Go for broke!

At A Holy Experience Ann Voskamp reminds us that

...When you really want to disappear – is when you really want to be found. When you really want to run away from everybody – is when you really want to be found by just somebody.

It’s about aging — and more. It’s about time passing and never coming back — and more. It’s about getting through the birthdays — and letting yourself be loved. Even if it’s imperfectly by imperfect people. Hold out for perfect and you end up holding nothing.

Why is it so hard to let yourself be loved?

Sometimes you can hardly bear to let anyone try to love you because it feels like a lie.

And for crying out loud, life is too blazing short to live lies.

...Is that why a million haggard people hate birthdays? Because love on that day can feel like a lie, like an obligation, like a polite duty and it’s too hard to smile and pretend through its plasticity.

Or maybe it really is — that the moment you accept love, you have to accept yourself, and there’s something in that that seems unacceptable. Strange, how there’s no love without humility...

...If you have Christ – nothing can steal your peace.

And right there those memorized verses from Romans breach the surface of things, because memorization isn’t for the smug saints who have made it but for the desperate sinners who want to make it:

“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus… ”

The enemy wants nothing more at the end of the day than to make you and all your offered years feel like a piece of chopped up meat. You’ve just got to call Satan by what his ugly name really means: prosecutor. The work of the enemy isn’t ultimately to tempt you, but to try you.

...And even the weary and worn-out can cut him down with one sharp edge of a memorized verse:

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?

Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? …

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us…. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth —

nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” ~ Romans 8

Sure, time, age, life, this side of glory is traumatic. Living in a fallen world can’t help but be traumatic — falling is traumatic. Every single day is this stream of tiny traumas. (Those who dare to trust call them gifts.) We’ve all had to unplug toilets and clean up puke and crawl into bed and lay waiting for His new mercies to come again before we move. None of us are alone in any of this.

You have to let your life wrinkle. You have to let hope get into the folds of things. You are here to be spent. Saving yourself up isn’t how the saved are meant to live. Go for broke.

And when you are broken – because that’s what happens when you go for broke – and you look into a mirror, a calendar, into that one face, and you can’t stop the aching lump burning up through the center of your heart, listen till the rain comes.

Watch how the clouds break and break open and listen for rain and reach out your hand and feel it’s wet sweetness coming down in all this vulnerable freeness. This is the broken that makes you beautiful.

Live like this right to the very end.

Peace can fall like rain.

Read more here.