crowns
Sometimes at night, when darkness has settled outside, Zoe and I dream of glittering crowns. “Glittering’ is almost too dull a word. These crowns are other-worldy—piercing, as opposed to just shining; stunning in a way that we will feel instead of simply see. These crowns would make human beings shield their dimmed eyes, still dulled as we are by flesh.
Zoe describes hers, laying there under the covers while I sit beside her on the bed, one hand on the Bible open in my lap, one hand on her chest.
“Mine will be covered with sparkling red and purple, and it will have these letters that glow and say, ‘God loves Zoe.’ …What do you suppose yours will look like, Mom?“
I blink, tears obscuring my view of her. “I don’t know. But I hope God decorates mine with stars that twinkle and shine brighter than any diamond could.”
This conversation, one I hope will never end, began the first time we talked about Paul’s words to Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award me on that day—and not only to me, but also all who have longed for his appearing (v.6-8).
You know, scripture has a lot to say about crowns. Our Savior wore a very different one—one crafted in ugliness and jammed down on his head as mocking men wet His cheeks with their spit; one that made His blood drip into the dirt; one foreshadowed one day on a mountain, when the ram that would take Isaac’s place on the altar caught it’s horns in a brier thicket. The Lord who is my life left heaven and wore that one, so that one day He could place a glorious diadem on my head; one I don’t deserve and never could.
The idea makes me gasp. I never can quite suppress the awe I feel over the notion that God has promised me a crown—me–sinful, selfish, righteousness-like-filthy-rags-ME, and that one day Christ himself will place it on my head. Wow. Makes me cry every time.
James wrote,
Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him (James 1:12).
And Peter echoes,
And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away (1 Peter 5:4).
Christ himself urges in Revelation,
I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown (Revelation 3: 11)
Really, the promise is sprinkled evenly all through the tapestry of Holy Word. Paul even boldly suggested living for that crown, training for it.
Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever (1 Corinthians 9:25).
So, I am teaching my children to dream of crowns, and to train for them.
I have a note on the dry erase board, in the place where I write our schedule for the day, the date hidden in a garden of flowers I’ve drawn or floating on some ocean sketched from my imagination. Zoe loves it when I add a stick-figure surfer, especially if I draw her with long, blonde locks. The note, bordered in curvy lines and hearts, says: “Beads are for training your heart…”
On the counter in our kitchen sit three small, simple votive holders—three glass beads in one, two in another, the third empty so far this week. Every day, I walk past that spot and drop a square, iridescent green bead (Zoe says those look like the ocean) or a clear round one, veined with red and gold, into one of the little holders with a tink!; having noticed a voluntary effort at kindness or service, encouragement, or love; having heard a sweet word spoken.
Recently we started the bead system with our kids after I visited a dear and beautiful friend who uses the same system, one I think was inspired by something yet another of our friends has done for a long time in the name of heart-training. My friend pointed out that there are so many undesirable paths our hearts and thoughts can take, and she said that the beads were about helping her children learn to enter a room and think first about how they might help or encourage someone else. When the beads are counted, those with less than five aren’t punished or discouraged, but they are asked to pick an opportunity for service from a paper-slip filled cup. Those who have ten or more beads are allowed to pick a congratulatory reward from a different cup—something simple and family-oriented like time spent baking with mom or quality time with dad playing a favorite game. When my friend told me about her system, I said, “You.are.BRILLIANT!” and then I asked her if she would send me the files she’d made up on the computer so that I could tweak them if necessary and use them myself.
There are dozens of ways our kids can earn beads, and not all of them household-chore related. They can write encouraging letters, make gifts for others, offer hugs when they see a need, say something kind, help without being asked. Time spent with God is the best heart-training time of all, and to encourage the habit, we also give them beads if we find them reading the Bible, praying, worshiping, or practicing memory verses.
Heart-training comes easiest to Zoe and is most difficult for Adam, which is certainly no surprise to us. This, after all, is the way of it. We all train at different levels, and God seems to have enough grace for all of us. As is usually the case in our home, we needed three different approaches to bead-earning, adjusted to account for social maturity. In Zoe’s case, her choices have to be more about training her heart than earning the bead. The bead is an acknowledgement of right-hearted effort, not the goal itself. The choice has to be hers entirely, made sincerely instead of as a performance. If we have to ask her to do something to help us, her efforts are appreciated but don’t merit a bead.
For Riley, I made a list of “suggested ways to earn beads” and wrote it on the dry erase board. From time to time, she’ll do something and say, “Hey, Mom, could you put a bead in my cup because I did that?” For Zoe, that’s bead faux pas, but for Riley the question is more about expected outcomes and compulsions, and while I continually remind her just to do the right thing and trust us with the beads, we offer her a little grace on this particular point. While Zoe is learning to evaluate her motivation, Riley is still learning what loving, kind, and encouraging behaviors are. She’s still trying to wrap her literal mind around why training is necessary at all, and how to train something she can’t see—her soul.
The first day we started tinking beads, I told the girls that Kevin and I would be helping Adam earn his beads. At this point, language and participation with the group are still such a huge effort for him that he’s no where near coming up with creative ways to be loving and helpful, and he doesn’t even quite understand enough yet about what we’re doing to feel motivated. In time, he’ll figure it out, but for now, we give him a lot of hints. Adam earned his first bead for throwing away dirty paper towels that were on the counter in the kitchen, after Kevin pointed to them and said, “Hey, Adam, what do you think we need to do with these??” Adam earns beads for doing required household chores, while the girls earn them for going above and beyond, and Zoe earns them for having a properly motivated heart. Adam is very old testament, which just makes me chuckle. Every time I read Leviticus I just laugh my head off at the lists of laws, because they remind me of all the written signs in Adam’s life. Yesterday, after he snuck half of the contents of his room to school with him, he came home with a note pinned to his book bag. “Adam can bring 1 George (he has 2…another story) with him to school. All other toys and CD’s must stay home.” Adam needs expectations and consequences clearly and specifically defined, preferably in writing, for the same reason all those Israelites needed step by step “do this, not that, or this”guidelines about how to be Holy. They weren’t all quite ready for why, though God was clear about that too for those who would hear Him.
The first few days after we introduced the bead system to our children, the girls could not help enough. They felt so excited about discovering the bonuses in the 10+ cup that they became overzealous. Kevin and I grinned at each other across the kitchen while they scurried around trying to be the first to set the table, the first to get drinks for everyone, the first to say something kind. I got many compliments on my hair, my cooking, and my work around the house, and Kevin was told several times that he is the best dad in the universe. Of course, this gave us the opportunity to explain the difference between encouragement and compliments, and it has helped us illustrate, especially to Zoe, the joy in offering help and encouragement where and when they are needed.
Somewhere in the midst of all the excitement and the flurry of compliments, Kevin and I made a tremendous mistake. We laughed. I’m not talking tears-on-our-cheeks laughter, I just mean a few poorly hidden chuckles of delight. But Zoe is my daughter, and she hates when people laugh if it might be over something she did. She wants to be taken seriously. It took me years with this affliction to figure out that I’d enjoy life so much more if I found myself funnier than other people find me. I am trying to teach her now, to save her the lesson learned one day when God and whatever else is unique about her life cause her to be an amusing spectacle for someone. I still sit across from adults who tilt their heads and offer me patronizing grins when I start talking about the things that mean the most to me—love, redemption, transformation, the resurrected Christ.
In the moment, Zoe said nothing, but the next day I noticed her counting her beads (another bead-earning no-no). When she reached five beads in her holder (the exact number that guarantees not having to draw an opportunity for service), she stopped trying to “go above and beyond.” She became indifferent and removed from the enthusiasm she’d shown in the beginning.
So, of course, I asked.
“Hey, Zoe, why aren’t you doing anything that could potentially land more beads in your cup?”She looked up from her book, her feet drawn up in front of her on the couch.
“I’ve got five. I’m okay with five.”
At this point, I put down whatever I had in my hands and sat down beside her.
“Why would you be ‘okay with five?’ That doesn’t sound like trying your best. Your heart is not in the right place. Why?”
“You and Daddy laughed.”
“Huh?” I’m thinking, uh-oh.
“When I was doing my best, you and Daddy laughed at me. I don’t want you to laugh at me, so I’m just going to get five and stop. Then…maybe…you won’t laugh.”
I frowned. “Zoe, there are many reasons parents laugh around their children. Of all those reasons, making fun is never one of them—at least not for your dad and me. We never laugh because we are mocking you or think you are ridiculous. We laughed the other day because we were delighted with your enthusiasm. Remember what I have told you about assuming you know the reasons for someone else’s behavior. Trust me, you will save yourself a lot of heartache if you ask questions before you change your behavior on the basis of what you think someone else might have been thinking. You cannot know that stuff. You should’ve asked Daddy or me why we laughed before you allowed your assumption to move you to do just enough to get by.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, looking down at her fingers in her lap. She peeked shyly up at me, a small smile tugging at her lips. “So, you weren’t…I just thought…”
“Zoe. We love you. We think you’re amazing and wonderful all the time. If we’re laughing, the reason isn’t because we think less of you. Ever. But it makes me sad to see you do just enough to get by. You know that’s not the point of this.”
“I know. I just feel embarrassed. I don’t like to feel embarrassed.”
And so, another conversation began between us, one we’ll be having for a while. Just this morning, I talked with her about Jesus, the way He was mocked, threatened, despised. “The people He grew up with didn’t believe He was God’s son,” I told her. “They liked him right up until He told them something they didn’t want to hear, and then they tried to throw him off a cliff.”
It is a hard thing to tell my daughter that the things she avoids the most—embarrassment, being set apart, the disapproval of others—will likely follow her if she trains for the everlasting crown of a Christ-follower. Lately, this point has echoed in my own heart as the challenge of the Spirit. Why, exactly do I do what I do? Am I trying to please God or other people? How many times do I balk when the Spirit calls, because I am concerned about what other people will think? I read Galatians 1:10, and my stomach ties itself in knots.
Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
At some point, if I am truly following Christ, someone is going to laugh at me. They are going to mock my behavior and belittle my choices. These things we do, to live for the crown, at some point even the people we sit next to in the worship assembly may label as extreme. Christ’s teaching and examples were so bold we often try to water them down to make them a little less radical—the woman who gave everything she had at the temple, the idea that we should love our enemies, the notion that we can’t serve both God and money, the suggestion that we serve in secret that God might be the only one to reward our efforts.
Noah’s neighbors didn’t go buy building materials. They laughed about a crazy man building a gigantic ark in the desert because God told him to do so. David was not really the son Samuel should’ve anointed if he were doing so to impress the people. But God had taught him something right in the middle of all that about hearts being the important thing, not faces or standing. And, well, nobody thought a shepherd could defeat a giant with a slingshot. Job lost everyone he loved and refused to curse God for it, and even his own wife called him a fool. Jericho should never have fallen. Gideon should not have been victorious against the Midianites with only 300 men. I wonder what other people said when he surrendered his heart to God’s leading and sent all those men home just because they got down on their knees to drink their water. It was the “religious elite,” the heroes of religion in Jesus’ day, who plotted to kill him because He threatened their carefully established, self-righteous position of influence. The Pharisees were not unbelievers. In fact, they were men who set themselves apart by doing more than the law required them to do in the name of piety. The problem for them, really, had to do with motivation. And a man who came asking for yielded hearts, love beyond the bounds of human nature, and sacrificed, surrendered lives—radical relationship with a Holy God—did not receive their praise, much less the crown the people had hoped. And He didn’t seek it, either, even when men offered Him their favor.
But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men. He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man (John 2: 24,25)
How many conversations have I had with other believers who love God as much as I do, and as we talk about Jesus freaks (even a little afraid of such a title ourselves), eventually we’ll say, “Now, maybe that was a bit extreme.” As Kevin and I have discussed our own distance away from the calling, we’ve acknowledged a new expectation—shaking heads, doubt, labels. Well, at least God has taught us a few things about those. Even Peter, who loved Christ with bold and passionate abandon, tried to talk him out of the cross. And when Christ addressed that effort, He didn’t do it lightly, and He didn’t call him Peter.
Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men (Matthew 16:23).
I am gently unfolding these things to my daughter, drawing out her thoughts, sharing awe. I take a deep breath, acknowledging the knots in my own stomach, as I tell her that God will take us so far beyond human nature (if we let Him) that we’ll behave in over-the-top, radical, surrendered ways that will draw not only laughter but hate from those who don’t understand. We may even have to settle for a crown of thorns in this life to wear the crown of glory in the next.
This morning, Zoe smiled at me as we spoke of crowns, and I asked her, “What do you think we’re going to do, when He sets those crowns on our heads and we see Him take his place on the throne?”
We haven’t made it to Revelation yet, she and I, but she already knows. “I’ll give mine right back to God,” she said.
I love her so much. I smiled a smile that stretched a million years and said, “Yes, sweet girl. We’re going to throw them all right down at His feet. Because all the honor and glory will be His, and none of us could even stand before Him apart from what He’s done.”
I can feel her smiling at me, even though I can’t see her in the rear view mirror as we drive to school.
“…I want a crown that shines like the stars, just so I can cast it down at His feet. Can you imagine what all those crowns are going to look like, laying there around His throne?”
They lay their crowns before the throne and say:
‘You are worthy, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power…(Revelation 4:10,11)
