"Not even little percent"

After years of very sparse entries on this blog, I've decided to try and update it more frequently. I deliberated long and hard over whether I should even keep it at all, or make my primary blog the one-blog-fits-all location of all my online writings.

Over the years I've built up a collection of devotional writings that I hope to type out and upload here, but tonight I want to write about something that's still fresh in my mind and heart.

I had a bit of a "moment" yesterday when a couple I consider myself close to, whom I've counted among my spiritual mentors for years, inadvertently hurt me (again) with some things that they said. They meant well, but their comments went deep and hit hard, and I spent the rest of the day back in the shell to which I retreat whenever things get too painful to face.

Tonight, I finally had the courage to sit down in the absence of noise and activity, revisit what happened and try to understand why it caused so much pain.

The content of the hurtful statement isn't relevant to this post. Suffice it to say that they had spoken out of their very limited human understanding of a very complex situation, with shrapnel-like results. As I drove home after our encounter, the words of one of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club floated into view. "You think you know me, but you don't even know little percent," she sniffs to her ignorant American daughter.

"You think you know me, but you don't even know little percent," I felt myself saying, in my mind, to this lovely couple. It's true. They are busy and have their own concerns; what I share with them is a tiny fraction of the myriad experiences and insights and trials that I encounter on a daily basis. And yet they saw fit to sweep together these fragments and try to piece together the immense, complicated tapestry of my life.

Tonight, as usual, I wrote. The benefit of being a writer is that I can articulate exactly how I feel. The benefit of writing in a private journal is that the world is spared 95% of my painfully introspective writing. But when I encounter hidden treasure as a result of that writing, I can share it here in the hopes that it will do some good.

As I wrote and wrote, my pain from being misunderstood and having the wrong conclusions made about me fell away and I began to see a different picture, hear a different voice.

A voice that, like mine, laments not being known as He truly is.

A voice that, like mine, weeps over having pronouncements made over the "best" way forward, when very little effort has been made to understand His heart.

A voice saying to a world that has misrepresented and misunderstood Him, and then dismissed Him without a second thought, "You think you know Me... but you only know..."

... and as for the rest of the statement, I have to wonder if the perfect One would ever use broken English, but perhaps for the sake of preserving the flow of my evening, He might.

"Is this how You feel, Lord? Do You long to be known as You are, not as I want You to be? Do You hear my conclusive, definitive, (absolutely mistaken) one-liners and think, 'That's not what I want at all, but you won't listen so I can't tell you'? Do You wish for the walls to come down and the scales to fall off so that we can know one another -- You in Your nail-scarred perfection, me with my tattered heart?

"If this experience is what it took to draw me closer to You, then how could I not thank You?"

One way or another, life has struck me hard over the years and I have the blood and scars to prove it. The friends I am privileged to have, the brave ones who dare to really know me, are the ones who haven't minded getting a little blood on their clothes and mud on their hands as they walk with me. But I pray that they won't only be soiled by my presence; I hope that some of my perfume would also rub off and sweeten their journey a little.

I walk, and so do many of you, with One who has shed much blood, who has borne scars many times more painful than mine. One whose very existence has a purity that puts my filthy best efforts to shame. Walking with Him, I am bound to get some of His blood on me -- and I cannot say loudly enough that I not only want to, I need to. Not only to have it smeared on me in places where I happened to brush against Him, but to have every part of my being soaked in it, because without His blood I cannot live. And while I crave that the faintest touch of my pathetic earthly fragrance, whether it's Bvlgari Eau de The Rose or Kenzo Amore or whichever takes my fancy on a given day, will brush off on my friends, I long for my life to smell strongly of Him -- the priceless aroma of sacrificial obedience and Kingly servanthood.