LCCN: 2019935180
Cover design: Chelsea Alt
Cover art: Shutterstock
Interior design: Amanda Falk
Interior art: Shutterstock
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For Eric,there but for the grace of you go I
Contents
The Invitation of the Incarnation
Introduction
Once upon a time I was a missionary in Southeast Asia.
When my new husband and I joined the team, I magnanimously thought of what great good I would bring to the world (through the power of Christ, of course, ahem). I would work to stop human trafficking, I decided, though I had no connections in the field. I would pour myself into the lives of orphans, I predicted, though I had no idea where to start. I didn’t worry about the details; after all, I served a God who would supply me everything I needed. I signed up for thrills, but got the monotony of regular old life instead.
After months turned into a year and the pages of the second year began flying off the calendar, I reviewed my life in despair. Nothing was going the way I had planned. Two years before, ripe and eager in the missions training school, I could never have expected to be so disappointed in myself. I could never have anticipated how small and ineffectual I would feel. My dreams had been way, way over my head — and now disillusionment was eating me alive. I knew I had to do something, anything, or my despair would swallow me whole.
I didn’t have a background in ballet, but I did have access to YouTube tutorials, and I decided that was enough to teach a dozen of my elementary school-aged neighbors once a week. The diminutive girls in our low-income kampung (village) beamed and buzzed at the prospect of doing something so decidedly upper class. When a donor in the States sent money for ballet shoes, the buzz turned to a roar as little hands clamored to find their size. Two of the girls, sisters, were missing several toes — a genetic abnormality, I supposed. I wondered if they, more than others, were hungry to slide into soft pink leather. Maybe not. Perhaps I was the only one uncomfortable with my own deficiencies. Maybe these girls were content with themselves in a way I would work years to become.
The class was humble to say the least. We never even had a recital. But every Friday afternoon they would come, a tiny conglomerate of skinny brown limbs. Before mirrors and before the witness of one another, we would together admire the grace we didn’t know we had. They, the grace to plié and jeté and see their own beauty while doing it; I, the grace of having less to offer than I thought, yet enjoying other people more than I ever had.
You see, I had never wanted to be weak: to be disappointed by my own lack of abilities or wounded by the suffering I would experience in life. In fact, for the first quarter of my life, I had successfully managed to fool myself into thinking I wasn’t weak. Holding fast to religious absolutes, leadership positions, service projects, and a life of comfort, I went about my days quite satisfied in the knowledge that I was one of the good guys. I pseudo-benevolently offered to embrace the weakness of others all day long, but I refused to reconcile with my own — that is, until the truth of my inner brokenness smacked me in the face, first through missions and immediately afterward, through motherhood.
I suspect I’m not alone in this. I think, deep down, each of us knows we aren’t as strong as we appear to be. The ever-growing list of our failures, disappointments, and sufferings is never far from our minds. And rather than deal with the harsh realities life has served up, we find more pleasant ways of coping: food and drink, incessant exercise, romantic relationships, volunteer hours, or the consumption of media and material goods, just to name a few. We can numb our pain with the elements sold to us as “the good life” and temporarily forget that we are not who we’d like to imagine ourselves to be. This feels harmless, until the day we wake up to the reality of the damage caused by our unwillingness to do the hard work of inner change: dealing with emotional distance in our closest relationships, undignified treatment of those we claim to serve, and even a marred understanding of the nature of God.
Subtle messages of power and “rightness” have infiltrated our theology and churches so much that we don’t even recognize how distorted is the view of God they propagate — an incarnation-less God who has no real compassion for or solidarity with the people of the world he claims to love. Humankind has a fatal tendency to make God into our own image, and if we can’t authentically draw near to those who are not like us, we begin to subconsciously believe God cannot draw near to them either.
The further out of touch we become with our own weakness, the more we distance ourselves from anyone outside of our particular “correct” bubble of faith. We dutifully seek to meet the needs of the world while denying that those outside our bubble might actually be able to meet ours. In neglecting to first embrace our own weakness before addressing the weakness of others, we lose the value of reciprocity that Jesus modeled so profoundly. We miss the gift of receiving a sacred God through vessels we have deemed unworthy.
Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t sort people into boxes labeled “acceptable” or “in need of ministry.” When the God of heaven came to earth in human likeness, he chose unethical tax collectors, prostitutes, and low-income fisherman to be his closest friends. He told parables that cast an immigrant as the hero (the good Samaritan), a pious religious leader as the villain (the Pharisee and the tax collector), and a rich man as the fool (the rich fool). He offended social mores, breaking class and gender lines, and challenged the status quo. People called him “a friend of … sinners” (Lk 7:34) and he wasn’t embarrassed, nor did he correct