Bitterness and the eucharist.

Someone wise once said - "If I'm not writing, I'm not processing."
[It was Debralyn - or Dribble]

And if this year is anything, it's a year of process - Not that every year and season calls for process and growth, but I am in desperate need of growth.

My mind would go blank when people would ask me, "What have you learned this summer?"

I couldn't give anyone a good or honest answer. The truth is I've spent too much time and energy this summer being bitter and angry; bitter from what my family and I have had to walk through this past year. And bitter soil gives no room for growth. Or for thanksgiving.

This past week, I've encountered the gospel in my friends, my professors, and in my classes, and again I have become undone.

After months of dwelling in this pain, the gospel hurt. It was painful to drink in it's sweet, richness when I was so use to the bitter wine of anger.

There has been no thanksgiving in my heart, there has been no honest praise. And what we refuse to thank God for, we refuse to believe He can redeem.

I've longed for Egypt, and been given the wilderness.

I didn't ask for this to happen to my family, none of us did. And sometimes I blame God for my pain. Pointing a hypocritical finger at this so-called Sovereign God, victimizing myself. Trying to justify my pain by blaming Him; claiming He has no good to offer me.

But the painful, sweet truth of the gospel is this: That He has not withheld any good thing from me. Instead I have withheld myself from His goodness.

"This, the hard eucharisteo. The hard discipline to lean into the ugly and whisper thanks to transfigure it into beauty. The hard discipline to give thanks for all things at all times because He is all good. The hard discipline to number the griefs as grace because as the surgeon cut open my son's finger to heal him, so God chooses to cut into my ungrateful heart to make me whole." - Ann Voskamp

...so God chooses to cut into my ungrateful heart to make me whole.

I have refused to commune with God, to partake in Him giving of Himself to me so that I could be nourished and healed. I have refused to give thanks. My bitterness has kept me from healing. 

Can I really hold pain and joy at the same time? Put suffering and grace in one hand?

I have to.
The eucharist invites us to give thanks for dying. To participate in His death with our own daily dying and give thanks for it.

I must give thanks for this pain.
If I don't, I refuse to believe that He can heal these wounds and make me whole.

Eucharist always precedes the miracle. 
I must give thanks in the midst of my bitterness. I must see this pain as grace.

a hope to cling onto.

It happened, that night I rode back on the train alone with my thoughts. 

And as the train turned south and then east, the city came in to view.

Tiny lights making up a grander scenery of skyscrapers and towers, office buildings and apartment complexes. 

It was that night I realized how much I loved Chicago.

And it was that night I realized how much this city has changed me.

And these past three years started to make a little more sense,

As He revealed the next step to me, everything that came before it had so much more meaning

All the dark nights, the fighting of depression and self-loathing.

The days and weeks when I couldn’t remember who I was in Christ, when I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be unconditionally loved by my Savior, when I couldn’t even grasp that concept.

All the moments of struggle and doubt, the days I woke up and wanted to give up and walk away from Him. 

It all made sense.

The nights where friends helped to reveal His redemption in my life,

The times when the Word cut through my bone and marrow,

When words of theology struck my hardened heart and made it soft again.

That night when He grabbed my soul, and His jealous love overtook my life again;

The brutal moments of discipline and sanctification.

It all made sense the moment I remembered His promise to me - I will finish this good work in you that I started. 

And I have a thousand things to be thankful for, to praise Him for. All the good and all the bad, because He turns into His glory anyway.

Because He has started a good work, and He will be faithful to finish.

And I cling to this hope.

Redemption found in the aftermath.

**A brief disclaimer. This blog is written with my utmost respect and deepest love for the church. The church that ministers to their congregation. What is written in this blog, though, discusses what I and my family have journeyed through (a brief overview) since August. We love Bridgepoint with all our hearts, those that attend that church have healed our hearts in great ways, they are what a church should be. The church I speak about in my blog, was not. I will not mention the church's name. Not because I am afraid, but because I believe and hope that there can be redemption for that congregation. If you are at all confused about my opinions or beliefs, please email me - allison.carlberg@yahoo.com

     As we sat in the living room, our conversation turned from topics of current events, to theology and ministry, and of course we soon found ourselves discussing the church. You would think that Moody students would love talking about the church, and we do. But that afternoon we found ourselves in the company of 9 students who had been deeply wounded by the church, our words and stories were laced with pain and grief. We laughed at the irony of the situation - students, preparing for ministry in a church setting, all baring scars inflicted by the church. Some of us with fresh scar tissue. Some with wounds still gushing blood. So, what drew us back? One theme kept resurfacing in all our stories: redemption. 

We all eagerly long for the redemption of the church. 

     Almost a year ago, my family was hurt by a church that we had once called home; the very meeting place of my parents, where they committed their lives to one another, the place I called my second home, and the people I called my family. With no warning, my dad was asked to resign. And those who we had once done ministry with for over twenty years, turned cold and indifferent towards us. The people we called ‘friends’ treated our family as a legal situation. And still, a year later, we are bleeding, confused, and wounded. Wounded, but sustained by grace. 

     The church is the bride of Christ - the fulness of Him who fills all in all (Eph. 1:23). The church is called to be one as it participates in Him, draws its life and nature from Him, sharing in all He has done for it and sharing in His very life as the incarnate Son of the Father. 

     More often than not the church does not look like this. And sometimes, different aspects are more magnified than others. When the church becomes something that takes life instead of a the life-giving bride of Christ, deep and gruesome wounds are inflicted upon those involved in the church. It becomes the very thing it should be farthest from; and that is what happened to my family. Ideas and things became more important than people. A brutal mistake Christ never made, ever. 

     But those who have tasted the evil of what a church can do, have seen and experienced the goodness of Christ. That, He too was spit on and betrayed by the very people He came to save. If anyone knows deep suffering, it is Christ. And in those dark nights of the soul, it is He who comforts us, who presses His hand upon our wounds and heals the hurt. It is He who shows us His scars and how they match up perfectly with ours. It is He who weeps with our souls. It is He who knows our deepest groans and hears the pain too deep to put into words.  

     My mom wrote, in her blog “I’m grateful for those who have chosen to honor our loss with their presence, for showing up and ministering to us.  Days and even weeks later when we couldn’t pray or sing in a worship service, faithful friends  showed up and did the praying and singing for us.  When all we had were tears they showed up to sympathize with us.  We are not done with recovery.  I don’t think we will ever be done with recovery.  It is just something which has been absorbed into our lives...And so we are learning we would rather live in a world of suffering, knowing that God’s grace sustains us, instead of being in a world free of suffering and void of God’s grace.”

     Those, especially those 9 students, have learned, and are learning to see our pain as a way of experiencing God. Instead of being content with this world, we have let this ache in our soul drive us to dig deeper into the Word, to search for God even in the dark places. We have seen redemption, we know the power of healing. We have been broken by the Truth, and we ache for the church to proclaim that power. 

my sin.

       My sin is not so much this or that particular evil, but my 

continual        separation, disunion,  distance from Thee,   and 

having a   [ loose spirit ] towards Thee. 

- Valley of Vision

Summer in the City

Cue Regina Spektor's song, "Summer in the City." -- That song has been running through my head ever since Spring Break.

Recap: Last summer I wanted to live in Chicago, but the Lord took me back home. Fast-forward, this summer I wanted to go to Poland, then to Seattle -- with a little bit of homesickness stuffed in there - but the Lord has placed me in Chicago for the summer.

Did God mix up His time line? Oh, no...that was me. always.

And like you've already concluded, I have find myself writing this blog on the 9th floor of Houghton Hall overlooking this landscape:

Actually, while I'm here, why not throw in a few more skyline photos....

Yesterday, I left campus for my internship at 9am, I got back last night at 9pm -- instead of 6pm

Usually, we hang out in the office for most of the day, but we had a lot of out-of-office work yesterday that took us longer than usually.

And, of course, commuting back into the city via CTA takes a good amount of time.

Actually, in all honesty I didn't mind coming back at 9pm. I took a different route. My PCM is in Irving Park (this is for all you Chicago-minded people, those who don't know the city, sorry!) and I take the blue line and the 66 bus back to Chicago. Not much of a skyline view (blue line is the subway).

BUT last night we finished up in Oak Park and I rode the green line ( the elevated train -- yes, the 'L') and transferred in the loop to the brown line. The loop is one of my favorite places in Chicago.

Commuting around the city makes me feel more apart of the city than anything else.
There is something about being down in the loop that makes your blood flow, you feel apart of the heartbeat of the city.
At the very center of it all.

And as much as I would love to be in the middle of the mountains, there is still something about Chicago that captures my heart.

Its a beautiful city, its a rough city, its  cultured, dangerous, affluent, poverty stricken, ALIVE.

So for this summer, my heart beats for Chicago. In all its beauty and ugliness. Because God's heart is for this city.

In Chicago as it is in Heaven.

It is well with my soul.

I think we like to ignore the idea of Christ suffering, or God suffering. No, I know we do because I am guilty of this ignorance as well. We tend to overlook scriptures like Isaiah 53, the suffering servant --

"He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,"

Well, this school year I have come to terms with the suffering Savior. Because I too have suffered deeply, my family has suffered deeply. And in my pain and tears I have whipped my head around to yell and curse God. But instead of seeing a haughty God, laughing at my pain, or even a distant and abstract God, I saw the cross.

I saw Christ stretched out upon the cross. 

I saw his wounds, I saw His blood. 

I saw his pain and his tears. 

Through my tears I saw a suffering Savior. A man of sorrows, a man acquainted, intimately, with my grief. 

Dr. Neely once said in chapel, 

“Plant the cross of Christ deeply into the Golgotha of your own pain. For His cross casts its Resurrection shadow over all of your life.”

     We are raised into the same power and life that Christ was raised. Not only are we raised, but we now currently live in that life. We share in His great redemption story. But we live in a world marred with sin, a world incapable of full healing this side of Eden. 

How do we live in the ‘already, but not yet?’

 How can we find redemption when this world continues to hand us pain and suffering, when God continues to hand us pain and suffering?

We come to the table, the Eucharist, with our hands full of idols we have fashioned for ourselves, and we try to fit Jesus among our ‘things.’ By doing so, we render ourselves incapable of receiving Christ as He gives Himself to us. 

And so He takes from us, so that He can give Himself to us. He wants to give us life, but we cling to death.

He wants to release us from our trauma, but we keep circling back and cling to our fears. 

He wants to give us peace, but we keep pushing Him away. 

This so-called pain and suffering that we claim God deals out to us in arbitrary fashion is Him giving Himself to us. 

But He has to make our hands empty before He can fill them. 

     We cannot numb ourselves to the pain, we cannot forget who we are. When we ignore our suffering, we ignore the suffering Savior; He is a man that is intimately acquainted with grief, with our grief. 

     We cannot stay calloused and brittle, we do not have to live like this anymore. These fears, these lies, this pain, this trauma is not the end. This pain is not who we are, this pain can turn into hope. 

Ann Voskamp writes,

 “Maybe more than scientific, conclusive evidence of God, maybe the dark depths of us really long for the filling of a wounded, weeping God who doesn’t write answers in the scars but writes His life in our scars. With His scars.” 

We are not alone in our pain, Christ is present. 

And He bleeds with us. 

"Don’t you see these scars on my hands and feet, on my sides? They match yours. I bleed with you." 

     God has set eternity into the hearts of men to remind us that this is not our home.

This is not the end. 

Healing will come, redemption will come, but only through Christ. 

Plunge your hands deep into His scars, get His blood on your hands. There and only there do we find salve for our pain, in His scars we find healing for our wounds. 

Warm afternoons and ice coffees.

And all of the sudden, it’s Spring. 

And the boxes come out of storage, and the clothes, and books, and pictures get packed away. And the warm afternoons bring friends together for the last time. 

And each moment spent together we cherish.

 And the walls become bare. 

And what once was home becomes a skeleton of what use to be. 

And you realize that it wasn’t the building or the pictures that made it a home, 

but the people. 

The friends. 

The memories. 

And no amount of repression, tears, or hugs could ever say how much you all mean to me. 

Nor could they express my bottomless gratitude.

And the car door closes.

 And the chapter ends. 

And the page turns, and a new season begins. 

We had no idea that life was just happening. 

And our lives part, but they will never be the same.

And we will always carry with ourselves the memories.

The lessons we learned.

The friends who stuck it out with us.

And time is short and fleeting.

We feel like we're given so little, but its exactly what we need.

How do we handle closure?

How do we say ‘goodbye’ in such a way that it encompasses all that ‘goodbye’ really means?

We honor those we love by living out the lessons they taught us.

We love more deeply, more strongly, with more vulnerability.

We love with truth.

I love you all.