Breakfast on the Beach

I’ve been a parent for three months, and perhaps the best way I can describe this new experience is that it breaks your heart in more places than you’d realized you had, and puts it back together, and then breaks it all over again.

It breaks your selfishness, your complacency, your plans, your patience, and any lingering illusion that you have it all together. It breaks you when you start thinking about the span of life and how quickly it goes by, how fast this child will grow up, and how you want him to become independent but also don’t want him to ever change. It breaks you when you let your mind wander to the what-ifs, the worst case scenarios, and the stories you’ve heard about babies who are neglected or abandoned or abused. It breaks you when you want so badly to comfort your child when he’s upset, but you don’t know what’s wrong and sometimes you can’t handle his tears for a minute longer.

And then he smiles at you, and coos, and for a few minutes you’re patched back up and feel like you could burst with happiness.

It’s a joy to watch a tiny human learn the basics of being alive in this world. It’s also a joy to return to those basics yourself. In the days after his birth, I saw how much like a child I can become again. I was tired and vulnerable. I, too, felt like I needed to be comforted, to curl up on someone, wanting warmth and safety, content just to eat and sleep and do what was needed. It felt like being truly present again. It crossed my mind that all of us still have these instincts - these very dependent, trusting, infant-like needs, and yet we’re all so busy and have to be so responsible all the time that we bury them. For a few days, I got to be in touch with my inner infant again, and it was a gift.

I went into the labor and birth experience intending to go as medicine-free as possible for as long as possible, but I hit my limit about 17 hours after induction began and got an epidural. For some reason I think I’d expected to feel God closer in the painful moments. Sometimes it’s easier for me to equate God with “doing things the hard way”, as if that’s somehow more spiritual. But accepting a provision of modern medicine was, I came to realize, a gift straight from him. I actually felt him much more in the epidural than in any moment prior. It felt like incredible grace to get relief from the pain and to be able to relax and rest. Needing it didn’t mean I was weak. And even if I was, it was okay to be weak and to need it. In that moment, God came beside me right there in the weakness.

Not that I’ve ever much liked being weak or childlike. Appearing younger than I am has never been high on my list of desired characteristics. Neither have being messy, imperfect, not put together, incapable, weak, or small.

Yet, funnily enough, I still don’t feel like an adult half the time, despite being married and having a child. Who decided I was ready for all this responsibility? I certainly don’t have it all together, although that’s the image I like to maintain. A lot of the time, I feel like a total mess. I wonder how God can possibly want to be with me in my wanton unpreparedness and weakness, not to mention in those moments when the old self rears its ugly head and I find myself capable of terrible unkindness and blame-shifting.

Surely God would not want someone like me around. Surely he’d rather pass me over in favor of someone who knows what the heck they’re doing, who lives a more extraordinary life than my rather small one, which right now I spend taking care of a baby and keeping somewhat minimal house, getting back in shape, completing small tasks and sometimes finding a little leftover time to write.

But in this season I am learning much about smallness, and slowness, and being like a child again. I’m reminded of how deeply valued all these things are in the kingdom of God. And I’m remembering that all this is true, and possible, because God does not stop with his own majesty, too high above us to care much for what goes on in our little earth. He isn’t somewhere up in the cosmos, uninvolved and unimpressed, looking down on the world from a great distance.

On the contrary - his love is so gritty and courageous and real that he made himself one of us and made a way to bring us back home to him when we couldn’t do it ourselves. That’s what this Christmas word, Emmanuel, means: God with us. God present, spiritually but also physically. God a reality and not just a concept existing in another dimension. God actually walking the earth and leaving footprints in the dust.

God who came in the flesh, a newborn whose name was Jesus, no bigger or stronger or more capable than my own little son. God who is bigger than I can ever imagine but who made himself small enough to be held in a woman’s arms.

I need to be reminded of this, that Jesus was a human, a friend and a brother, who asked us not to follow a set of ideals but a Person. With this idealized version of myself where I never mess up constantly hanging over my head, an image impossible to attain, I find myself living in a lot of fear. I’m afraid I’m not enough and afraid that I’m disappointing God. But when I think about Jesus, the Man, I wonder how I could retain any of that fear. Because in him, I see someone who is not disappointed in sinners and broken people and less-than-perfect people. He’s not disappointed in people who live small lives and don’t have a lot to give. The only people he’s disappointed with are the ones who think they do have something to bring God, who think they’ve earned his favor by following the rules and being religious. In other words, it’s only the people who don’t think they need him that he’s got no time for. But the people who lived small - he always took time to be with them.

This is the wonder of Emmanuel: Jesus, a physically real man, who shared meals with sinners and washed his friends’ feet, who wept, who cooked his disciples breakfast on the beach, who walked with the doubters on their long journey home.

I read that Jesus sat down to teach the people, and I’ve heard it said that sitting down to teach in that time symbolized authority. But I also love the symbolism I see in it through my modern lens: Jesus put himself on our level. He wasn’t teaching behind a podium, on a stage, far away from the audience in a huge auditorium. No - despite his very real authority, he sat down, right among us. Right beside us. Accessible, identifying with us.

It strikes me that if I were to meet Jesus, he wouldn’t be high and lofty, impressive, majestic, or incomprehensible. Of course, he is all those things. But I think he’d rather choose to relate to me in these ways: he would sit on the dusty ground with me. He’d stare up at the wondrous grey sky with me, or at the starry night. I think he’d wrap himself in that old patchwork quilt with me and tell stories by the campfire he’d built for us. I think he’d rouse me at first light and we’d start out on the trail together, a little bleary-eyed but so alive, just as the sun is peaking over the horizon and the cold wind is blowing through the branches and the sparrows are singing.

I think he’s with me over morning coffee and beneath the stage lights. I think he’d tell me about living water. I think he’d light a candle and tell me that’s how he dwells in my soul, an undying flame that may flicker when my own storm winds buffet but never truly goes out.

I think that at this moment he’s everywhere - in the hospitals, in the streets, in our homes, walking on water and somehow working all of it together for good. I think he’s better than any of us dared believe, and I think he makes himself small and sits with us and just shares himself with us.

I think the glory of him overwhelms me. I think he’d fill me to overflowing if I let him. I think he knows exactly what I need, what I yearn for and who I am; I think he knows it more deeply and cares about it more fiercely than even I do. I think he lets nothing go to waste and I think he’s giving me this time for a reason. I think he wants to meet me in all these small moments, when at last I have a bit of time and a small degree of patience and a totally upended life to hear him, see him, feel him. I have lofty ideas of wanting to follow him, but maybe what I need most of all is just to sit with him. To be small with him. To wait with him. To be a child with him.

To watch my own child learn and grow, and to remember that God once made himself that small, and to remember that the feelings that break my heart when I watch my son are not so different than the ones God feels when he watches me.

I think I want to stand on the edge of the world and breathe in his salty air, let his vastness wash over my feet, look out over his expanse. And then, I think I’d turn around and find him on the beach with me, cooking me breakfast.

I think I’ve spent so much time trying to be better, to be mature, to be professional, to be disciplined, mostly in the name (idol) of “doing great things for God”, that I’ve forgotten that he’s laid the banquet table in my soul with fat and rich food and what he really wants is for me to come and sit there with him.

I think he came down to our dust and lifted us out of it. And I think all I can do in response is come sit in the dust with him while he traces his finger through it, writing a new story of redemption and belonging for me.

I’ve read Psalm 23 many times, but one day recently I noticed something I hadn’t before: this psalm pictures a life of walking with God, and none of it involves being alone and doing great things in the name of some distant concept of who he is. Instead, it images:

Being led
Being satisfied
Lying down in peaceful places
Being restored
Learning righteousness
Not fearing
Comfort
Presence
Feasting
Abundance
Overflow
Care and tenderness
Being shown mercy
Dwelling with God

The hard things pictured in this psalm are walking through the valley and being in the presence of enemies. And even in those, God is right there with us.

It’s easy to think of the line “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me” as an abstract concept in a real situation. In other words, sometimes I think that in the dimension of reality, I’m walking alone, but I can carry this rather vague notion of God being spiritually with me as a comfort along the way.

But both the valley and God’s presence are allegorical symbols, which puts them on equally real footing. That means that, no matter what “valley” I’m walking through, God is walking right beside me. That’s what Emmanuel actually, tangibly means, in the grit and power and poignancy of it.

I end these thoughts unable to conclude that I’ve got this life thing figured out, now that I’m remembering all this. On the contrary, I already know I’m going to forget it tomorrow when I’m burrowed in the small moments that make up life. My heart and my idealized self are still going to break right and left. In all honesty, Christ’s presence is a hard thing to remember when you can’t see him.

But at least I can know what to look for. In every moment, he’s with me. In every moment, it’s okay for me to be like a child. I can’t do any of this anyway - not really, not ultimately. But he’s walking with me through it all.

And that makes me brave.