Invited Back

“I have also long held the belief that one's tears are a guide, that when something makes you cry, it means something. If we pay attention to our tears, they'll show us something about ourselves.” 

― Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes



There was a distinct season of my life, smack dab in the middle of my twenties, when I felt that I knew what it was like to be totally out of sync with the person I really was.  And what it was like to be lonely.  

And then I read a book, and it turned the story I was living.    

I thought about this yesterday...what that was, and why I am not lonely anymore.  I saw the book on my shelf and remembered it all.  Never before has one book been, at first glance, such a memory.  (This is a really humbling thing to write about.)  

Have you been lonely before?  Do you know that feeling?  I'll bet you have, either in a passing wave of gray or for a set time of your life.  It's a difficult thing. 

Now hazy-gray loneliness makes me resonate differently with the world we live in.  I can see it on other people, and because I've been there, my heart cracks each time with knowingness.  And now, when I pray about lonely things inside of people, I get refined.   Having lived beside pain changes how you pray.  

When I was that lonely, I learned two distinctly different things.  I learned how to hide it, self-protective and sharp.  I also learned how to recognize it, with deep dregs of compassion, in other people.  The first of these is something I never want to be again.  The second thing, this compassion, is what I always want to always see.  It informs the deeper places where people dwell.  

And it reminds me of how God can heal His people.  

In that time, being lonely didn't going away because my surface-level hopes willed it to.  It stayed, confusing me, probably for a year.  It divided my world, and made me tight. I knew I was saving face to pretend I wasn't isolated.  My people, the inner sanctum friends who know me best, could see that I was hiding with all defenses up.  But I think that for a while the rest of the world couldn't, and I was getting away with it.   

And then one day, when I was most rigid, I sat down with a book and it cracked me apart.   

"When you offer peace instead of division, when you offer faith instead of fear, when you offer someone a place at your table instead of keeping them out because they’re different or messy or wrong somehow, you represent the heart of Christ.” 
― Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

I sat there in my Stillwater apartment on the hill, and cried over the pages because this was not my life.    It was a beautiful book, and I was nothing like it.


“So this is the dance, it seems to me: to be the kind of host who honors the needs of the people who gather around his or her table, and to be the kind of guest who comes to the table to learn, not to demand.” 
― Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes


Shauna Niequist's book talks about hospitality, and how you know about the Spirit of God because you know His people.  You invite them in and you get over yourself and learn things.  And you go to their house too, or to places where they dwell, and life is about more than what you first thought.  Christians can live in this way because Christ makes them free.  

And I think I felt that so profoundly because I knew that it wasn't just a book with ideas and hopes in it.  It's also certainly not a bunch of kumbaya.  Hospitality is real and deep. It tells the story of God who invited His people back to Himself.   I had lived in this grace before, tangible and practically with others, and it was the best kind of living.  Its absence caused me to wonder about myself. What had happened?  

Thankfully Jesus Christ can also deal with opposite things inside of people.  
In fact, this is his specialty.  :) 

I cried, fairly horrified over my reaction to this book, and somehow paid attention to what brought tears.  And life got better.  I was humbled and human again.  What followed was a series of confessions, appropriate and markedly intentional, towards best friends in order to say, 'This is where I am.  Thank you for being with me here too.  Sorry for the sharp words....you know, for that entire year.'  

I participated again at tables, both figurative and literal.  I invited people over.  I thought about Christians everywhere in the world, and instead of letting the differences divide me, I got really close to the presence of God.  I thought less about ideas of Him and more about being with God, as He really was.  Let me tell you, there is a difference, and it is a lesson everyone is invited to learn.    

And so it became that the longing for hospitality brought about big change.  And now when I read that book, it marks heart change.  These are the best kinds of books.

Invitation is so elemental to the life of a Christian.  It tells the world about Jesus, who he really was, and how magnetic and relieving he was to be around.  I  want to always remember this and Gandhi reminds me of it best.....

'I like your Christ, but I don't like your Christians'.  

(Sharp intake of a breath.)  
This should not be.   People should know about Christ because they see it.  

So now, friends, you know.
  
These are the things that bring me to tears.  Pay attention to your tears.  And that season, a holy mix of tears and loneliness and redemption, is part of my story. 

Today humbling gratitude made me want to tell it.