It's Like Butter

My heart is being softened with respect to Cindy Sheehan.

Out of the blue.

While watching the news coverage of the destruction we must face together in the wake of hurricane Katrina, I found myself awash in tears as whole families were desperately flagging down helicopter rescuers from aloft their roofs, sticking up about a foot out of the floodwaters. The awareness of the stark reality in our hard hit gulf states further roots faith and restores perspective. In me, it also sparks a mighty thirst to add not only my prayers, but my concerted effort or actual presence to help heal the hearts of the thousands of people left with nothing as the waves and wind steal their homes and change their lives.

As I was finishing my phone conversation with the local branch of the Red Cross toward that end, I noticed that the news had given way to a commercial break. And suddenly I was confronted with Cindy Sheehan's face and voice.

Great. I can't seem to get away from this woman.

That was my first thought.

Typical of my often a bit obsessively ravenous desire to seek and ingest information, I listened to her. All the way through her little speech delivered into the camera while directing her angry words to our President. I heard the familiar, "you lied to us" verse (to which I admit unconsciously uttering a sound quite resembling a bullfrog), the bitter accusations, the hurt tone, the angry pleading face.

I heard her. Again. It was nothing I have not already heard before. Amply.

As I turned away from the TV in disgust, I muttered to myself, "Ugh. Ridiculous woman."

Now here I must offer you a bit of a personal glimpse into the nature of my love and life with God. Our relationship involves daily interaction, conversation, prayer, worship songs, and quite regular Biblical and spiritual wrestling matches which always end with a lesson learned and a humbler heart. Well, almost always. Sometimes I am just enormously stubborn and dig in my heels. And sometimes, despite stumbling over the same obstacle many times before in my journey towards Him, I inevitably encounter them again. And again, fall flat on my face. Those are the moments when I feel certain that most laboratory rats have a faster learning curve than I do. And in which I rely on grace alone. Those moments I am at my closest with my Lord. Because when I am weak, He is strong.

Today was one of those moments.

Once in a while, when He speaks to my heart and clearly leads me to His understanding, I am able to actually hear his words as though He is in the room with me. Spoken in conversational tone, heard within my heart and mind simultaneously. Not as intimations or tuggings at my heart and mind, which comprise the far more common delivery systems He chooses to use my life. But as WORDS, as clearly spoken to me as though I were having an-in person verbal conversation with a friend.

Because essentially, I AM.

No, I am not that crazy lady sitting on the bus next to you, eating yarn and barking like a dog. This is not an indication of some mental disorder or disease, but evidence of a particularly sensitive intimacy with God that has developed between us over the last 32 years. And continues to be a palpable blessing in my life.

Today, with the clarion amplitude I imagine God emitting as He spoke to Moses on the mountain top, I heard His still small voice nudge me firmly,"Why are you determined to hate her?"

That sharply got my attention. God is rather excellent at getting my attention. Gosh darn it.

"What?! I don't hate her!"

"'Ridiculous woman' is not a term of endearment, Lachen."

So here I go marching into the frey once more with God. Remember the lab rat/learning curve reference above? Yeah, that'll be further illustrated here. Again.

"I do think she is ridiculous, though. A ridiculous whiner in a field. She's so blinded by her agenda! She is using her son as a sword across the soul of this country. She just wants to hate."

"SHE just wants to hate?"

"Hey, I don't hate her."

Silence.

I realize I am squirming inside myself. Truth is hard to face, and I don't like the way this conversation is going. It takes me a minute, but I sit down on my bed with my Bible and pray, asking to be convicted, convinced, compelled to hear what God is trying to tell me (because He has not been clear enough to this point already, right? Shades of Gideon re-emerge within my character, which I am not altogether unhappy about, but I am using them as more of a stalling technique in this case, and I know it). I pray to be open to what I need to hear Him say to my heart.

I open my Bible and am immediately forced to confront this rather direct response, in the form of 1 Corinthians 13:

"1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love."

How many times have I read this passage and found solace and inspiration? Found comfort in the unending love of God and the committment I believed I had upheld until now to love every one of God's creation as HE does? Today, I found the Godly echo of my own self-condemnation. And it was righfully and painfully discovered.

My firece resolve, all my carefully honed and still subscribed to arguments about the Sheehan Festival of Whiners, the War, the Right, the Wrong, and all the Rest Of It stepped quietly and gingerly into the background. Dissolving, while remaining completely intact. Still as rooted as ever, just moved from the forefront of my mind to the back to allow the Spirit to take over and convict me from the heart outward. So that I could be restored.

I imagine that being confronted with the presence of hate as an unnoticed festering parasite in your heart is akin to finding out you have cancer. In whatever amount - even if it is a tiny glimmer in an otherwise healthy body, it still has the capacity to eradicate health in favor of death.

So, I found myself turning Cindy Sheehan and all who champion her cause over to God anew, today. And experienced the tight vice around me loosen and my heart soften. More tears. It's Like Butter! (in the words of the uber-hilarious Mike Meyers, who universally cracks me up. Well, aside from that ill-conceived Cat and the Hat fiasco. But let's reign in this tangent, shall we?)

I still find her cause untenable, her methods unproductive, and her words bitterly uninspiring. I still believe that a great many of her more public supporters are media-hungry crackpots. And I continue to wholeheartedly assert that the circus in Crawford is little more than a Festival of Whiners on behalf of tired, long standing political agendas.

But... I can with pure heart today say I love Cindy Sheehan without reservation. Without expectation or caveat. Unconditionally. Borrowing God's view of her, not leaning unto my own understanding. What a shock to find something so deplorable as HATE barging into my spirit and taking residence there as an ininvited, unwanted, unChristian squatter. I had no clue this poisonous foothold was within me until God, with His characteristic and rather forcefully wielded chisel, pointed it out and propelled me to eradicate it.

Thanks Lord. I rather hated this fabulous experience. It's not easy to realize how far off the mark your heart is, and more difficult still to admit and reconcile it. But once on the other side, once repented, once forgiven, once healed? Unimaginable freedom.

It's like Butter.