by self

Especially on Friday mornings, we feel the flat, sharp, immovable borders of our own built-in human limitations, and we groan, searching blindly for a Godly perspective.

I’ve come to understand that this is the battle, although on the surface it looks, more practically, like Riley stumbling through our open garage door with teary eyes, her face splotchy where she’s tried to rub the frustration away, wheeling a small carry-on suitcase my parents gave her as a bag for school.  It looks like Kevin walking out slowly behind her, carrying her travel mug of creamy coffee and a purse, making I’ve-just-about-had-it eyes at me behind her back.  It looks like me, sitting on a beach towel in the driver’s seat, soaked from ponytail to socks after our morning workout and still sweating, tapping my thumb restlessly against the steering wheel as I wait to take Riley to class at our local community college.

She trundles out to the car and the open trunk to stow her bag, Kevin passing me the coffee and the purse, wordlessly, through the open passenger side door, shaking his head slightly, lifting a few fingers to his lips to blow me a kiss before moving aside so that Riley can get into the car.

I don’t begin to know exactly how God, as a parent, thinks or feels about our immaturity, our growing pains, but based on what He’s said about His own character, I’m inclined to believe that where my patience and compassion and understanding and strength and endurance get interrupted by selfishness and sin and fear, His go on and on forever, in all directions.  He’s unlimited.

I glance over as we pull out of the driveway, and Riley wipes furiously at her eyes, trying her best to push aside whatever flood of anguish has come now to swallow her joy.  She feels weary too; I can see it.

“Are you okay?” I ask quietly, knowing she’s not, but also knowing she needs the opportunity to express her own feelings aloud.

“It’s just, Dad said I have too many things to carry,” she says, her voice wobbling.

Ah, I’ve known this problem intimately for most of my life, this weariness that comes from trying to carry too many things, or maybe, from trying to carry them the wrong way, and from trying to do it by myself, even though I’m yoked with Christ.

I had seen, from where I sat in the car, the jerking movements of Kevin’s body just inside the door as he bent down and tried to consolidate Riley’s baggage in a hurry.  He had unzipped the carry-on and stowed her lunch inside, as well as the wallet she takes in case she’d like to buy a snack from one of the vending machines in the student break room, as well as another bag containing I-don’t-know-what, and without his intervention, Riley would have come out pulling the carry-on with two more bags dragging down heavy on her wrist, trying also to hold, in the other hand, her coffee, her phone, and her wallet.  But she likes to do things her own way.  By herself.

What a pervasive phrase, uttered by children and lived out by adults, by-my-self, and what a lot of trouble.  There’s a groan, a flood of tears, somewhere on the jagged path between the immaturity of by self and the wisdom, the gift, of by grace.  For Riley and for me, it comes down to admitting that we can never be God, were never meant to be.  We are limited.

I watch Riley smear her tears along her cheekbone with her fingers, wondering how to communicate that the blessing of shepherding—of wise, watchful, and protective guidance, of loving leadership–empowers our freedom instead of stripping it away.  By self offers us no freedom at all; it’s a prison where we live defeated and always thirsty, always out of breath.

God has said, I am the life; I am the living water; I am the breath.  I am the way.

Kevin had told Riley she was carrying too many things, but what he actually meant to convey was that her decisions about how to carry the things had made it all unwieldy.  Wait.  Let me help you, he had said.  He had shown her, as quickly as he could, a better way, and he had helped her do the carrying, and his frustration had been that she grieved his bearing the yoke by her side.  She had grieved his love, and she didn’t even know it.

I’m coming to see: By self, I always forfeit grace.

 “Your dad loves you,” I say to her, watching the road, slowing in a clog of traffic.  “He’s trying to help you, don’t you see? I reach blindly for her left thigh, just to touch her.  “He just didn’t want you to suffer for trying to carry everything in your hands.”

Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.

I am quietly smiling now, as we merge together onto an even more congested thoroughfare, headed down the way the whole world seems to want to go this morning.  Smiling, because I realize, my Father doesn’t want me to suffer for trying to carry everything in my hands either.

“I know he doesn’t,” Riley finally says, and the words come out like a sigh, as she gazes out the car window.