s the one who asks us to look at His wounds, because He knows that there we will find healing for our own. He’s the one who says, just as He did to Thomas: touch me.

He’s the one who asks us to trust Him in a dark world. And in trusting Him, in putting our trust in Him, in letting Him hold our hand, and pull us to our feet, He gives us a straight path, where we can walk out into the world with our heads held high, forgiven for every mixed motive, relying on His strength, not our own, loving others, and knowing we are loved. Spending time with Him makes our faces glow; it brings a light to our eyes; it lifts our hunched shoulders; it gives us a deep, knowing sense of beauty we can find in no other person, place or thing. And God opens our eyes to behold wonderful things in other people, places and things. God enables us to see how even the darkest of people are made in His image. He shows us how the entire world is charged with the grandeur of God. He makes all the world unfold, so that even the cooing of a dove makes us melt with the sense that God is singing love songs to us all day long.

In other words, God enables us to love people without having to put our trust in them.

Blessed are those who trust Him, even though we’ve never seen Him. Perhaps the blessing is that when we trust Him, without having seen Him, we begin to see Him – everywhere.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on August 3, 2012

what is love?: John 19

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 19. An old boyfriend and I used to text each other almost every day the question: “what is love?” The answer varied. Sometimes it was joking. Okay, usually it was joking. Sometimes it was serious. But it wasn’t the answer we were interested in. It was the question itself.

Why? I don’t know, but I think maybe there’s a deep asking inside each of us, and that the asking out loud makes us feel loved. But we can’t ask just anyone. We have to ask someone who loves us.

If you want to laugh out loud, you can click on this link and watch Jim Carrey lip synching in a car to the Haddaway song: what is love? It kind of proves my point – there’s something about just asking the question that cheers us up. Okay, so maybe it’s Jim Carrey’s face that cheers us up. But I think it’s the combination – Jim Carrey’s cheesy grin, shining white teeth, along with Haddaway half-shrieking the words: ”what is love?”

So what is love?

As with my texting, the answer varies. We can look at 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter we have heard read at almost every wedding we’ve ever been to, perhaps even our own, and know love is patient and kind. We can google it – according to the Economist it was the most googled question on the planet last year, replacing the question “who is God” – and we’ll find cute little affirmations, usually from children, saying things like: ”Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.” Bobby, age 7.

So what is in the room with us at Christmas when we stop opening presents and listen? What is whispering to us? What shimmers in the air around us? What is in the room with us when we’re alone with someone we love? What is in a city with us when we’re walking on a crowded sidewalk and feel love welling up inside us and know all is right with the world, for no apparent reason at all?

And what’s in the room with us on Christmas Eve when we find ourselves all alone and know it’s wrong to be alone on holidays? What’s in the room with us at a party when we look around and realize everyone else is a couple except us? What’s on the street with us when everyone walking toward us bumps into us, scowls, and doesn’t look back? What is love then? What does it look like? And why does love exist if it seems like we alone, out of all humanity, can’t have any? What is love when the world seems dark? What is love when someone we love is bleeding, or has cancerous tumors growing out of them, so big and ugly they pierce through the skin? What is love when we see someone who once grinned at us, with a grin as wide as Jim Carrey’s, giving that same grin to someone else, and turning to us with indifference?

It’s a strange thing about feeling unloved, but when we’re in the moment, it feels like we’ll never be loved again. Apparently this feeling is a “documented” stage of grief. When we lose someone we love, it’s “normal” to feel like no one will never love us like that again – and then, strangely, unexpectedly, when we least expect it – they do. Until they don’t, all over again. And we go back into that “stage”, that deep knowing, that certainty, that no one will ever love us again.

And so we keep asking the question. We ask the question when we feel loved, and we ask the question when we don’t. No matter what our circumstances, no matter what our relational status, no matter whether we’re healthy or sick, happy or sad, busy or bored, we still want to know, we always want to know: what is love? What is it? We ask, and ask, and the more we ask, the better we feel, because we somehow sense we’re on the right track.

We humans are conditioned to think that we have to know all the answers. But maybe knowing the right question is even more important than knowing the answer. Maybe just asking the question WHAT IS LOVE is more right than we can know or imagine.

Maybe it’s the very question God wants us to ask.

But, as I discovered with my texting boyfriend, we have to ask someone who loves us. And when the humans we love leave us, or die, or just fade away into busyness, and we find ourselves alone in the dark, who can we ask? Who loves us?

We can whisper the question into the dark, and in that moment, we might feel worse. Prayer, I often find, doesn’t make us feel better in the moment. But it always, always, makes us feel better afterward. ”You should smoke pot,” a middle-aged friend cheerfully shouted at me over the music at a party recently.

“Why,” I asked him.

“It makes you see things – understand things from a distance.”

“I do other things,” I told him, “to get that feeling.”

“Really?” He’s a bright man, and curious, and he seemed genuinely amazed that something could produce the same feeling as drugs. ”Like what?”

“Um. You really want to know?” We were at a party. It was a fun party. Did he really want to hear about God? I doubted it. And yet, he was asking.

He nodded.

“Prayer,” I said.

He looked at me blankly. He didn’t seem to believe me. He didn’t seem to understand. So I reached for a way to explain. I reached for an honest answer about where I get that feeling, not a pious mealy-mouthed answer. ”Or reading a really great novel. Or listening to a great piece of music.” That hit home. He could relate to that. He agreed. Like I said, he’s a bright man. And he knows what it feels like to get “high” on reading a great novel or listening to music. But the “high” of prayer, he seemed to not know.

If you haven’t tried prayer, it’s hard to understand. Especially, I think, because my experience of prayer is that a lot of times it makes us feel even worse when we begin. Prayer means “going there.” It means entering into our hurts, and then going even deeper. We buried them for a reason – they hurt so much we don’t even want to know about them. But they’re sitting in there all the time, anyway, so, my feeling is, hey, we might as well get them out into the open. They’ll sabotage us if we don’t.

But we don’t want to do it alone. We want to “go there” with someone who loves us. When we do, it’s like the connection we feel when we’re buoyed by a really great novel, or listening to a piece of music that touches us deeply, that makes us feel alive, that makes us feel like someone understands us, and is, perhaps, like us, too.

What we find when we go into our wounds in prayer is that there is something very, very particular about love. Love lies in the details. While we express the concept of love in universalities, it can’t live there. Love lives in the fine print. Love is particular. Love notices every detail of someone’s hair and face. Love notices every detail of our hurts and wounds. Love is “going there” – going into the fine print.

That’s why the 19th chapter of John – the one where Jesus is crucified – is so detailed. I’ve included it in the Amplified Bible version above, the version that expands the original language so that we can picture it, live it, breathe it, in all its details. It’s the chapter where the soldiers twist a crown of thorns and jam it on Jesus’ head. It’s the one where they flog him with a lead-tipped whip. It’s the one where they deck him out in a purple cloak. It’s the one where Pilate goes back and forth, back and forth, between talking to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and then listening to a shrieking, jealous, angry, violent crowd who want to murder Jesus – and where one senses they are shrieking not about Christ but about the sin in themselves, the darkness that lurks in their hearts, the things about themselves they hate and want to murder. It’s the chapter where we watch Pilate go back and forth between innocence and guilt, guilt and innocence, and then judges the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent – even though, all along, Pilate says, and knows, that Jesus is innocent. It’s the story of a weak man, sensing his weakness, knowing his weakness, having his weakness rammed home in his face, and yet giving in to his weakness anyway.

And so Pilate turns Jesus over to be crucified.

It’s the story of how we can see love, know it, want it – and reject it anyway. It’s the story of how we can know right – and choose wrong. It’s the story of how very very detailed our poor choices are. Our bad choices, our sins small and large, our selfishness and pride, are written not just in black and white, but in vivid techni-color, painted in blaring, neon colors all around us, for everyone to see, for us to see, no matter how hard we try to bury them.

And yet, what is so moving about the story, is that it’s the story not of our shame, but of Jesus’ seeming shame. Jesus is the one mocked here. He’s the one people strike. He’s the one who is nailed to a cross. He is the one who meets every clawprint of hatred and venom with love, forgiveness, grace and mercy.

“Don’t you realize that I have the power to release you or crucify you,” Pilate says to Christ. You can almost hear Pilate’s voice crack as he shrieks with the hot air of the powerless. Jesus calmly explains to Pilate that he wouldn’t have any power unless it were given to him from above. This is Love. Love is when God meets our powerlessness with His power. It’s when He meets our shrieking with His calm. It’s when He meets our wrong with His right. It’s when He cuts through our pride with His sword of Truth.

Even as He is on the cross, Jesus then takes the time to give his mother Mary to the disciple John, and John to the disciple. It’s a strange detail, in a way, because we know Jesus had brothers and sisters. So it means that at that moment, Mary’s own children were not in a place to look after her. It means that sometimes, even our own family can’t be there for us. It means that God knows this, and looks after us in other ways, ways we didn’t think we wanted, ways we couldn’t have predicted. This, too, is Love. Love doesn’t always look like we think it should.

And Jesus is the one who thirsts here. We thirst for love. That much is obvious. We ask what love is because we’re thirsty for love – perhaps even thirstier than we realize. ”R u thirsty,” a friend texted me recently before picking me up for a party. Yes, we are all thirsty. But for what?

We know WE don’t want a crown of thorns. We know we’re not thirsty for being whipped. We know we don’t want to be rejected. We know we’re thirsty for love, for acceptance, for grace, mercy and kindness. We know we want someone to see us at our worst, and accept us anyway.

So, actually, we all know what love is, don’t we? So why do we keep asking? What are we really asking?

Maybe what we’re really asking, is just to be loved. Maybe we’re asking that someone see, know and care about all the details of our lives. Maybe we’re asking for someone to always have our back. Maybe we’re asking that our deserts be turned into gardens. Maybe we’re asking that no detail be wasted, that everything have meaning, that every tumor blossom into beauty, and that every thirst be quenched with streams of living water.

Maybe, then, our thirst is a gift. Maybe it’s a gift to want to know what love is. Maybe it’s a gift to be able to sing, along with a grinning Jim Carrey, what is love? Maybe it’s a gift, because Love already is. Maybe God made us to connect with Him by asking what love is – and the moment the question is on our lips, He is in our heart, saying: Love is me. I am Love. And I already Love you. I made you for Love. I died to bring you to life. I took the neon purple colors of your twisted shame, so that you could fly free, unencumbered by guilt.

So maybe all that God asks, is that we ask the question of Him. What is love? Just keep asking. Because, as Someone far wiser than I once said: To seek is to find.

To ask is to be answered.

To want love, is to be loved.

To know you were made for Love, that you want Love, that you thirst for Love, is to know Love Himself.

He already knows us, in all our vivid techni-color, our subtlety, our nuance, our whispers and our shrieks. He knows it all; He bore it all; and He loves us. After all, He made us that way, and He doesn’t make a mistake.

He just wants us to know Him. Because if Love already knows us, then we are, more deeply than we can ask, know and imagine, loved in the finest detail imaginable.

What is love?

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on August 1, 2012

I’m NEVER going to talk like that again. EVER….: John 16

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

Before and after my father died, we took turns cooking large family dinners in Long Island. One night, as I was cooking alone for eighteen, I heard myself erupt at my beautiful 16 year old daughter for not helping me exactly the way I wanted. I hadn’t explained what I wanted, of course, but that didn’t stop me from getting angry with her for not being able to read my mind. Then I heard myself speak in honeyed tones, the very next moment, to my nieces and nephews. The contrast shocked me. It meant I had control, but somehow I hadn’t chosen to exercise it. Instantly, I resolved not to lose my temper with my daughter EVER again.

When I finally sat down at the dinner table that night, one of my brothers said to me with an amused smile, “Caroline, do you know Aesop’s fable about the sun and the wind?” I’d missed that one. Clearly. My brother said, “the sun and the wind made a bet about which of them could get a man to take off his coat. The wind blustered and blew, and the man just drew his coat more tightly around him. So the sun came out and shone down on the man, and he took his coat off.” My brother paused. ”You were the wind.”

I knew that.

My brother mistook my silence. ”You were,” he said. ”I heard you.”

“I know,” I said. ”I was just trying to decide whether it had worked being the wind. All the work for the dinner got done.”

“That,” my brother said, “Is because YOU did it.”

I laughed. He was right. Being the wind hadn’t worked at all. It had just driven my daughter away. Instead of getting me more help, my anger had resulted in less. So I resolved then and there to be the sun, the little darling shining sun, full of sweetness and light. Shine, shine, let my light shine.

And the next night, cooking the next dinner, I erupted at my daughter all over again.

The strange thing is that I’d really tried hard not to lose my temper. I’d gone on a long walk. I’d prayed. I’d asked for God’s help. All to no avail. I felt the words of St. Paul as if they were my own: “I do the very thing I don’t want to do.” Romans 7:21. Yes, stress brings out the worst in us. Yes, I was exhausted. Yes, I was grieving my father. Yes, I could have used paper plates. I could have ordered in. I could have taken more time to teach my 16 year old how to help me in a non-stress situation. I could have started asking my nieces and nephews to pitch in. I could have walked away, thought quietly for a moment, and figured out how best to get help. I’d overdone it.

But the fact is, that bad stuff – the way I blamed my daughter – is stuck in our hearts all the time. When the bad stuff comes to the surface, it shocks us. We can paper it over, and succeed in speaking sweetly to nieces and nephews, but the people closest to us see what’s really lurking within. We see it, too, and we hate it. We can despair, despise ourselves, rationalize, blame others, look for distractions – and we do all these things – but we can also, eventually, hopefully, turn to God for help.

And He gives it. When we’ve failed enough, and broken every resolution we ever made, we’re finally ready to listen to the voice of Truth. The problem is, sometimes the voice of Truth tells us things we don’t expect. In my case, what I discovered first was the Truth about my own heart. There’s a lot of anger in there. And God let me stay there in that Truth for a while. Because, guess what, I spoke in the same way to my daughter two more times over the past few weeks. My daughter is kind. She’s understanding. I’ve apologized. But speaking in anger hurts her. It hurts our relationship. And ultimately, it drives people away when we need them most.

So why don’t we always listen to God’s voice? Why do we continue to do the very thing we don’t want to do? Why, in other words, are we imperfect? Is there more Truth to be learned than just the sad Truth about our imperfection?

I know one thing. I cannot sit here and write that I will never lost my temper again. I can’t say I will always be the sun. But I can say that I know the Sun – and I mean that in all of its glorious punnery. I know the Son.

The Son of God shines His light down on us. He loves us in our inadequacy. He is always there, always shining on us, offering us grace, mercy, forgiveness and love when we deserve it least – because He alone knows that’s when we need it most. When an exhausted two year old child has a temper tantrum, even we humans know to scoop her up and hold her tight until her raging turns to tears. We’re less good at doing that with adults. But God knows exactly how to parent us. He knows when to scoop us up. He knows when to hold us tight. He knows when to “quiet us with his love.” Zeph. 3:17.

And yes, of course, He knows when to discipline us. He knows when to allow our relationships to suffer to the point that we really do learn how to hold our tongues. But my guess is that God scoops us up and holds us tight far more than we realize. We expect Him to be the wind, but He is always the Sun.

When we start to listen to the voice of the Son, we learn how much Love there is there. We begin to bask in that love. We unfurl. We begin to release, just a little, all the things we’ve clutched tightly to our chests. We start to trust. We start to release our anger to His healing light, and melt into sweetness instead.

I can make all the resolutions I want, but ultimately, I can only throw myself on God’s mercy. And the more I understand how kind God is with my inadequacy, the more able I will be to be kind to myself in my own inadequacy, and kind to others in theirs.

When we mess up, we want to hide from God. But that’s exactly the wrong response. He wants us to lift our faces to the Sun in the very moment of our greatest darkness. He’s grieved when we choose to harden our hearts, but He’s not surprised. He wants us to turn to Him for healing and forgiveness over and over – no matter how many times we lose our temper – and go on trusting Him to help us. He doesn’t give up on us, ever, and He doesn’t want us to give up on Him.

The voice of Truth tells us the truth about our weaknesses – but it also tells us the Truth about God’s sacrificial love. God doesn’t live inside us because we deserve it. He lives inside us because He loves us – even when we don’t love Him back, even when we harden our hearts. All we have to do is ask.

That’s what melts us. That’s what makes us take off our coats. That’s what makes us lay down our arms. It’s what makes us surrender. And ultimately, somewhere, somehow, in admitting our faults and finding God’s Love, that’s what puts sweetness in our hearts instead of temper. Because the sweetness will shine from within – not from us – but from the one true source of Love. The more we bask in the undeserved love of the one true Son, the more that Sun can shine through us. Ironically, paradoxically, thankfully, there, where we least deserve it, we find the most Sunshine and Love we can possibly imagine. It is there, in God’s grace, that God overcame the world. He wants us to take heart. He wants us to experience His peace. And only in His peace, can we radiate Him to others.

posted by Caroline Coleman on July 10, 2012 in carolinecolemanbooks.com

until death do not us part: John 15

Posted on June 30, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 15. Two weeks ago, my mother called to say the doctor had said my father, who had Parkinson’s and stage 4 melanoma, wouldn’t last the week. My brothers and I all rushed to Dad’s bedside at home and watched his breathing slow and his pulse weaken. We read to him, prayed over him, and if we could have, we would have breathed for him. Every evening the nurse told us Dad wouldn’t make it through the night -and every night he made it. On the seventh night, I said to his prone weakened body that hadn’t responded to us in five days, “see you tomorrow, Dad.”

A murmur passed through the room. I could feel my family not wanting me to be disappointed.

That evening, a thunderstorm lingered over our houses, dark, heavy and humid. In the morning, my doctor brother called me at 6:15 a.m. ”Dad just stopped breathing.”

“I’ll be right there,” I said. I sprinted through the wet grass in my bare feet. Dad was lying on his bed, alone in his room with a nurse. He was still and his mouth was open. I asked the nurse to make her phone calls somewhere else. My doctor brother stood in the doorway. ”He may give a few more breaths,” my brother told me, “but it’s just a reflex.” My brother left me alone with him.

I stood over Dad’s bed, and the words poured out as if he could hear me – or perhaps, in case he could hear me.

“You can go now, Dad,” I told him.

Dad breathed.

It’s just a reflex, I told myself. ”You’ve done everything you needed to do,” I said.

Dad breathed again.

“You were a great father.” He breathed again. His intelligence, humor and drive glimmered in his face, as if his spirit were hovering there. I could see his spirit there in his face, in a way we hadn’t seen for the past five days.

“Everything is forgiven in Jesus. Everything.” Dad’s Adam’s apple raised and lowered. ”You can let go.”

One of Dad’s nurses came to the door and freaked out: ”HE’S BREATHING! I SAW HIM BREATHING,” she gasped. I glanced at her and returned to Dad. I knew Dad was breathing. I could see it. I wasn’t surprised. I still had things to say. It was as if Dad had been waiting for me, hanging on, perhaps needing help letting go. I told him the words God had once told me: “it’s going to be alright, Dad. God’s going to take care of you.”

Dad left. He stopped breathing, his face stilled again, and his mouth opened.

I joined the others in the living room, and we began the process of planning a funeral and grieving a man who’d loved us more than life itself.

Perhaps what I saw in Dad’s face as he passed was just a reflex, but it didn’t feel like it. Look at Lazarus. God can raise anyone from the dead, any time He wants, for His own purposes. We don’t know why or when He gives life, and we have no control over when He takes it. But it seems to me that Dad was still there, still hanging on, not quite ready to let go, needing to hear the reassurance that he could trust God.

Or maybe it was all just a reflex, and the one who didn’t want to let go was me.

We all have trouble letting go. In Dad’s case, who can blame him? Even though Parkinson’s had stolen his mobility and melanoma had stolen his health, leaving this world and all that is familiar is something most of us fight. Similarly, letting go of a father is also something most of us fight.

We all have trouble letting go of our desire for control. We have trouble yielding to God, surrendering to His will, and wanting what He wants for us. We have trouble trusting Him.

The good news is that God knows all this. He is gentle with us, and kind. He is a gardener. John 15:1. And like all good gardeners, He doesn’t let us run wild. Instead, He prunes us. He cuts off everything that doesn’t bear fruit. It hurts to be pruned, but it makes us lovely. When we’ve failed enough, and broken every resolution we ever made, and lost all the things we once thought we had to have, we discover we’re finally ready to try things God’s way.

In other words, we finally ask for His help. God’s way is an affront to our pride. Jesus explains here in John 15 that we can’t do anything without Jesus: “apart from me, you can do nothing.” John 15:5. The first time I read that, it shocked me. You mean I can’t do anything without Christ? Now I’m starting to understand that what God is asking of us is that we rest in His presence. It’s an invitation, not an insult. He asks that we accept that if Jesus is the vine and we’re just the branches, all we branches can do is hang on for dear life. We can only cling to the vine. We can just lie there. God asks that we go off by ourselves and spend time alone with Him. He asks, as He explains here in John 15, that we remain in His love.

I don’t know why we fight remaining in love, but we do.

My father has passed into the arms of Love. He’s asleep in Christ, and when the world is made new, he’ll be given a new body. But Jesus offers us that kind of transformative love even now. He longs to make us into beautiful gardens. He wants us to accept His love. He knows that love, and love alone, makes us blossom the way He intended.

God also knows that we resist love, so He offers us help accepting love. As John Stott explains in his memoir “Why I Am a Christian,” when David writes at the end of the 23rd psalm that surely God’s goodness and mercy shall “follow” us all the days of our lives, the original Hebrew word means “pursue.” We may run away from God, but His love keeps “pursuing” us. Just as God once wore a crown of thorns so He could transform the thorns in our lives into blessings – even though we didn’t ask for that – He keeps pursuing us, even when we don’t ask for it. Jesus was cut off in a far worse way than any of us could imagine, so that we can blossom. Our deathbeds can become, as it did for my father, thrones of life, if we ask to remain in God’s love even when we don’t want to – even when we don’t just walk through the valley of the shadow of death but make our beds there.

Grief is a strange emotion, full of contradictory feelings – peace and sorrow; joy and sadness; denial and shock. The emotion that has surprised me most, because it’s so irrational, is that I feel abandoned by my father’s death.

God knows all of our contradictory emotions, and He whispers to each of us that He will never leave us and never abandon us – not today, tomorrow, or on our deathbeds. We read to our father from Revelation 21 as his kidneys failed and his pulse weakened, because we had a feeling that he was already catching a glimpse of the city of gold and the river of life. We knew this, because we, too, catch glimpses of the gold. We feel the river of life streaming through our own hearts. God’s Spirit is alive. He offers us the love that never disappoints, never dies, never loses faith and always hopes. That’s the love in which we can remain, forever.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on June 30, 2012

remain in my love: John 15

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

The next post, on how God is the gardener and Jesus the true vine, is going to have to wait. My father is slipping away, and we are all trying to live out the words of this gospel: remain in my love. The gardener is at work, and sometimes he lets, as the singer Nicole Nordemann puts it, a little rain fall now and then to make us lovely.

finding home – all over again: John 14

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 14. Home is one of those evocative concepts that we associate with fulfillment and yet longing at the same time. Home is something we pine for, but far too often with nostalgia. We have a set idea of what home should look like, but we spend much of our lives wishing for it rather than having it. About eight years ago, my definition of home was living under one roof with my husband and children. But when divorce struck, I felt like I had lost my home – and I couldn’t find one to replace it. It’s a common theme in life – losing home – and the question is: how do we find home again?

A year into my separation, I was thumbing through the gospel of John, and found a promise about home that I’d never seen before. Or perhaps I’d seen it, but it didn’t mean anything until I’d lost my home: “All who love me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with each of them. Anyone who doesn’t love me will not obey me.” John 14:23-24. Joy, and its twin song, peace, flooded me. If God comes and makes His home with us, home becomes anywhere. We can be “homed” when we’re alone, in a crowd, or with our family. We can be “homed” when circumstances go our way, and when they don’t. Home is wherever we are. Home is everywhere.

But the rest of these verses stopped me short. Is Jesus saying God only makes His “home” with us if we do what He says? Is this promise of God dwelling with us conditional? That would make me homeless all over again. That would create more anxiety, not less – and all this in a chapter that begins with Jesus telling us not to “let” our hearts be troubled: ”Trust in God, and trust also in me.” John 14:1. How can we not let our hearts be troubled, if God only comes and lives with us if we’re obedient to a perfect God – when we’re anything but perfect?

The answer lies in this concept of trust. If we trust God to do everything – including to help make us obedient – we can relax. Funnily enough, isn’t this why we’re seeking home in the first place – don’t we long for a place we can relax? We want to be able, as one of my nieces puts it, to put on our “loungy” clothes when we get home. We want to slip out our contact lenses; rip off our tight clothes; pop out our dentures; hang up our wigs; wipe off our make-up, and know that nobody minds. There’s no one in our homes we need to impress. There’s no one in our homes that will change their opinion about us, no matter what we wear, do or say. Home is the person to whom we can send a picture of ourselves at our worst – the day we break out, have bags under our eyes, sallow skin, and unwashed hair – and know they’ll laugh and love us more for it. Home is the place where we can just be, in all our stuff, and have nothing to prove. Home is where we can relax.

So if God invites us home, He must be inviting us to let Him take us home. God must be inviting us to get home by relaxing into Him. He wants us to lean into Him. It’s so easy to think God is like the humans we know. It’s so easy to think God is as fickle as we are. We forget that God really is kind. He really does love us. He really is rich in mercy. He really does have a good plan for our lives. And, as Jesus says twice in this chapter, He really will give us anything if we ask for it in His name.

So what if we ask for home? What if we ask for trust?

My experience is that the only way to move closer to God, home, trust and the peace we want is by being honest with God about how we can’t do these things. Embarrassing confession: a few weeks ago, I was driving alone on a highway at high speed in the fast lane. A car in front of me had the audacity to actually be going only the speed limit. I flashed my lights. The car wouldn’t move over. I flashed again. And again. The middle lane was full, so I zipped over to the slow lane, accelerated up and moved into the fast lane – feeling pretty proud of myself – only to have it happen all over again with the next car. Road rage had taken over. I wanted to go faster and faster and have the road to myself. It felt out of control. Finally, I moved over to the slow lane, and burst into tears. Why? I didn’t know, so I started to talk out loud to God – something you can do when you’re alone in a car. I discovered that the reason I had road rage had NOTHING to do with those poor cars I’d been terrorizing. Instead, I started to tell God the truth about who I was really angry at. I told him the truth about a situation that was troubling me: “I don’t trust You to help me with this.” I stopped praying perfect little prayers, and instead started telling God the truth about what I really wanted to do; who had hurt me; how much I wanted to hurt them back instead of forgive and let God handle it; and how I didn’t trust God to take care of my concerns at all.

And that was where I found home: when my prayers got their “loungy clothes” on.

It’s strange, and unexpected to us, but right there, in the midst of our blindest rages, our deepest fears, and our most honest doubts, God comes in. In telling Him how I didn’t trust Him, I was finally making room for Him to give me the trust that I lack. That day of road rages and tears changed everything. Trust has grown for me – the way the things of God always grow – slowly, in God’s time, emerging in a way that fills us with joy.

That’s why David Crowder can sing in a song called “You’re Everything” about how God can’t ask the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the cripple run, unless He does everything. How can God command us cripples to run to Him, UNLESS, He gives us the ability to run? We’re too blind to see heaven. God has to open our eyes. We’re too deaf to hear the voice of God. He has to unstop our ears. He has to do everything, including give us faith, including give us trust, including give us a vision of what we’re really pining for. We’re so blind, we think home looks very different than what really satisfies us. We think we’re longing for particular people, places and things, but really we’re longing for Eden. We can’t long for the right home. We can’t trust God. We can’t find our own way.

That’s why Jesus promises here: “I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am.” John 14:3. And there’s our solution to the seemingly conditional nature of this promise of home. God has taken care of the conditions. That’s the only way to get home – if God Himself comes and gets us, and takes us there, and stays with us, no matter where we go – even, as King David says, if we make our beds in hell. Psalm 139.

Jesus is the way home, as He says in this chapter. We can’t get home on our own. The entrance to Eden is blocked. So God made a new way. God Himself died for our disobedience, so that He can carry us over the threshold, over and over again, and bring us home – battered, exhausted and weary from banging on the wrong doors, searching in the wrong homes, looking in the wrong places, making our beds even in hell. When we admit we’re lost and can’t find our way home, He comes to us and makes His home in our hearts. He puts His Holy Spirit inside of us.

That’s when we become “chapeled.” We become “tabernacled.” As God promised Joshua, wherever we put our feet, we will be on land God has given us. Deuteronomy 11:24. When God comes into our hearts, our longing for Eden is satisfied, because Eden comes to us. The garden we can’t find on our own grows within us. God’s Spirit moves within us with supernatural love and joy. Streams of living water flow from our heart. We become obedient – not to robotically obeying rules and regulations – but to gratitude. We become obedient to the free gift of grace. We become obedient to His mercy, and knowing this helps make us merciful to others. We become obedient to being able to put on our “loungy” clothes, to being honest with God. We walk into our godly homes and kick off our shoes wherever we are, knowing we are loved. We become obedient to the way of the cross, of knowing God did all the work there, and all we can do is thank Him.

And somehow, in God’s miraculous way, this kind of “home love” from God helps us obey Him. Knowing Him in the intimacy of our homes – our hearts – helps us to follow more and more of His rules, because we start to trust Him. We start to believe, slowly, that His ways are not our ways – and His ways are better. We start to stop thinking we know best, and start doing things His way. We don’t obey to get to heaven, we obey because heaven has come to us, and we’re so grateful, our cups runneth over with love. We obey because there’s the same freedom in God’s rules that we find in our loungy clothes at home.

And once we’ve tasted our true homes, once we’ve dwelt in the “many rooms” of the house of the Lord – where else can we go? We may knock on the wrong door, but now we know it’s the wrong door. Before we were wandering around blind. Now our eyes are open, and when we walk down the garden path, we’re really really sorry. We know where home is – and we know how to get there. We get back the same way we got there in the first place. We block out the judgmental critical voices that tell us we’ve fallen too far for God to pick us up, and we ask to be carried back. And when we trust God even to give us trust, He meets us with kindness wherever we are: ”You’re home now,” God says. ”Welcome. This is where you belong.” Just when we think there’s no way home, it comes to life from out of the blue.

“Home- where the wheels are turning
Home- why I keep returning
Home- where my world is breaking in two
Home- with the neighbors fighting
Home- always so exciting
Home- were my parents telling the truth?
Home- such a funny feeling
Home- no-one ever speaking
Home- with our bodies touching
Home- and the cameras watching
Home- will infect what ever you do
Where Home- comes to life from out of the blue.” Brian Eno.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on June 11, 2012

avoiding the mess – or diving right in: John 13

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 13. When my English grandmother had a stroke, I would fly over for the weekend and sit with her in her hospital room. The left side of her beautiful face was paralyzed, impeding her ability to smile. Her left arm hung useless. Her left leg barely moved. She could just manage to wriggle her toes.

She was a woman whom, up until that moment, had never stopped moving. She was one of the most important people in my life. We stayed with her and my grandfather in their house in Hampshire for a month every summer until I turned sixteen. I adored her. She entertained constantly. She loved people. Everyone immediately told her their deepest secrets, because they sensed she was a practical, caring, sensible, compassionate person they could trust. She bought me my favorite doll house furniture – which, yes, I admit, I still have in my daughter’s doll house. She took me to every art gallery and museum in London. She saved an oak chest full of wool blankets for us to drape over the climbing frame in the garden to make forts. She knew that the true purpose of her rows of roses and other flowers was as a backdrop for Hide and Seek tag. She made sure she always had an ample supply of jam sponge cakes for us to eat. Her hair was always elegantly coiffed, and she wore silk dresses of beautiful designs. And she never walked in London without stockings and glossy black pumps.

But after her stroke, there was only one thing I could do for her. I could wash her semi-paralyzed feet. It was something that neither of us would have dreamed of my doing for her until she was sick. She would never have sat still long enough. She would never have allowed time for me to tend her – after all, it was her job to tend to me. And yet when she lay in that little hospital bed, in a large room that smelled of the urine of the other old people, with a window that looked out onto a beautiful blue cloud-filled sky, I took a towel, washed her feet, patted them dry, and rubbed lotion into them. That experience now lingers as one of my sweetest memories. It’s a bittersweet memory, of course, because I would much rather she’d never been sick. But in this world, we don’t get to control that kind of thing. What we can control is how we meet people in their vulnerability. What we discover, there, is that they’re completely beautiful, no matter how paralyzed. What we discover there is the strange truth that we, too, are completely beautiful, no matter how paralyzed.

Which brings us to John 13, and this strange, lovely, hard to understand story of Jesus taking off his robe, tying a towel around his waist, and washing his disciples’ feet. The reason I call this story strange is that it’s so very pedestrian. It seems almost mundane. It’s messy – literally. Jesus, who acknowledges in this chapter with complete confidence that He is our “Lord” and our “Messiah,” washes dust and dirt off of the feet of His followers, and commands us to do the same.

I’d much rather he commanded us to have startlingly successful careers on t.v. It feels like it would be so much easier. Washing feet is the sort of thing you can’t control at all. It has no glamour. It has no glitz. It really doesn’t even have any rhyme or reason. We have no idea when other people will come wandering into our lives with dirty feet. ”Oh,” we’ll say, looking down and noticing dust on the clay feet of the person in front of us. ”Looks like you could do with a little help.”

“Oh, right,” they respond, looking down themselves. ”I am a little dirty. Um, okay. Fine. Help sounds great.”

And that’s how it works. That, apparently, is what glory looks like. That’s love. That’s the messy reality of washing other people’s feet. And it’s the messy reality of how God wants us to let Him wash us.

As I discovered with my grandmother, sickness can allow us to get closer to people. I was already close to her. But her sickness allowed me to see her at her most vulnerable, and minister to her in her need. We think we won’t enjoy that sort of thing, but when we do it, we discover we like it. My grandmother told me that during the war, everyone in England had to go out and dig ditches together – the butchers alongside the Duke’s – and they discovered they liked it far more than they would have imagined.

What’s involved here is the casting down of pride. We cling to our pride. We think we need it. But when we fall, and discover our weakness, vulnerability and need, there’s no room for pride. I’m not just talking about my grandmother and her stroke. I’m talking about the circumstances of our lives that knock us off course, and humble us to the point where we finally admit our need of God and others. We reach out to God and friends out of desperation alone – and we discover it brings us closer to them. We discover we like the intimacy that comes out of that experience. We discover that asking for help brings unexpected joy, when we least expected it, and often when we least deserve it.

So why does it take us so long? I don’t know, but I do know that whenever I ask for God’s help – which is far too often a cry of last resort – I discover that what He gives me so far surpasses anything I could have discovered on my own. But we’re like toddlers, covered in mud, kicking and screaming that we don’t want a bath. Once we’re hauled, or bribed, into the warm water, splashing around with our rubber duckies and battery powered divers, and tugboats and bubbles, we don’t want to get out – until the next day, when we go through the “no way no how am I having a bath I’m fine just the way I am” routine, all over again.

None of us really think we need cleansing, but we all do. The most chilling aspect of this chapter is the moment when Jesus tells Judas He knows that Judas is going to betray Him, and that instead of changing his mind, Judas goes and does it anyway. We are told that “Satan entered him.” And “Judas left at once, going out into the night.” John 13:30.

It’s a chilling verse because we know the feeling. We know when we shouldn’t do something, and we go and do it anyway. We leave at once, going out into the night.

But unlike other humans, who so often judge us for our journeys “into the night”, God doesn’t hate us for our waywardness. Since God knows that we resist our baths – since He knows we can’t even really want to be cleansed without His help – He comes to find us. He knows we have stubborn hearts; after all, He made our hearts. But He also knows, that like every dragon of old, we have a soft underbelly. There’s a chink in our armor. There’s a tender place where His arrows of love can pierce.

That tender place is the moment when someone gives to us when we least deserve it. It’s when we expect condemnation, and we receive kindness. It’s when we show up, covered in dirt, and someone washes our feet. That’s why Jesus asks us to wash each other’s feet. That’s why Jesus came to wash our feet. He bends down and washes our feet, even though He knows that before “the rooster crows tomorrow morning,” we’ll deny we even know Him. John 13:38. Like Peter, we can promise God our undying devotion – and turn around and betray Him the very next minute.

Ultimately, what pierces our walls of pride is when we start to see, just a tiny little bit, that God forgives us. On the cross, Jesus experienced all the filth Satan could muster from his arsenal of hatred, so that God could cleanse our hearts.

Knowing that melts us. We can acknowledge our fault to God once we understand how deeply He loves us. It’s easy to tell someone who loves you what you’ve done wrong. In contrast, we all get defensive when we think we’re being judged by someone. God doesn’t judge us. The judgment already fell on the One who didn’t deserve it, so that God could look at us and see His own perfection.

Admitting we need God’s help changes and heals us. It enables us to sometimes, just sometimes, wash other people’s feet – and discover that we like it a lot more than we thought we would. We all want to love each other – we just aren’t really sure how. We need help getting into the mess of other people’s lives. God wants to help us. He wants to take our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh – a heart like God’s, a heart that can be broken. Gen. 6:6. He wants our hearts to be capable of being “stirred” and our spirits to be “moved.” Ex. 35:21-22. He wants, in short, to give us a tender soft heart that enables us to love other people and become so close to them we literally weep when they weep, and laugh when they laugh – hardly even noticing anymore who is “clean” and who is “dirty.” When we allow God to daily cleanse us, by humbling ourself and admitting we fail, we discover we’re beautiful in His eyes, no matter how dirty we become and how deep the ditch into which we’ve fallen. We discover that all we have to do is cry out for help, and we receive His beauty.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on June 2, 2012

on why being vulnerable is a beautiful thing: John 12

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 12. Have you ever poured out your heart to someone, only to be met with indifference? Have you ever explained how deeply you love them, only to be told in a cold voice that they don’t love you back? We think the solution is to NEVER be that vulnerable again. But God asks us to be this vulnerable all the time – with Him and with others – if we want true joy. In other words, the thing we think is the worst possible thing, is actually the best. Here’s what I mean:

In John 12, you find John’s account of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet with perfume at a dinner party in front of all the other guests: “The house was filled with the fragrance.” Mary wipes Jesus’ dirty feet with her hair. Mary displays the vulnerability to God to which we are all called. If you read the Psalms, you’ll find that they’re full of desperate honest vulnerable cries for help. ”From the depths of despair, O LORD, I call for your help.” Psalm 130:1. ”I think of God, and I moan, overwhelmed with longing for his help.” Psalm 77:3. ”O God, why have you rejected us so long?” Psalm 74:1. ”Rescue me from the mud; don’t let me sink any deeper.” Psalm 69:14. ”I am exhausted from crying for help; my throat is parched. My eyes are swollen with weeping, waiting for my God to help me. Those who hate me without cause outnumber the hairs on my head.” Psalm 69:2-4. ”From the ends of the earth, I cry to you for help when my heart is overwhelmed.” Psalm 61:2. ”My heart pounds in my chest. The terror of death assaults me. Fear and trembling overwhelm me, and I can’t stop shaking.” Psalm 55:4. ”As a deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God.” Psalm 42:1-2. ”My heart is breaking as I remember how it used to be.” Psalm 42:4. ”Why am I so discouraged? Why is my heart so sad?” Psalm 42:5. ”My heart beats wildly, my strength fails, and I am going blind.” Psalm 38:10.

David and Mary know the secret to living an abundant life lies in becoming vulnerable to God. Judas criticizes Mary for wasting money that could have been given to the poor, but Jesus praises her for doing “a good thing.” See Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9; Luke 7:36-50 (it’s probable the Luke account is of a different anointing). Jesus had earlier also praised Mary for sitting at his feet listening: she chose the “only thing” necessary, Jesus said. Luke 10:38-42. Similarly, David spent so much time alone with his sheep on the hillside as a young boy, that he stormed onto the battlefield armed only with a slingshot because He trusted the “living God” to help him defeat a giant named Goliath. When you spend this kind of time alone with God, you learn that God looks down on humans with love and understanding: “He made their hearts, so he understands everything they do.” Psalm 33:15.

We, on the other hand, don’t understand our hearts. We can see evil in others, but we have a lot of trouble seeing it in ourselves. That’s why God asks us to pour our hearts out to Him. He knows that if we do so, He’ll expose our hearts. He doesn’t expose them to condemn us but rather to heal and transform us. It’s also why God asks us to read the Bible. The Bible is called the Living Word. It cuts between bone and marrow. The Bible exposes our heart. Here in John 12, for instance, the vulnerability of Mary is contrasted with the greed of Judas who steals from the disciples; the flightiness of the crowd who worship him with palm branches only to turn on him and scream “crucify him” a few days later; the religious leaders’s desire to kill Christ out of envy; and peoples’ fear of admitting they believed in Jesus, because they “loved human praise more than the praise of God.”

In other words, the light of the gospel exposes the human heart in its greed, infidelity, jealousy and weakness. But the gospel doesn’t end with our darkness. It exposes the darkness in our heart for the very reason that God wants to give us His light instead. The only requirement is our honesty, vulnerability and humility. The only requirement for receiving God’s help is asking for it. That’s why David can cry out to God with such vulnerability. The only way to receive help is to admit our need of it.

The pivotal verses of this chapter are Jesus’ terrifying words: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels – a plentiful harvest of new lives. Those who love their life in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity.” John 12:23-25. Jesus is talking about His own sacrificial death, in which He died for our sins. He is also talking, however, about gospel living. He’s talking about a life in which we make ourselves vulnerable to God and others. He’s saying that true fulfillment doesn’t come the way we think it does – through our striving, achieving, conquering and acquiring. True joy and fulfillment comes through sacrificing ourselves for others. It comes through being vulnerable even to those who reject us. It comes through pouring out ourselves for others, and trusting God to fill us back up.

I don’t know about you, but while I can write that, and while I know it’s true, I can’t do it. It’s terrifying. It sounds like it will hurt too much. The good news is that sometimes God brings all of us to the place where we have no choice but to die to ourselves. He uses the circumstances of our lives, especially our places of woundedness, brokenness, disappointment and rejection, for good. We are all completely and utterly reliant on God all the time – but we fail to realize this. When bad things happen, we turn to God, as David did in the Psalms, with our fears, trembling, despair and brokenness because we have nowhere else to go. We discover no friend, no doctor, no medication can fill the deepest longings of our hearts, and so we cry out to the living God…

and He meets us right there in our place of deepest emptiness. He gives us His strength in place of our weakness. He gives us His love in place of our selfishness. He gives us His joy in place of our despair. He gives us His hope in place of our hopelessness. It’s God’s nature to give, because He is love. And so that’s why being vulnerable feels like the worst thing but is really the best. We discover our complete reliance on God – and since God is love, we begin to rely on the best thing we could ask for or imagine. When our hearts break, we find God’s love right there to mend us. Broken hearts hurt. But that very brokenness that we hate and dread, brings us to a place of such vulnerability that our hearts finally melt with compassion and love when we encounter other people. We stop seeing people as competition to be feared, and instead see them as fellow servants of the Living God, who are just as needy, thirsty, hungry and afraid as we are. We can embrace others in love, not needing anything from them, because our hearts are overflowing – our cups runneth over – with the love of God, a love that we find only when everything else in the world fails us. This is abundant living. And it’s the only way to find joy. When circumstances and other people hurt us, and we start to live dependent and vulnerable to God out of our brokenness, we discover that our whole houses become filled with the most expensive perfume of all – the fragrance of God’s love.

And when we feel like we can’t do it, and we don’t want to be vulnerable, and we’re too afraid to trust God – we can remind ourselves that God became completely vulnerable to us. He died naked, abandoned, and alone on the cross. Even God turned His back on Jesus on the cross, so that Jesus could experience hell for us. If God didn’t scorn the shame of the cross, who are we to be ashamed of anything? Just as the cross is ugly, and yet God transformed it into the most beautiful thing, so our shame, rejection and vulnerability seem ugly to us – and yet if we bring them to the foot of the cross, God can transform our weakest ugliest most shameful places into sources of transcendent beauty.

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on May 17, 2012

what kind of revolution is this?: John 11

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Caroline Coleman

read John 11. The New York Times today claims that 15 “months after the generals seized power at the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, how much they now submit for the first time to civilian authority will determine whether last year’s uprising lives up to its billing as a democratic revolution or amounts instead to a coup.” NYTimes Monday May 7, 2012 A4. It’s a fascinating concept. The idea is that you can evaluate a revolution in retrospect alone – how does it pan out? Who ends up in charge? If it’s the military, we call it a coup. If it’s the people, we call it a democratic uprising.

If the end result is the gold standard for a revolution, therefore, what does that say about the revolution of Christ? Is it a coup or a democratic uprising?

To answer that question, we can look at John 11 and ask why the leader of the revolution wept. This is the famous story where Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. It’s an incredibly moving story, packed full of authentic details that mean either it’s true, or it was written by a gifted storyteller who thought up everything. For instance, when Jesus orders the people to roll the stone away from Lazarus’ tomb, the response of Martha, his sister is to say: “Lord, he has been dead for four days. The smell will be terrible.” John 11:39.

Martha is right. The smell of death is terrible. Death, even the death of someone “old and full of years” as the Bible says of Job when Job finally passes away, is a shock. It’s a tear in the fabric of the world. We are not meant for death, and deep down, we know this. God has “planted eternity in the human heart,” and deep down, we know this, too. Ecclesiastes 3:11.

But when Jesus heard that Lazarus was sick, instead of rushing to heal him and prevent his death, Jesus delayed, even though “Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus”. John 11:7. We need to remember this when our prayers seem unanswered. There is such a thing as divine delay, and it doesn’t mean God doesn’t love us. God works in His timing, not ours. God works all things – even death – for His glory. We don’t like this concept. We hate it. We chafe against it. But accepting that God knows best is the first step toward a productive life of joy, instead of a bitter life of despair and self-pity.

Jesus waits until he knows Lazarus is dead before He goes to Bethany. After Lazarus dies, Jesus tells his disciples that Lazarus “has fallen asleep.” John 11:11. To God, apparently, death is like sleeping. That’s why John Donne can ask, triumphantly, “O death, where is thy sting?” Jesus conquered death on the cross, so death has lost its sting. This, too, we need to keep in mind when our loved ones die, or become as good as dead to us. God can do anything. As Paul says, don’t you now that the same power that raised the dead is at work in us?

Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, and Martha, the sister who once got a loving reprimand from Jesus for resenting the way her sister Mary sat at Jesus’ feet instead of helping her in the kitchen, goes out to meet Him. Meanwhile, Mary, the sister who had chosen the only thing Jesus says we “need” (sitting at Jesus’ feet), stayed in the house. I don’t know why they reacted differently to Jesus’ approach. Had their roles reversed? Had Martha become like the prodigal son, running into the arms of her heavenly father, and Mary like the miffed elder brother, refusing to join the party? Martha certainly runs out to meet Jesus and affirms Him here. She says she believes in the resurrection of the dead, and that Jesus is the Messiah, and that He is “the Son of God”. Is Mary too angry at the death of her brother to join the party? It’s possible, but I don’t think so. The reason I don’t is that both sisters say the exact same thing to Christ: ”If only you had been here, my brother would not have died.” John 11:21 and 11:32. They seem to be in the same place, in that they both know that Jesus could have healed a sick man and are just sad and confused as to why He didn’t.

What’s fascinating is that when Martha says this, Jesus gives her a theology lesson. He says that Lazarus will “rise again.” John 11:23. He says: “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live ever after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this, Martha?” John 11:25-26. Martha says she does – even though Jesus hasn’t yet raised Lazarus. It looks like Jesus is already using his divine delay to the purpose of bringing Martha to the place where she can have faith in the unseen. Sometimes when we go out to meet Jesus, He gives us knowledge and wisdom.

When Mary says the same thing, however, about how if Jesus had been there her brother would not have died, Jesus reacts not with theology but with strong emotions. A “deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled.” John 11:34. Why the difference? I don’t know, but my guess is that it’s because Mary ‘fell at his feet” weeping. When we fall at God’s feet, weeping, we may imagine that God doesn’t care, but this passage of Scripture shows that God cares, deeply. God weeps when we weep. God is moved with deep anger at our pain. It strikes me that God, too, is moved by the fundamental wrongness of death. Sometimes, when we meet Jesus, He gives us not words but empathy and action. God knows what each of us need more than we do.

The reason Jesus weeps, to me, goes even deeper than just that Jesus saw Mary “weeping and saw the other people wailing with her.” John 11:33. He doesn’t weep at the first sight of them weeping. Instead, He reacts with anger and deep compassion to the sight. Jesus asks where they put Lazarus, and the people say: “Lord, come and see.”

“Then Jesus wept.” John 11:35.

I’ve heard that this is the shortest verse in the entire Bible. Jesus wept. Why does Jesus weep when the people say to Him, “Come and see”?

I think it’s because God says to all of us, over and over in the Bible – come and see. King David cries out: ”Come and see what our God has done, what awesome miracles he performs for people.” Psalm 66:5. When two of John’s disciples ask where Jesus is staying, Jesus says: “come and see.” John 1:39. When Nathanael asks if anything good can come from Nazareth, Philip says “come and see for yourself.” When Jesus meets the woman at the well she tells her village “come and see” the man who told me everything I ever did. John 4:29. God wants us to come and see what He offers. These are His words. This is His invitation.

Because God knows that we are, all of us, searching. We’re seeking answers. We’re searching for love. We’re hungry for righteousness and thirsty for soul satisfaction. We’re desperately seeking satisfaction of our deepest desires. Jesus begs us to “come and see” what He is about. He wants us to “come and see” how He is the answer to our every need. He wants us to “come and see” His love for us. He doesn’t force us. He asks. He invites.

So when the people ask Jesus to “come and see” where a dead man lies in a tomb, He weeps. He knows He’s going to raise Lazarus. So He’s not weeping because He thinks death is final. He is, perhaps, weeping because He knows that we are rejecting His invitation and instead looking in the wrong places and seeing the wrong things. We see death. He wants us to see life.

In the ultimate moment of the wrong kind of “come and see,” when Jesus was hanging on the cross, the people ridiculed Him: “Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down from the cross so we can see it and believe him!” Mark 15:32. The people thought that they should see Jesus off the cross. We don’t understand that the true miracle was that Jesus stayed on the cross. We get it backwards. We don’t understand what a miracle should look like. We think we know what we need, but we forget that God’s ways give us joy, not our ways. We are so selfish, all of us, that we can’t even take in this concept of sacrificial love – the concept at the heart of love, the concept at the heart of the gospel of Christ.

So Jesus stayed on the cross, suffered death and the furies of hell for our sins, so that He could raise us from the dead. So when the people tell Him to “come and see” Lazarus’ tomb, He is weeping, I think, because of love. He weeps because He loves us so much He will choose to die for us. He knows that one day He will die, and the stone will be rolled away from His tomb by angels. He weeps because He hates that we suffer. He weeps because He has compassion on our short-sightedness. He weeps because He knows we experience a thousand deaths a day, afraid of our own shadows, afraid of the future, afraid of being alone, afraid of continuing to mess up the way we always have, afraid of the unknown, and yet we refuse to come and see the answer to our every care. He wants to give us peace. He wants us to trust Him. He wants us to throw ourselves at His feet, as Mary does, and bring our problems to Him, knowing He will always, always answer us.

And He knows we just can’t.

So Jesus wept. Then He raised Lazarus from the dead. With the same authentic details, we are told that the “dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in graveclothes, his face wrapped in a headcloth.” John 11:44. Jesus wept, and then He raised the dead.

And there is the answer to the original question: what kind of revolution did Jesus bring? Was it a coup? Or a democratic uprising? Well, it’s both. It’s a coup, in that God can raise us from the dead. He can cleanse us from our sins. God can come in and give us a new heart, one that is tender and soft, responsive to His touch. God can free us. God gives us a revolution in our hearts. We need it. Nothing short of a coup can raise us from a dead and selfish life.

But it’s also a democratic uprising, in that we have to ask for it. We have to want it. We have to choose to invite God in. We have to vote for it.

It’s both and. God asks us to come and see. He wants us to see that He weeps with us. He is inviting us to trust Him. He is offering to raise us from the dead. He wants to transform our dry, hollow, shallow, dried up hearts into soft, warm, compassionate hearts. He wants to revolutionize us – but through our voluntary surrender, not through force. What’s the end result? The end result is that we have to keep on begging for a coup, over and over, every day, as we lay down our pride and selfishness and lift up the banner of sacrificial love – and receive grace and forgiveness for the ways we fall short of our king who weeps for us. When we start to realize that we’re asking not a selfish dictator, but the one who loves us most, to be in charge – what choice do we have but to beg for a coup?

posted by Caroline Coleman in carolinecolemanbooks.com on May 7, 2012

A Chapter a Day

by Caroline Coleman

Category Archives: John

do you love me?: John 21

who can we trust?: John 20

what is love?: John 19

I’m NEVER going to talk like that again. EVER….: John 16

until death do not us part: John 15

remain in my love: John 15

finding home – all over again: John 14

avoiding the mess – or diving right in: John 13

on why being vulnerable is a beautiful thing: John 12

what kind of revolution is this?: John 11

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