On God | Sarah Markley

God is Good All the Time

May 15, 2013 by Sarah Markley 5 Comments

I’m learning that God is good all the time.

I’m learning that God is good even in a desert.

I’m learning that the power of waiting on him and learning what that actually means.

I’m learning about God is true even when I don’t see Him or feel Him. My understanding of it doesn’t change Him.

So, humbly, I’ll ask you to jump over and visit this post on a newer site I’ve been writing for.

God is Good all the Time

“I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” Psalm 27:13-14

These two verses have been my hope in this season of life lately.

Understand, the last two years of life for my family have been hard. In fact, if I look back over 17 years of marriage, the last 48 months have been the hardest ever. A little less than three years ago, we lost our home. A casualty of the burst housing bubble, we packed up and moved from our little community that we loved to a place of stark suburban sameness. For the next two years, we tried to find our footing in a new place that we hoped could be an Eden but ended up a desert.

Sometimes life simply is a desert, I’ve learned. It’s sandy and thirsty and even the most devoted of lovers of Jesus can begin to doubt His goodness.

I entered into two years of doubting the goodness of God, two years of wondering if He really has good things in store for me, and two years of resigning myself to the fact that the desert might in fact be the reality…

Fighting Cynicism

April 9, 2013 by Sarah Markley 29 Comments

A month ago I decided to take a once-a-year movie day for Sarah. I’d put it on the calendar, turned off my phone and closed my laptop.

Settling into bed in my sweats I watched guilty-pleasure movie after guilty-pleasure movie. The kind that my husband won’t stand for — random documentaries, chick flicks and episodes of “How I Met Your Mother.” It just felt so good to sign off for the day.

Right in the middle of a Marshall, Ted and Lilly conversation, someone knocked loudly at my front door.

Are. You. Kidding. Me.

I got up, pulled my hair into a pony and opened the door.

Sales kid. About nineteen or so, with a couple of spray bottles hanging from his belt and a clipboard in one hand.

He opened with, “Hello young lady, you must be the daughter of the house.” Spare me.

“Um, no. I’m the mom. What can I do for you?”

“What kind of cleaner do you use in your home?” he continued. Which launched him into a fifteen minute monologue about why his cleaner will remove anything from mold to grass stains and of course, it was only a fraction (Fraction, I’m telling you!) of the cost of any other cleaner anywhere in the world.

Sigh. Just let me get back Barney Stinson.

Then he started spraying down and scrubbing my front step. Seriously. Because this takes off mold and old stains and… Oh, no. Please don’t do that! Now he is scrubbing down a small portion of my front sidewalk chirping away happily about why this is my dream come true.

“If you could only buy one cleaning solution for the rest of your life, would you?”

My movie-muddled brain screamed Trap! “Of course I would.” I said. Oops. He shoved a clipboard in my face.

By now I was getting irritated. I didn’t want to say “No” off the bat but really? I’m not buying cleaning supplies from you if you interrupt me in the middle of my day off.

I sent him away a few minutes later. I was gracious, but he was mad. He ungraciously took his spray bottles to the next house.

Perhaps his cleaning solution WAS the best thing I would have ever purchased. And it was in fact the only thing I would need to buy for the rest of my life. Perhaps. And I missed out.

But probably not. Regardless, his sales pitch was trying to get me to buy in on something that may or may not be true. And I’ve seen enough infomercials and had enough people pitch me things that I guess I would consider myself a cynic in this area.

I’m basically a hard sell.

When I grew up in the evangelicalism of the 1980s and all the families I knew were moving to Colorado Springs because, we wondered if Jesus was in fact living there right alongside Focus on the Family and all the other Christian organizations that put down roots there, I think the bill that I was sold was that going to church would solve everything.

This brand of Christianity was “sold” as the end-all, be-all for all. In essence, church was the one cleaner to clean them all.

But this was also a Christianity that was without cost. It was a faith that was full of legalism and without a lot of grace. It was a road upon which everyone looked the same and walked the same path. If you didn’t find Jesus in church, where could you find him?

Sometimes I wonder if I was sold a false bill of goods like the kid with all the spray bottles and the mold-scrubbing.

But I think I know now that being a follower of Jesus means that there is much cost. And that faith is full of grace as much as it about wanting to be like Jesus. I think I understand now that our journeys toward Jesus can look very different from one another. I wonder if Jesus likes to also hang out beyond the walls of the sanctuaries. If some of His favorite places are in board rooms and in the bars and in the streets of our cities.

It’s hard not to become a church-cynic, or a hard sell, especially when you’ve pretty much seen it all.

And I really do fight and scratch hard against the bitterness.

Don’t sell me any more church, I want to say. Trust me, I get it. You think that your brand will be the only brand I need for the rest of my life.

But then I also want to say Jesus doesn’t need to be sold. He IS hope and He IS grace and that kind of redemption doesn’t need to be marketed.

I want us as a people to fight cynicism and bitterness even though we’ve been hurt and wounded and some of us have been sold a really false bill of goods. It would be easy to shut the door in the face of the church and go back to our sitcoms.

I want us to scratch hard against those bitter feelings and instead of pushing out, let us push in and figure out where we fit in all of it.

Because what is different about the sales kid and the church is that while there is wounding and hurt and difficulty, there is also joy and truth and goodness in the church. And there is community here in the church. And there is beauty here in the church. And there is Jesus.

What do you think?

Filed Under: on church, on community, on God

Kneeling in the Dirt

April 5, 2013 by Sarah Markley 31 Comments

In John 8 Jesus kneels in the dirt and writes something for the woman caught in adultery and the scribes and the Pharisees all to see.

“Let him who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

One by one the religious leaders walk from the scene and I wonder if they all look down at the dirt as they shuffle away. They are shamed but it is not Jesus who is shaming them. They can’t bear the weight of their own brokenness.

It is only Jesus and the woman now.

When I read this I don’t see him yelling at her. I don’t see him talking to her about all the various and intricate ways she has sinned. I don’t see him shaking his head at her and “Tsk, Tsk.” When I read this I don’t see him shaming her.

Instead, he gently tells her to move on. Don’t make this a part of your life from here on forward. Stop doing this, he seems to say, this thing that makes you broken. The thing that makes US broken.

And that is where the story ends.

We don’t know if she listened to Jesus or if she continued in her life of sin. We always assume, I think, that she walked on in freedom and in newness but we don’t really know that.

It’s the attitude toward the person, not their choice that is important.

What would Jesus have done had she been caught again the next week? Do you think he would have said, “Ah, well, second time’s the charm.” And do you think he would have stood back and let the mob tear her limbs apart?

No. I don’t believe so.

I believe he would have knelt again in the sand and dirtied his knees doing the same thing, maybe with a little more sadness in his eyes. And I believe that he would have lifted her face and told her once again not to live this way.

But what do we do to friends or our Christian leaders when they fail. To be honest, they are lucky if they get a first chance from us, more or less a second one.

So let us love others regardless of what they do with that love.

Let us move inside and through grace as if we are made from it. Let us let this grace-love shine from the corners of even our broken hearts as we help heal others of their brokenness.

When I was younger I asked my father (after he had handed a homeless man a few dollars), “Why do you do this when you know he’ll go and buy something to drink?”

He said, “I don’t have any say over the gift once it is given. It is me doing the giving that is the obedience.”

Yes. This.

It is us giving the grace that is the obedience. It is us kneeling in the dirt that is the obedience. What someone does with that? If they choose to love or to thank me or if they choose to understand? That isn’t my business.

It is me giving the grace. It is us kneeling in the dirt. This is where it is.

Filed Under: on God, on grace, on love

Labor of Love

March 27, 2013 by Sarah Markley 22 Comments

We had lice in our house yesterday.

It’s really something I don’t like to talk, even here among friends. It is so much easier to keep this private because YOU don’t want to be the reason the whole school issues a “disease” warning and if you are, you don’t want anyone else to know it’s YOUR kid. But you don’t. You call the school and tell everyone you know that we-are-staying-home-today-to-pick-out-lice.

People think you are dirty or not clean or something (even though you are very clean) and they make assumptions (still) about hygiene when someone gets lice. It’s almost like you are a pariah and your home is a source of disease for even the people that love you the most.

But it’s what happens when you have school-aged girls with long untamed hair that is hard to catch for more than a few hours in a hair tie.

So we scrubbed and picked and lice-shampooed. We combed and sprayed and tore apart the house and everything soft and fluffy went into the washing machine on the hottest of waters. We swept and vacuumed and changed every linen in the entire house. I opened all the windows and doors.

Fresh air, please come in.

I sat for three hours, two different times bent over the head of a girl-child, using my fingers through long, deep hair scouring them clean.

I can only call it an intimate labor of love. There are very few people you can call to come search your scalp for insects, as very few people will even enter your house when the L-word is used.

But nonetheless my back is almost broken today because yesterday I bowed it to make sure these children’s heads were fixed and mended.

My eleven-year-old, with her thick, auburn hair sat patiently as I silently combed. I was in the middle of my second hour on her head. She said something softly. “Thank you Mama. I don’t know anyone else who would do this.”

“I love you sweetie.” I said as I adjusted the towel over her shoulders. “It’s what I do.”

And it’s familiar, this child sitting close to you, nearly an embrace, but it’s not. It’s a cleansing.

I only wonder if this is what Jesus does with us.

He pulls us close, not worrying if the dirty will rub off on himself, and gets to work on the mending.

This cleansing us is dirty work. There are parts of it that shouldn’t even be spoken of in good company. It’s the picking and scrubbing and the death and the need. The intense need! This is something that one cannot do alone. We need someone else to do this washing for us.

But it’s also intimate. It’s close and humiliating to have someone else look at the ugly, dirty parts of you. It’s embarrassing to have someone else know that you need this so deeply and to be still held close during it.

When the girls had gone to bed late last night after the last nit comb had been sterilized I pulled a chair under the light. “Chad, its my turn now.”

And I bent my head for him to look and touch my scalp, behind my ears, the top of my head. For an hour we remained like this, his body close to mine in this intimate cleansing.

It is a labor of intimacy that only love can perform.

Filed Under: on family, on God, on love, Uncategorized

When Life and God Split Us

March 18, 2013 by Sarah Markley 25 Comments

It’s hard when life and God shift us.

When we move one way and the people we love move in a different way.

What’s even harder is that when we shift, friends who loved us now wonder if they ever really knew us. And they wonder if we ever really loved God. And they whisper and we catch the gossip of the whisper and we know what they really think. And then it’s been years and they ask silly questions like how is your-walk-with-Jesus?

These are questions that wouldn’t be asked if they really knew me. If they knew how whole I am because of Him. They wouldn’t ask me that if they were to call me up for any other reason than to figure out how far from Jesus I really am. As if when I left that place I left God as well.

I believe that a relationship brings intimacy and those who are close enough to have the right to ask that kind of question are also close enough to know the answer without having to ask in that way. I believe we should never ask that question, the one about the Walk, because in the walking together we learn each other’s “Walks”.

It could not be further than what is real. In fact maybe I’ve even found more of Him. That I’ve found more holiness in the daily and more worship in the wind. For me to love God well, I have had to do some of the hardest things: the ones that shift me away from some people but shift me closer to God.

So I shouldn’t have to prove my faith to them, I think. My faith is between me and God and my community. My faith is mine.

I tend to think Jesus came to set us free. And that also means freedom from proving that faith to the people who ask the intimate questions.

And maybe Jesus also sets us free from legalism-speak and free from extra Praise-The-Lords and If-It’s-In-His-Will’s. Maybe I don’t have to say those things at every breath to still be called Daughter and Sister!

It doesn’t mean that I don’t love God. In fact, for me it means the opposite.

So on one hand, I don’t have to prove my faith to anyone. My faith is complete and whole in the One whom I’ve given it. It is true and right and my journey is imperfect and chaotic but it is the Journey that steers me closer and closer to the hem.

On the other hand, if I were to show that I can still love Jesus and drink a glass of good wine, that I can still believe well and not use language dripping with Christian-speak, that I can still chase hard after God and be a political liberal then maybe I should prove it to the people who still care.

Maybe I should, for the sake of us and for the sake of the church, show them that the Holy Spirit can indwell me even when my faith is a little outside of the box. Maybe I should, in some way, prove it to them so that our faith will be strengthened because we see one another with new eyes. Maybe I should pray for them with their language so that they know I’m still okay. That we’re all still okay.

Maybe.

It’s like when I put perfume in the hollow of my neck or the soft place behind my ear. The scent mingles with my own scent and becomes a new, unique and perfect one. It is the same with my faith.

I have nothing to prove. But if I must, if it is what will bring us all closer to Him, then I will tell them the things they need to hear without compromising any inch of who I am. And I’ll do this because of Love.

Filed Under: on God, on journey, Uncategorized

The Goodness

February 21, 2013 by Sarah Markley 4 Comments

This is all I have today.

Sometimes, like now, I’m depleted and the only thing I can do is not-write. The only thing I can do is think, and wonder and try to understand something more.

I try to understand a thing and it all gets jumbled in my head and in my heart. So today, for this Thursday afternoon when the words get stopped up like a jam in my mouth and will not come out the tips of my fingers (it’s like magic, I suppose), all I have is this. His goodness. And that’s all I ever have I think.

And I shake my head because I don’t understand it one bit. I don’t understand His goodness and the why-me’s of it. So this is all I have. This is it: the thinking and the wondering and the heart-quiet.

Think on this with me today, would you? The Goodness?

Filed Under: on God, Uncategorized

To Be Known

January 16, 2013 by Sarah Markley 40 Comments

If I had a say in the Academy, my vote for Best Actor would be Hugh Jackman. The Wolverine? I know, right.

When I was fifteen my best friend Jennifer invited me to go with her family to see a big, giant stage production of a musical in LA. I’d never heard of it before.

We sat in the third row of one of the balconies of the Schubert Theater and her father leaned over and handed each of us one of those $20 programs.

“Les Miserables.”

My life had been changed. We watched and wondered and our hearts rose with Eponine’s and crashed with the death of Val Jean. I cried when Gavroche died on the barricade and I stood with applause at the end.

Since that day I have seen the stage production of Les Miz four more times, and after each one I would compare it to the first. I was young and very much affected by this story. And I always cried when Gavroche died. Each time I cried.

There is something about this story that is true and right.

When the latest iteration of Les Miz came out in the theaters last Christmas I was far across the sea. It wouldn’t arrive in Europe until now, after I’d already been home.

Last Sunday my parents came over to feed the kids some pizza while Chad and I escaped to the movies. Finally.

I knew every word of every song, of course, and knew every scene. It made me feel fifteen again, just for a few minutes, and I relearned some of the beauty of the story’s masterpiece as I wept again.

Of course we all cry when Fantine sings “I Dreamed a Dream.” How could we not? But something at the end of that film, and it is in large part due to Hugh Jackman’s acting I believe, struck me as brilliant.

When Val Jean confesses to Marius that he has been a thief, that he has been a fraud his entire life and has lived under a different name and that he must go away to ensure his daughter’s respect, Marius simply softly says {sings},

“You’re Jean Val Jean.”

He simply speaks his name.

The look on Val Jean’s face is one of utter relief, of ache and of gratefulness. It has been over 20 years since someone has truly known him. And now someone was speaking his true name without reproach or hatred but with love. The expression is insignificant but communicates perhaps the biggest need we have as humans.

We all have an ache to be known for who we really are, I think.

We long to be seen and for our souls to be known. We move heaven and earth for others to love us, but what we really want is for others to know us first and then to love us as a result.

What if someone knew us for who we really were? Would they still love us? What if someone saw all of our past (and our future) laid out before them and still chose to be with us? What if someone really understood our fears and hurts and pain and still wanted to walk through life with us?

What if?

To be known.

What is amazing is that someone has known us and still loved us. And perhaps has loved us as a result of knowing even the horrible cracks in our surfaces. He knows us because he has created us.

Let us seek to be a people who know one another and who allow others to know us as well.

Filed Under: on friendship, on God, on living, Uncategorized

The Pleasure and the Holiness of Writing

November 9, 2012 by Sarah Markley 31 Comments

It took me a long time to say that I’m a writer.

It took me over a year of writing EVERY day. And I mean every day for me to admit to myself that I’m a writer, and then a few years after that for me to comfortably admit to anyone else that I was.

What I’ve learned along the way is that I process much of my life as I’m writing. This is what I mean: The learning often doesn’t come until the writing.

I wrote a post about my daughter catching a fish last spring at a Girl Scout camp out. I admitted that initially I didn’t want to go on the family camp out {what woman really wants to be without showers or toilets for more than a day?}. But some beautiful and amazing things happened during that weekend. And I learned some significant things about my ten-year-old as well.

But for me, the learning of it didn’t come until I wrote about it.

This is what I believe: If you are a writer then God has given you a gift that He intends to use to bring you closer to Him. Let me clarify: yes, your writing may help others become closer to Him. Maybe you write in a devotional style or a challenging style or a style that helps people figure God out more. If that is true, then it is only the icing on a very grand cake.

Writing, if you are a writer, is God’s thoroughfare to your heart and your spirit. It is through the writing that He will draw you to Himself. The gift of writing, as a Christ-follower, is His means of crafting you into who you are supposed to be. You will learn, you will expose parts of your heart you intended to keep hidden and you will examine your soul as you do it.

And the same is true of all gifts and art, not just writing.

Here’s something else. Not only is it a holy, sacred thing, this gift you have. {Don’t be fooled. You have a gift.} But it is a thing for pleasure. For your pleasure.

Your pleasure should come from the gift. Your pleasure and your holiness, both.

I’m going to share something with you that I’ve sworn I would keep a secret until it was completed. I’ve never had so much pleasure in writing as I did over the past week. I began to work on a private, longer project that when I go to it, it makes my spirit move in rhythm with the idea, my hands move in time with my heart and my soul takes a deep, full breath at the end.

It is what I’ve been meant to do.

Not only do I find pleasure in it, but it exposes the still-hidden places of my heart and makes them sacred. It is the gift, drawing me closer to God.

When God gifts us, he does it with purpose and intention. And if He also intends for it to be a means to Him, then we must do it. I must write. You must write. Or you must do what you have been gifted to do.

And when you do, you will find deep pleasure in it.

Are you a writer? What are your gifts? How have they drawn you closer to God?

Filed Under: on God, on writing, Uncategorized

On Loving the Haters

August 6, 2012 by Sarah Markley 20 Comments

Sometimes I wonder if Jesus was aware of all the people that hated Him and who were out to get Him. Really get Him.

If He worried about the blunt force of their aggression and their words and all the religious testosterone being stirred up around Him for simply telling the truth.

Or if He simply decided not to allow the swirling masses of hatred to bother Him.

If He went about his daily business doing “His Father’s work” and focused on the woman who touched his robe or the child who needed healed. Maybe He was the Great Compartmentalizer and was able to put aside the “haters” in His mind and do what was right and needed and good for the people He walked with and for the people of the world.

I’m sure He loved the haters. I know He loved the haters. But did He let them bother Him? I don’t know if He did.

Maybe He allowed their words and actions to infiltrate His mind as He saw them as scared and wounded and as products of their religion. Maybe His compassion for them went so far as to forgive before they’d even begun to do the hateful things they did.

Maybe he was generous with grace and overflowing with love for even the haters of His day.

Can we be as generous?

Filed Under: on God, on grace

What I Do Not Know

June 29, 2012 by Sarah Markley 15 Comments

God is God no matter what we say about Him

How we argue about His truths or

How we treat each other.

He is who He is no matter what we do about it.

He will continue to be

Good

Perfect

Kind

Compassionate

Gracious

No matter what we say He is, no matter what moniker we give Him or how much we meditate or how little we pray to Him.

He will be God no matter what we believe about heaven and hell and no matter what we believe about gay marriage, troops in the Middle East or about global warming. He will be God regardless of who becomes the president in November and He will be God regardless of what we believe about immigration or healthcare.

God is God no matter what elaborate theological construct we swirl around Him. Whether we prop Him up with Calvinism or Evangelicalism or Catholicism or Judaism. He will remain who He is through all of our arguments and word-wars.

And even still He will be

Slow to anger

Full of grace

Abounding in mercy

We can spend our whole lives trying to

learn,

pinpoint,

and exact

perfectly who God is {not an unworthy goal by any stretch}, but at the end of the day there are parts of the Divine Him that is a mystery.

And that has to be okay.

I do know some small things about God, humbly, I think. I know He is the God who soothes me back to sleep in the middle of the night when I’ve woken up with bad memories. I know He is everyday-longsuffering with me. I know God has given me perfect gifts of time, of people and of witnessing beauty all around me. I know He is a God who saves, who rescues and who loves divinely.

And what I do not know far outweighs what I do know. I think that’s part of the beauty of Him: that He cannot be fully caught in my hand, He cannot be fully grasped by my mind or even my heart and that He remains who He is regardless of my faithlessness and pride.

What do you know about God to be true?

Filed Under: on God