mud + spit + oaks of righteousness

Have you seen the way that I journal? 

It's a bit nuts, I know, but it helps me to make sense of all the thoughts inside of my head. I'm hugely visual, and, when I have time, I pretend to be intellectual. (Okay, pretend might be the wrong word.) I love times with my Bible and all of the resources that I use to understand it more fully. To me, reading the Bible void of context, without knowing the people, the time, the place, seems frustratingly incomplete. For me to know the Lord more completely, I need to STUDY. Which means resource books laying everywhere, multiple colors of pens, dictionaries and blank paper. Occasionally, when I am disciplined enough to participate and open enough to receive, I get some strange and beautiful insight into my life that makes me know + love the Lord all the more. For now: 

1 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" 3 Jesus answered, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." 6 Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man's eyes with the mud 7 and said to him,"Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing.               [john 9:1-7, esv]

I can't separate this passage, with all of its rich meaning, from what I feel stirring in my own heart about family and restoration and freedom from my assumptions about the nature of God. This blind man could be any one of us, with physical ailments or emotional baggage, and the world asks (and us right along with them), "Whose fault is it?" We need someone to blame, something to make sense of why things are the way that they are. A perfect God would never allow causeless imperfection, so it must be our fault. The disciples thought this way initially. (More extreme, we think that imperfection=the non-existence of God, but I'm not getting into that.) Blindness because of sin. Cause and effect reality, void of grace. Credit it, maybe, to ancient philosophy: Sickness is a product of sin; he is blind because of something he did, or something his parents did. Sin stalks through the generation. It's what they believe. It's a sad and cruel way to understand God, inaccurate and damaging, giving evil far more power than it deserves. How shaming, how isolating, to think that He keeps record of our wrongs through the generations, forgetting that forgiveness is His constant gift + His mercies are new with the morning. We've heard the phrase though, and it's frightening:

generational sin

This line of thinking is not foreign to me, with anxiety and fear of the legacy of divorce in my family. But I love this passage, because in the competition between cruelty and compassion, the character of Christ is revealed. 

I love that this passage draws us back to the earth, back to the way the world works: "In this world, there will be suffering, but take heart, I have overcome the world." This is the way the world works: we were born into a world full of sickness and sin (separateness from God + the things of God). God loves us no less for it. We were born into families that conditioned our behavior, for good or for bad. God loves us no less for it. We were born unable to see, through no fault of our own (Jesus said so), and God loves us no less for it. Ultimately, His purposes win. His purpose: healing. Relational + physical. For this man, it was physical and immediate. Drawn back to the earth, almost to force us to reevaluate the goodness/badness of nature, that tendency of ours to blame creation. We come from the earth, fallen, and yet the Lord uses His creation to grow and heal us. He uses mud. 

Mud + Spit. It's gross, especially by our standards of modern medicine, but I can think of nothing more beautiful. (Yes, I think weird, unbeautiful things are beautiful.) The thing about spit is this: it's typically an insult, an image of revulsion or rejection, and yet Jesus uses it to heal, to pause and reverse the natural workings of the world. To bring a person out of isolation, to include this blind man in His kingdom. Mud + Spit. Nothing more natural, more "of the flesh," something so socially undesirable used by the Lord to heal, used to glorify and reveal His character. Brilliant, actually.

This passage makes it seem so simple: anointing and washing and complete, immediate healing. Yet I find, in my life, a struggle to "maintain" healing--constantly falling back into my areas of poor health. My issues are not birth defects, but learned behavior--you can call it generational and you'd be justified in doing so. Generational legacies of divorce, of selfishness, of Jesus-less-ness. Things many families deal with. It is learned behavior, engrained deeply and passed down in years of parenting. God loves me no less but He calls me to healing, a process of unlearning and creating new legacies and it is a struggle to do so. You'd be crazy to go back to the habit of blindlessness once the world of sight had been opened to you. But what about the comfort of self-service? The pattern of avoidance? The habit of abandonment when things get hard? And many, many others. Those are difficult habits to break. Entirely impossible to do it along, despite the allure of self-help book and therapy and the practice of yoga (all good things, but an incomplete form of healing). You'd have to step into an entirely new identity, an entirely new family.

Source: alisonyinblog.com

One of the many things that I love about the Lord is His intentionality. Here, I would have been stuck. It's the longing of my soul for as long as I can remember: Oaks of Righteousness and generational restoration. It's heavy on my mind these days. I think about the ways that I have been gathered into the families around me, welcomed and wrapped up with friends that are second family, and how I feel the tension of that adoption: Will it last? Is it strong enough? Will it define me? Is it only blood that binds us? I think about the ways that my life, a marriage, a welcoming heart could be a mode of this restoration.


It's as if Jesus knew this longing for family and understood the tension of adoption when he says, "You are heirs with Christ in salvation." And more: "You have been grafted in." Grafted in, married in to a family of righteousness, made so by a desire for Him.

In the midst of reflection and anaylsis, comparing and contrasting what I want vs. what I have (and I need to emphasize comparing: in many ways, my actual family is a dream come true). It is easy to hope for simply an earthly family. One that prays genuine prayers before meals, one that seeks transformation by Jesus, one growing in the fruits of the Spirit. It's natural to find that and cling to it for the life that it gives, to want to be grafted into that family, already in existence. To want them at my wedding, standing next to me in support, to be in the waiting room when I give birth and to act as family until the very end; to want spiritual parents and wise + righteous counsel. It's easy to forget that they have been grafted, too. I have not been grafted into them (though they may be the tangible representation of what Christ has done), but we, separate branches, have been grafted into THE Oak of Righteousness, with THE head of the family. We come from the same broken world and God loves us no less for it. From Him, new branches shoot out--a new family and a new identity, that the weight of who God is would be revealed.