receive

In the predawn, I spread my journal open on my lap, smoothing the pages, pressing tape down to affix to the blank page a card I received for my birthday.  Slowly, I reread every word, tracing the curling signature with my thumb, determined to actively take hold of love.

There will be days when I’m stuck in the land of me, that cold, skeletal place where I lose track of the truth, and absurdly believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, what that nasty, slithering voice asserts, that I’m just unlovable.  It can strike me flat blind, the fog and murk in that insular place, where lies grow like weeds and life tumbles, brittle.  It can give me soul amnesia, as Ann Voskamp says, and make me forget all the ways I’ve been loved and affirmed.  It’s an ugly, barren land, and no place I want to live, so I’ve been echoing one of David’s psalms in my prayers.

 Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust.  Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.

And God’s response, as He teaches me to abide, has been to urge me to take hold of His gifts, even as He heals the parts of me that still don’t know how to receive them.

Kevin stands in front of me, balancing a steaming mug carefully in his hands, those hands that have loved me for years in every kind of condition, those hands extending toward me, always giving.  I reach back, smiling because I see him.  My fingers tingle with the warmth of the mug.  I take a sip and pause, steam curling around my nose, just letting myself behold the truth, that is, not just to see but to experience his love.  Kevin raises an eyebrow at what feels to him like over attention. He is only doing what he always does.  Silver threads his beard to match the natural fairy hair that glints now all through mine, and I think of all the years I’ve woken up with his arm draped across my waist, tucking me up close to him, all the things his love has taught me about what it really is to give yourself away, to live in union with someone else, how he’s never once asked me to be anything other than me, even with all my scars.

For all my trouble receiving, he just keeps on loving me.

Finally, he smiles, genuine and tender, as paragraphs pass between us in silence.

While there are many things about the Old Testament that baffle me, I’ve never struggled to understand how it could be that the Israelites, at the very edge of claiming the promised land, decided that in fact they could not, nor have I ever wondered why, when they finally moved into the territory, they failed to claim the whole of it.  That first time, they said, we seem like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we seem to them.  This is something I understand, both the self-deprecation and the transference, how both make roads right into wasteland. I’ve used other words, but those sentiments have been mine too.

The part it took a while for God to help me see—Him continually touching my eyes–is that He interprets our refusal to receive His gifts, even on the self-consumptive basis of our own unworthiness, as a rejection of Him.

How long will these people despise me? God asked in response to the Israelites, but the word in the Hebrew there translated despise is a lover’s word referring to spurning.  He extends His love, and His people fail to receive it.  It’s a problem as old as time, and one that God ultimately answered with the greatest act of love ever known.

For all our trouble with receiving, He just keeps on loving us.

In New Testament scripture, the word for receive is lambano, meaning to actively and aggressively lay hold of what has been given.  The concept, which keeps right on running like its own glinting thread through God’s continuing history with His people, emphasizes the volition of the receiver, the deliberate and careful choice to take what’s on offer.  From the beginning, God has wanted our trust in His provision and our intention to actively receive His love and grace.

It’s only taken me half a century to begin to understand this thing that God has always made clear, that receiving love, far from being merely a passive response, happens intentionally, as an active, reciprocal response of faith.  In defiance of the slight of hand, even my own feelings of unworthiness, I have to reach and take the gifts God’s given, or, in other words, drink the living water, eat the bread of life, taste His goodness and oust the enemy from the sacred ground where I abide with God.  This is spiritual warfare, and I need intentional strategies for fighting.

So I read the card again, one more time, tasting the syllables on my tongue, the delicious generosity of the words of a friend.  Her message says I’m easy to love.  I sit for a moment just acknowledging that my immediate instinct is to deny the possibility because I find it hard to believe about myself, and then, recognizing that this says more about her, how wonderfully kind and generous she is in friendship, I choose to receive the gift she’s given so freely.