Christa Wells

When I told him it’s about self-control, saying “no” to yourself…his lips pursed and his eyes stayed on the floor.

Pleadingly, anger just under the buckling cellar door, I say: “You feel like screaming and hitting me, but it’s not okay to do those things.  Do you understand?”

Chin out and trembling, he looks up, shouts: Yes!!  But I just keep forgetting!  You think it’s easy, but it’s not easy for me!!

This one, this 7-year-old kid, knows how to speak the truth.

Another day, another exasperated moment, I ask: Do you believe you can trust God to help you with this?

He says: I can’t trust anyone. 

What about Daddy and me?  Do you trust us?

No, because sometimes you say you’re gonna do something and you don’t. Daddy said he would wrestle with us, and then he didn’t.

Yes, it’s true, even we who love you most will let you down.  But He will not.  Remember what we’ve learned: He is a faithful God, keeping His covenant of Love to a thousand generations…

I know.  But I just can’t.  I’m just stupid.

No. You are anything but stupid.

I’m stupid. Just say it. I’m stupid.

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And this is when I realize I am sitting across the table from myself.  This is the conversation I’ve had with myself a million times.

And what can I give that will provide a sure grip for the falling child to grab onto?

It can’t be only me & my love, because he & I both know I’m not a sure thing–he’s fully aware that I break sometimes.  I have wielded words like weapons.  I’ve said “yes” to my urge to demand and throw tantrums.  He knows it, I know it – so my embracing him, my embracing myself (positive thinking, “loving myself”) – we both know it’s not enough.

It must be something solid and ancient, something deeply reliable.

Something that has real power to save us from ourselves over and over again every day.

Something like…

Know therefore that the LORD your God is GOD.  He is a faithful God, keeping His covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love Him and keep His commands…

and

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion…

Yes, that’s a start, hope…

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Across from my child/myself at the table, I’m still exasperated.  I do not feel like loving this person who has disrupted my plan for a tranquil day (ahem – hello, Self, nice to confront you.).

But it’s about self-control, saying “no” to myself, yes to something more lovely than myself.  Gorgeous, actually – peace & beauty-birthing. And since I’ve just exhorted him to such things, I find myself with accountability…

Can I pray with you?

Shuwah (translated: Sure), he says without conviction, mouth twisted into a “it’s-not-gonna-help-but-go-ahead” posture.

And I pray for us both, for a miracle.  Because peace at this point will be a miracle in both of us.  And while I pray, my hand is on his cheek, and I glance up to witness a softening…sadness, remorse…release of anger.  And when we say Amen, let it be so, we are humans changed.  Ready to give life another go.

Most likely, tomorrow, the scene will play again.  And again we will be saved.

I didn’t grow up with my hands in the dirt.  I never planted anything in any of the yards of any of the houses we called home over those years.  It was Grandma, who lived with us, who set roses in the beds.  Grandma on her knees in the same old paint-stained brown jeans she loved, with kneepads strapped on as age made bones tender.  One year, I bought her a little green garden cushion for those knees, and that was the extent of my awareness of garden life.

As young marrieds in Indiana, in that first house of ours–the yellow 1917 bungalow on E. 10^th Street—some nurturing instinct kicked in, and we covered the chain link fence in blue morning glories.

Transplanted to the east coast, I dug a flat circle in the center of the sunlight, between towering pines, sewed seeds for a cutting garden. We love trying to call up blueberries, tomatoes, rosemary from this Carolina clay.

So these past weeks, we’ve celebrated the Great Return, the re-emergence of things buried months ago.  And I kneeled yesterday like Grandma did, thinning out and relocating perennial offspring to empty spaces elsewhere.

Sometimes I find myself standing there with dirty roots in hand, stalled by indecision…shade or sun?  Drought tolerant?  Deer-tolerant? How big will it get?  If I put this here, I can’t put it there…will I regret it?  Will it hate me for moving it?

(Not known for my decision-making skills.)

Eventually, I make the call and…hope for the best.

And my heart digs too, these days, at the bulbs of decisions made along the years.  The garden we’ve been working at since we met…the merging of two from before.  How exactly did we get to this particular place?  Is this what we expected to come of us?  I don’t remember why we made that choice.  Do we love it? Does it matter?

It’s true that some plans were uprooted here and there.  Some preferences changed along the way…certain climates turned out more or less pleasant than we’d thought they’d be.

One spring we blossomed blue instead of raspberry. Surprise!   Five offshoots. Surprise!

Some seasons we prepare for shadows, then find ourselves in 8 hours of sunlight a day.  In others that same sun beats down til our heads droop low.

Maybe you find yourself in the middle of a Home & Garden layout.

Or not.  Maybe instead you are one of those tucked back under woody branches, and the prospect of rescue looks bleak.

Do you seem to always be on the outside of the “Editor’s Choice” circle?  The one where all the “popular” flowers (zinnias!) are?

Maybe you said “yes” to something which meant a sad “no” to something else, and you felt loss…

My friend Karla has, as long as I’ve known her, has had her hands in the soil, adding to the beauty of earth with a little texture here, a bit of color there.  I long hoped some of her magic would rub off on me.

One day, it did.

She said:  I don’t worry about the arrangements too much.  I don’t have any kind of master plan.  I just dig a hole and throw in some dirt – if they don’t work, I move them later.  Mostly trial and error.

Crazy how much that freed me.  That bit of wisdom alleviated a great deal of pressure: just try something.

Why not try and see?  It’s okay.

But I am further comforted to know that GOD doesn’t operate that way.  He knows in advance and He knows completely. The season of shadows will serve His glory and my good…which are permanently interwined.

The season of light also will serve His glory and my good…which are permanently intertwined.

And the elusive show gardens we stand outside?  Merely flats of topsoil carved by human hands…a far cry from the multi-dimensional-ever-blooming land of primavera we (His children) are destined for, and to which we (His children) already belong.

The gardener knows the soil.  He is a gardener on his knees, setting every rose in her right place.

In Nashville this week, I had the rare opportunity to go out with Mom and hear some live music last night.  Listened to several accomplished songwriters at Cindy Morgan‘s benefit for the Leukemia Society sing in the round, telling stories – some lighthearted, some serious – about the music they have made, and perform them for us simply, guitars or piano.  I sat leaning back, absorbing the phrases, language and melody, hearing them sprinkle each other’s tunes with harmony…loving every line.

Before that event had finished, we buzzed out and over to Family Wash in East Nashville to hear our friends, Ben and Emily, from Carolina Story.  And I swear I couldn’t stop smiling the whole time they played, being completely delighted by their creativity and the layers just these two build into a tune.

I don’t get out for live music much these days, but it was awesome.  And a reminder of what it can feel like to have someone else wash your feet with music.

So with that in mind, I invite you to join me tonight with the generously gifted Nicole Witt, in her living room just outside Nashville.  What’s that you say?  You’re in Alaska tonight?  No problem.  Just follow this link:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/christa-wells-live-from-the-living-room-w-nicole-witt#

…and log in (easy) to join us from wherever you are. Apparently you can chat there – enter questions or file complaints – so we’ll have someone on duty there to pass on your messages.

Sure, it’s not quite the same as hearing the sound fill a room or getting to swap stories in person.  But come along anyway. And bring the whole family.  Mine will be there.

Time: 7-8pm Central

With humble gratitude for your ears and hearts,

christa

Santa Semana–Holy Week–is a week to weigh costs.

Fuel is nearly $3/gallon, unemployment at 9%…the $3 coffee that seemed nothing a year ago we now hesitate or pass on.  We feel the emptying of the bank account as we pay utility bills, mortgage, car…

But this is a week to consider the price tag on our right to be spiritually Alive.  The cost of life…of death.  This week, the worldwide family of Christian believers remember a purchase made on our behalf.

I think maybe we flinch a little at the idea of things done for us…honestly, don’t we prefer independence, strength, self-reliance, self-sufficiency here?

Our default: I can do it! And our medicine: You can do it!

When I wrote “Life Cost So Much” I was not trying to be obscure.

But try to capture the Great Story in a few lines of lyric, and you see the problem…

I had been studying with our church “Two Ways to Live” and reading Tim Keller’s The Reason for God and also the book of Ezekial, and was providing music for a study on the basic tenants of the faith.  I just wanted to express some of these truths, to walk through the story in song.

And more people ask “What’s this one about?” than any other.  At the risk of saying too much, here is the place from which I wrote.

Death is easy, you don’t know you’re a ghost, The fee is taken out nice and slow…

It’s about the living dead, by which I mean humans who have not yet realized what we were born for, spend their days pursuing a sort of emptiness that does not sing.  In a way, a broad sketch of all human history, our childish insistence on wearing a crown not sized for our heads, certain we know better than our parent how to manage things.

Wisdom warned us but our flesh was strong…

It’s about Him telling us what we needed to know, giving what we needed for life from the beginning.   And us rejecting.

It’s the later part, the part where His children needed rescuing and He paid the debt we’d incurred by rejecting.

Life cost so much, life cost so much…

It’s the invisible Laws we have a hard time believing exist much less understanding, Mysteries that are before us and beyond us.  Things far more real than anything we’ve yet seen or experienced, and the true meaning of Justice, and the answer to I Deserve… .

Send us a king, send us our King…

It’s the late dawning desperation of humans everywhere through all time that oh, I do need what He said I needed.  I do need to come near, to listen, because nothing makes sense or means anything without Him in the picture.  I truly do not know how to be alive and be human apart from the Creator.

It’s about…the very tangible torment He opened Himself to repair the damage we’d done.  The great personal price He accepted to resurrect us.  How free is Grace?

Someone paid for the damage…

Tim Keller points out that if someone backs out of your drive, running into your gate and garden wall, there are real, actual damages that must be paid in order to restore the gate and wall. “Either you or he absorbs the cost for the deed, but the debt does not somehow vanish into thin air. Forgiveness, in this illustration, means bearing the cost for his misdeed yourself.”

And the Father told us all of it long ago.  He told us we were dead, reminded that dead people can’t raise themselves up.  That resurrection would be a critical heart of the plan.

Dry bones, breath breathed, open graves, dead brought to life, Lazarus, Christ himself, our own future…the imagery is pervasive and effective in Old and New Testaments.

Ezekial 37: They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.”  Therefore prophesy and say to them: I will bring you back to the land of Israel.  Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live…

How else do you explain all these open graves we’ve got?

How do we explain it?  Joy in emptiness?  How do you explain the forgiveness of deep offenses?  Peace in tempest winds? How do we explain the always-returning green hope buds of this Life?

Someone must have paid…

Today I repost my reflections on the time I spent in 2010 with high school students at one of the best creative arts camps out there, along with a note written by one of our students.

This is where you’ll find me every late July and where I am personally encouraged and challenged by an intimate group of young artists. This is where I would have spent my summers when I was a teenager, if it had existed, and it would have been a source of deep encouragement to me, as it is to these students.

Registration is now open for Masterpiece Project 2011 whose theme will be “Add to the Beauty” (inspired by Sara Groves’ song by the same name).  To find out more, contact Sherrie Rogers at gslrogers@gmail.com .

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I want to tell you about Masterpiece Project 2010.

Our theme this year was “Frame the Clouds,” and you’ll just have to believe me when I say I did not have anything to do with that. But I was humbled, so grateful that the concept resonates with others.

The staff at Masterpiece are not all of a kind.  We are songwriters, musicians, graphic designers, painters, poets, photographers, calligraphers, pastors, dancers, and counselors.

We are all passionate about our art forms and passionate about the work of God’s kingdom.

In particular, we are passionate about encouraging young artists to be fearless in their faith and in their work.

We all feel inadequate in one way or another.

We wonder what’s next in our own lives.

Above all we believe there is a big, big beautiful true story happening and that it is our responsibility to participate in the telling of it.  By making art.  And by living in love with God’s art.

The students at Masterpiece are not all of a kind.  They are songwriters, musicians, painters, poets, photographers, calligraphers, dancers, novelists, cartoonists, designers.  Public-schooled, private-schooled, home-schooled.  Funny, dramatic, shy, mysterious, hardworking, uncertain, open.

They feel inadequate and wonder what’s next.

But above all they suspect they have something in common with other storytellers, past and present, across the globe and in the next cabin.  Some small part of them, at least, believes they have been given a uniquely powerful way of representing God’s True story.

In one little week in the rural midwest, we are together and changed.

We, together, have listened, walked and talked, written, collaged, and played, danced, cooked, and cleaned.  We’ve sung prayers, read the Word, and represented a Creed.

We tried to frame the clouds.

And yes, we even built a giant iPod.

*The following was copied (with permission) from a Facebook “Note” posted by one of our campers:

“When we were released by the kitchen staff the people who were helping and I were sitting around a table and someone asked if I had any of my drawings with me and I did. I showed them the one I was working on and I ran back to my cabin and grabbed my three boxes of my drawings and brought them over to the gathering area. I opened them up and gave them up for viewing. This is something I do not do often, generally I am not comfortable with groups of people looking through my art for whatever reason, but I knew it could be appreciated. Now there was a little crowd of about eight or nine people chattering and oooing over my art. Now this was unique being that I have drawn them and made up my mind whether or not I like them or not. There was stuff from a couple of years ago to present and some of those pieces are somewhat embarrassing to me but much to my surprise people were pointing out things in my art that I never saw and were explaining how much they enjoyed them. Compliment after compliment kept coming about drawings that I had nearly forgotten about. It was an encouraging moment and something I remember clearly. In that moment I knew that I was in the company of friends…”

I’ve been thinking about you…

You waking with anxiety, curling up at night with anxiety, and carrying her wrapped around your middle like a boa constrictor.

Squeezing out life with not enough time, not enough talent, not enough money, not enough friends, not enough…

I know it personally.  The pet who continually tears up your furniture and attacks your friends but you can’t quite figure out how to get rid of it.

Or a quiet disease…

A sap-the-life-out-of-you while you’re standing there smiling and running to the next thing and saying yes to one more activity and making a million disclaimers for your dirty floors and wondering why no one is responding to your witty Facebook post and thinking we really just need more ________________ and when I get the job and what if this doesn’t work and trying to do better look younger sound smarter sort of plague.

When did we start thinking it is no big deal to spend days with our breath held?   When did we start saying, it’s part of me…? When begin thinking it proof of a purposeful life?

Who taught us to live in knots?

There is a different way… people waking up in simpler spaces, not self-reliant but inter-dependent, not saving the world but loving a neighbor.  Working for food, but not gasping for breath.  Fewer options, greater peace.

You think I’m idealizing, maybe.  Maybe this is a different place and we just have to be this way?

I know that’s what I believed, but I just don’t anymore.  Not because I have any illusions about small Central American countries having it all figured out. They do not.  But because I’m becoming disillusioned with the functional belief that  GOD is to be admired more than worshiped, talked about more than known, acknowledged but not relied on...that we can be about His work without being WITH Him.  That really, on the plane of daily work and decision-making and accomplishing, it all depends on us being as close to perfect as we can muster.

But…What if He is GREATER than we have believed Him to be?

What if the God who was alive and holy enough to make Moses’ face glow in the dark is still alive and holy?

What if I actually NEED him…in a desperate way in this ordinary untragic moment?

What if I admitted I’m like a HELPLESS baby and can’t walk 5 feet without running into an idol, apart from Him?

I remember Samuel, coloring at the table in San Isidro del General, singing:

I’ve got the whoooooole world in my hands,

He’s got the whooooole world in His hands,

I’ve got the whole wide world in my hands…

Hmm…like mother, like son…but all we really have in our hands is what we’ve been given to hold today…daily bread.

How do I begin to release my imagined grip on things?

Lord, I believe.  Help my unbelief!  Save me from the poison of ego-rooted insecurity, prideful independence, control-grasping exhaustion, people-pleasing idolatry…misplaced affection..!

I am prone to bending my knee at the wrong altars.

You too?

He compassionately shines light:  He…the only god that will ever love me back.  And how little I need that which I thought I might die without!

The more that creeps into my really-believing consciousness, the more I feel I might just shoot straight up into the sky, leave the gravity of these chains behind.

And yes, I’ve used more than my share of metaphors in one post, but that too, for today, is part of the process.

Now that we’re home (home home in North Carolina), it’s time to unpack.

Physically, that looks like a bedroom floor piled with a mayhem of luggage and car trash.  :)  That’s going to take a few days.

Spiritually, it’s been underway for several weeks and will continue long after the clothes get sorted and put away.  Blogging is helpful not only to readers but to the writer…when Kat , who sees herself as one who passes out torches (and I agree), asked me to post some reflections of our journey – why we did it – on her blog, I was grateful for the push.  Too often, we mean to write but never get around to it.  (Even people who write for a living!)

I’d LOVE for you to hop over here to Inspired to Action (which is one of my favorite places to get motivated), where Kat so graciously made room for me on her couch.

ALSO.

Thank you. You guys have been (and continue to be) immensely encouraging to me, not just with the release of How Emptiness Sings, but over the months, with your lifting-up letters and stories.  They always seem to appear in the Inbox at just that moment when I’m beginning to wonder about all this and where it belongs.

It belongs with you.  And not surprisingly, you and I are a lot alike.  Which “adds to the beauty” (credit Sara Groves) by reminding all of us that we are less alone amongst humans than we sometimes feel.

So.  That’s it.  Thanks. Now go get inspired.  

I made myself wait these past several months, and now we’re ready to share the music we made last summer/fall before heading out to Costa Rica.  And now…I’m both eager and a little shy about actually shipping.  :)

How Emptiness Sings is a 7-track EP, all new originals, recorded & produced by Zodlounge (Nashville, TN), cover art/photos/design by Shelly Eve (who, by the way, you might know as Shelly Moore – singer/songwriter).  I love it.

Making music is joy – made complete when others enter in, listen, and respond.  Once that interaction begins, the work seems out of the artist’s hands, ownership transferred to the listener.

So…to that end, I invite you to interact with these new creatures of music & lyric.  We are adding one preview track every couple of days through the release, until all 7 are up – click the image below to listen.

Official release is March 15 (hopefully you’ll be able to find it at iTunes, etc, right away) – and we are already taking orders for physical CDs here at the Store.

You have a million other places you could be right now! Thank for stopping here.  And…please respond freely…your stories bring the music to life.

We arrived in Costa Rica mid-December, unsure how long we’d stay or even where we’d stay once we finished the first six weeks in San Jose.  As it has turned out, our visit will have amounted to just over 11 weeks, and we’ll be buckling in for a flight home to the United States 10 hours from now.

Several weeks back, as we arrived at the last of our three temporary homes here, I realized how quickly the time would pass, and I wrote:

The thought of leaving Costa Rica feels like…leaving a person.

We became acquainted with Costa Rica in an ordinary urban neighborhood, where we transported ourselves to grocery stores and language school and the downtown area via the public bus every day for 6 weeks.

There was Arnie, who who runs the tiny convenience store nestled between the houses.  Our Tican teachers who come from country and city, from conservative Catholicism and liberal atheism.  There is Ana Grace and Tony, who met us at the airport and watched over us, always offering, extending the love of Christ.  The churches we visited in Cartago and Zapote, warm and alive and growing.  The guards with rifles outside the gasolinera who offered a smiling “Buenas!” every morning on our way to the bus stop.  The leashless puppies running the neighborhood.

We met the greener, more “tranquilo” side of Costa Rica when we emancipated ourselves from the concrete and traffic and rode the early morning bus from San Jose to Quepos.  Two weeks with cariblanco monkeys on the balcony, iguanas sunning the tree trunks, daily bus rides down to the beach, where the sun sets on the horizon every evening and the people in bathing suits watch and applaud.

(In case this sounds just a bit too dreamy…We didn’t manage to fly away from the usual challenges of traveling with humans younger than 13, of sibling rivalry and parental temper tantrums, of living out of suitcases and shopping and cooking in a foreign country.  I probably need to post about those lovely moments more often. )

Our third “home” was in the hilly outskirts of Isidro del General, about an hour inland and 3 hours south of San Jose. On the 1.5 hour drive from the beach, tropical rainforest gave way to oil palm plantations, which led to coffee fincas and dynamic cloud patterns that morphed throughout the day, dawn to dusk.

We slept with a view of the entire valley and her lights, woke every morning to lakes of fog below.  In those three weeks we grew attached to a family of 22 living in close & simple quarters below us on the hill.  These children of ours from different cultures and without a common language except laughter and play, did just that, every day.

We were finally really together after an exhausting autumn – or decade?- of running different directions (me on the road a good bit and Toby considering a job change).  We were far outside everything that feels “normal,” which allowed us to see things and ask questions we wouldn’t otherwise.

And I wrote:

The thought of leaving Costa Rica feels like leaving a person.

But today, when that thought played again, I added:

Oh.

The person is me.

From a mountaintop, you tend to see things differently.  It’s a cliché of a metaphor, but it’s true.  There is always a little fear when you come back down the mountain.  You’re afraid everything will be forgotten like a dream and no one in the valley will believe or understand and your pictures won’t capture the scent or texture of the air.  Some try to stay up there.  But I’m turned toward home.

I just don’t want to leave her behind -

this free woman I found under the laundry line in Costa Rica.

It’s not really her, of course, but Him.  Him in her.  In me.  Him standing right there in the cloud-shrouded mountains and red sunsets over the sea, and cliffs of cascading water.

Him in the face of people who eat rice and beans every day in small open-air homes, and invite a family of seven over to share.

Him in the humility of stumbling over foreign words and asking for help over and over again.

I’m afraid I’ll leave it behind.

So we went to the artesans’ market and chose souvenirs – carved animals and necklaces, a cross.  Things to take home to remember.  I took 1000 amateur photographs which will be printed and framed.

But really, there is just one thing to keep.  It’s every morning climbing back up the mountain on the Word that paints truth more clearly than any photograph or song or poem.  The Word that lives in Costa Rica and the United States and every city and countryside under the sun.

The Mighty One, God, the LORD, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to where it sets. 
From Zion, perfect in beauty, God shines forth…

(Psalm 50)

Despite what we may think, we’re not ready for paradise yet…no – we’ll return to the place that is home to us, even if she is broken, flawed, or slightly less gorgeous.

It’s time to go home.  If we can just carry a little bit of the light back with us, we won’t really need the wooden crocodile.