Because you are young.

Four couples sat around a glass patio table, the sun sinking down into the horizon. We all leaned in quietly, listening, hands folded, some of us glancing down and trying to process the news we’d just received. For every one of us, it meant our futures – the future of our families – were changing.  And as for me, the initial reaction, which was a mixture of panic and disappointment, was slowly offset by a quiet settling within my heart.  My husband and I were brought back to that awkward sensation of wandering in a desert with an unknown destination. All of us thought we knew the plan, and it was foolish. But this was what we’d signed up for: being sent into the desert and told to walk until God said, “Stop.”

All of us were members of a newly formed church-plant team. And all of us were under the age of 30.

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Choosing to address this topic in my blog was difficult; I don’t take it lightly. When inappropriately handled or emotionally fueled, it’s destructive.  Brothers and sisters leave churches over it.  But the very fact that I am in the demographic which I’m addressing – a 26-year-old in leadership in a church – I think will be a boon and not a hindrance.  Something caught my attention and led me to the call to write this as I meditated on 1 Timothy 4:12:

“Don’t let anyone think less of you because you are young. Be an example to all believers in what you say, in the way you live, in your love, your faith, and your purity.”

In reading and meditating on this passage in the past – perhaps a product of the folly accompanying immaturity in faith – I often heard it read as this instead:

“People who are looking down on Timothy because he is young, cut it out!”

And I used it that way – when I’ve heard stories of criticism from older Christians in the church coming against those who were rising up in a call to leadership, or perhaps when I’ve seen dear friends and companions in the faith denied precious opportunities for lack of experience, regardless of qualification and calling.  This was my go-to verse.

I quoted this verse, even in recent days, in incredulity. Why are older believers ignoring it? Don’t they hear Paul’s instruction that they have to stop looking down on Timothy?

However, I ignored something I should know by now to never ever ignore as an English major: authorial intent.

When Paul writes this to the young man he trained up in the faith, Timothy, he wrote it with instructions exclusively for Timothy: do not let.

If this group of miscreant elderly chaps or lasses was ever scolded by Paul for their prejudices against a youthful leader in the Gospel, we don’t see it. What we see is Paul’s admonition to Timothy, a young man Paul describes as his “true son in the faith.” (1 Tim. 1:2).  Paul trusts Timothy not based off of Timothy’s years of experience, but based of his personal experiences with Timothy.  

He trusts him enough to send him to minister to the hurts and needs of the bruised and battered church in Philippi.  In fact, in his words, he couldn’t send anyone else.

“If the Lord Jesus is willing, I hope to send Timothy to you soon for a visit. Then he can cheer me up by telling me how you are getting along. I have no one else like Timothy, who genuinely cares about your welfare. All the others care only for themselves and not for what matters to Jesus Christ. But you know how Timothy has proved himself. Like a son with his father, he has served with me in preaching the Good News.” (Phil. 3:19-22)

I think Paul knows here that there could potentially be concern about Timothy’s age when he comes strolling into a spiritually hurting community of believers ready to care for them.  Paul could probably already hear the protests in the back of his mind after writing verse 19, and knew he’d have to explain himself over the course of a paragraph.

“I have no one else like Timothy,” he reassures them, “who genuinely cares about your welfare.”

Timothy’s age doesn’t prevent him from being truly broken for the condition of this church and hurting for them in their time of need.

“All the others care only for themselves…”

Timothy’s age doesn’t automatically result in pride, selfishness or a need for applause, accolades or a pat on the back.

“… and not for what matters to Jesus Christ.”

Timothy’s age doesn’t prevent him from being deeply concerned for the things of God: making disciples (Matt. 28:18-20) and building up of the church (Eph. 4:11-13).

“But you know how Timothy has proved himself.”

Timothy’s age plays no factor in his faithfulness in these matters.

Paul’s history of interactions with many in the church, by this point in his life, is extensive. There’s no doubt in my mind he had a whole host of people with more life experience flashing through his mind as he pondered and prayed about who to send into the spiritual fray in Philippi. But life experience was not what determined his final choice about who to send.

“Like a son with his father, he has served with me in preaching the Good News.”

Paul knew Timothy’s heart because of how he served alongside him. Where others had life experience, Timothy was held up as the example of self-sacrifice.  He labored with such a deep love for the body of Christ. It was his labor of love – choosing to lay down his youthful years on the altar in devotion to Christ for the building up of His church – that qualified him for the task before him. Paul knew all of Timothy’s sleepless nights, the tears Timothy wept over wandering brothers and sisters, the sacrifices he made in his personal life and his career, to give to the church.

And his admonition comes to Timothy, and Timothy alone: do not let.

Timothy was already being the example. Paul told him, essentially, to keep doing exactly what he was doing.

Young brothers and sisters with a heart to lead, to serve, to sacrifice for the sake of the church: don’t let others look down on you because of your age.  God’s power and might and movement don’t come through what we judge to be appropriate by our own examination.  When Samuel was sent by God to find a king who would rule and reign as a man after His own heart, it was the youngest of Jesse’s sons that He called. When God wanted to build a family by which the promised Savior would come, he came to an elderly couple well out of their childbearing years.

Your age is a number that plays no role in your standing before God, has no bearing on your capability. Is it not God and God alone who empowers us for service?

Your passion for the gospel is invaluable. Your sacrifices can’t be numbered or ranked. The merit of your experiences is weighed not by their quantity, but by the heart with which you walked through them.

I have seen people lay down every ambition for the sake of Christ. Give up their homes, their career paths, the approval of family members, the comfort of their relationships or friendships or neighborhoods or anything familiar. And it is these people – whether 20 or 50 or on their way to a retirement home – that I will invite to labor alongside me for the sake of the Gospel. It is these people that I will follow into the desert.

Liberating loneliness.

I have a fascination with Myers-Briggs typology, as I’m sure many of you are aware. It’s not a fail-proof system hard-wired into our brains. I use it as the Dewey Decimal for people.  (No author pens the last word in a novel just to have a magical number come floating out of the text. Rather, we create a system in which to organize and assemble the thousands… millions?… of books in every crack and corner of creation.  The Myers-Briggs categories are a manmade invention assisting us as we try to classify and categorize the individualities of billions of people.)

So yes, Myers-Briggs = DDS for people.  Mankind oversimplified. It is especially helpful for the more reserved cerebrals like me who struggle to relate to 98% of the human beings in their surrounding environment. If I can study up on a person, I can prayerfully find a way to interact with them in a way that is meaningful to them.

The problem is, it’s a venture with little ROI.

My category is INTJ. That’s “Introverted, Intuiting, Thinking, Judging.” My personality type is represented in 0.8% of the female population. Can I tell you how difficult that makes life in the social arena?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m blessed with a lot of friends, or people who show a general, occasional interest in the happenings in my life. I even have a couple “Feeling” best friends who have labored hard at bringing out the sliver of humanity in me that hides behind a less sympathetic exterior.  (Actually, let me amend that. They help me remember to show compassion on the outside when in my core I am largely calloused, unconcerned, even antipathetic toward others. ) But no amount of bodies and faces and beating hearts (or, if I’m talking to a believing crowd, community) around me can soothe the loneliness that pervades existence as an INTJ.

It’s only this summer that I’ve begun to see the absence of like minds and like hearts as an untethered life.  Lonely, but untethered.

You can be tied down to so many things and not even realize it. For example, I’ve never been one to be tied to stuff.  My husband would be the first to testify to my disdain for material possessions. I go shopping only when I have a need and I don’t create fanciful or fun Christmas or birthday lists.  A love for objects, the accumulation of objects, doesn’t even fit in with my interpretive system.

There is nothing sinful or wrong about enjoying and finding pleasure in possessions that God has gifted me with. The danger is in the insatiable hunger for more.  More of anything. More recognition. More admiration. More shoes. More cylinders. More knowledge. More influence. More titles. More opportunities.

And for me, the most dangerous want of all is the want for more people like me. Women in particular, as that is where the bulk of my friendly social activity must revolve as a married woman. Women who will talk about abstract ideas, theories and possibilities. Women whose every thought and conversation doesn’t have to revolve around other people and relationships in their lives.  Women who find true enjoyment in sharing a conversation with another woman on theology, philosophy, science and current events and drawing conclusions, making meaningful interpretations.  Women who read more than self-help books with Christian labels, and then want to really dig into a text, analyze it, discuss it.

It’s this particular want for a world where more women filter life the way I do that puts me in a deep spiritual trench time and time again.  I begin to avoid answering the phone, keeping conversations brief and task-oriented.  The seed in my heart that clings to what I want more than it clings to Jesus begins to grow, and little creeping tendrils of bitterness suddenly penetrate every aspect of my life: marriage, motherhood, fellowship with my Christian brothers and sisters, evangelism, family relationships, friendships.  Suddenly, I am my own world, the only world that matters.  Everyone else is an accessory.

So what is so liberating about this loneliness?  It’s the mechanism by which God drives me so deeply into the sickness in my own heart that I can’t help but confront it and deal with it. He gets me back to the place where I can remember and say with conviction, “No. I don’t need more of anything but Jesus.”

The moment I stop needing people to be what I need is the moment I find myself truly beginning to love them exactly as they are.

Life untethered. When you love something just as much as you should, just as it is, and stop manipulating it to fit comfortably into your little universe.

Dissonance.

I open my eyes to a glaring sun nestling into the horizon. Streaks of red, orange and gold break through a vast, darkening blue sky. Cooled grass unfurls from beneath my legs, stretching downward, producing people of all sizes and shapes and colors. Somewhere nearby, unseen, a river presses through a deep canyon. I imagine the weight, the power. I know it only as a force.

Rising up from each blade of grass and the dense, rich earth: music. An ethereal refrain envelops my body, unchaining me from the ground. I rise to greet the evening’s light, and the gold and the warmth overcome my face, my lips, my eyes. What is this new fire?

Ashes, ashes, we all fall…

It is irresistible. My hands reach for heaven, longing to graze just a fragment of this overflow into my world. I close my eyes again and bask in its warmth as a breeze whispers across my shoulders and outstretched arms.

A song breaks in. It has come to me from beyond blue or purple or black, even beyond the glittering lights far above, rippling across the hillside and into the canyon where the water churns and tumbles over and upon itself, eating away stone and edge and sand. 

My lips move effortlessly, intertwined with the cadence, finding their place in an unearthly chorus.

As quickly as it captured me, the fire slips just out of my grasp, settling somewhere nearby. I stand close enough to be warmed by its presence, wrapped in ribbons of light. A gift for the divine.

Open your eyes.

The people.

Only I am unseated, am unable to be seated.

Oppressive shadow rises up from within the canyon, throwing itself over the crowd like a heavy, unfamiliar blanket. The melody that gripped my soul is disturbed. Notes on the hillside – dissonant, divisive, merciless – clash with the choir of all created things.

He’s somewhere behind me. I know he hears. And I must speak.

“I don’t understand.” My frantic eyes bounce from one distraction to the next. Accusations. Grumblings. Voices and activities – needless things. All needless things next to the fire. “Why am I the only one singing?”

I am desperate. I feel his gaze upon my back, heavy with sadness and in control. Grieved and victorious. Raging water and consuming fire.

Somehow, my anxious heart finds his and is comforted.

Another breeze crosses over my back and shoulders, pulling my hair in front of my eyes, obscuring all but the brightest rays of the sun. I’d been waiting my whole life to hear one voice, and had never known.

And he spoke to me.

“Brittany, don’t you worry about what everyone else is doing. You just keep singing.”

Naming the jar.

It may not be very apparent to you by the sound of chirping crickets here on my little corner of cyberspace, but there’s been plenty of thinking and writing going on the past several weeks. I just stopped posting what I was writing.  I would get through about 90 percent of my thoughts and have to leave a piece unfinished. Something would always interrupt. My husband would walk through the door after work, my son would wake from his nap.

In some ways, it was refreshing to untangle some very frustrating knots in my heart without broadcasting them. Even more refreshing to not have to work hard to give the impression of resolution. No one watching. No one to be bothered.

I’m also reading this tiny book (anything less than 200 pages is tiny, for me) on leadership, and the author presented a few straight-to-the-point methods of time management for overly busy people who feel like they are burning the candle at both ends and praying for more wax. The takeaway for me is that I just need to decide what matters. What stays in my life, what goes.

The question I found myself asking after that segment of the book: why am I writing?

If you’ve ever heard the big-rocks-and-little-rocks analogy, you know you can’t put the little rocks in the jar until all the big rocks are accounted for.  But let’s be honest. The more agonizing decision is not which rocks to leave out of the jar, but comes before you even get to that point: which ones are the big rocks and which are the little rocks?

Every time you put in a big rock, a lot of little rocks have to be left out of the picture.

Some big rocks are obvious. Jesus, husband, son, church. But then you get to things like hobbies, individual relationships, ministry opportunities, and you have to examine each rock more than you’d ever be comfortable admitting out loud.

That’s where I’ve been. Lining up my rocks and, even more eye-opening, evaluating the jar.  I haven’t done anything of the sort ever, and have paid for it with a host of sinful responses to stressors, not the least of which are anxiety, control issues and neglecting my own relationship with Jesus.

I used to think the jar was my time.  I tried to see the whole of everything my life could hold as hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year.  Jesus has been giving me new eyes to see that the energy, the very pieces of me I pour into each activity and relationship amalgamate over time into a bigger reason for existing.  Am I living that way? That’s what I’ve been yearning to find out.

Suddenly, the rock is not occupying a volume of time but a volume of purpose. And the rocks I’m throwing out aren’t the ones that don’t fit into my schedule, but the ones that I said yes to because I had time but no direction, no meaning, no understanding of eternity.

As I’ve been writing this, I’m reimagining that whole Mary and Martha scene into an image I pray will never leave me. Mary, at Jesus’ feet, smiling and enjoying Jesus’ presence. Martha hobbles in with a jar filled to the brim – no wasted time – but burdened. So burdened.

Jesus looks at my Martha heart, grieving over me. “Come to me, all you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

The rest is in the purpose. The striving, the laboring, the going to keep going to get somewhere and not knowing where or to what end, only ends in half-victories and unsettled hearts.

This too is a grievous evil:

As everyone comes, so they depart,
and what do they gain,
since they toil for the wind?
All their days they eat in darkness,
with great frustration, affliction and anger.

I can’t be the only one who crawls into bed each night having worked hard and been so empty and dissatisfied in my heart.

When the calendar of my life is stripped away, all that remains is eternity.

And there are a lot of foolish things I could do, not the least of which is attempting to fill up a jar of eternity.

Hands.

The tears were building in the corners of his lids. He looked up at me from folded arms on the table with a hint of despair.

I covered my face with my hands, burying myself into a dark little space to see my thoughts more clearly. How can I communicate this? How do I teach this?

I glanced up only when I heard his whimper rising from the bench seat at the breakfast nook.

“Okay, we’re going to make sense of this together. But can you be patient with Mommy? Mommy is different too, and sometimes it takes longer for us to help each other when we do things differently.”

Ethan fidgeted and tucked his leg under, choosing to become distracted by a bird at the feeder than to offer a reply. He ground his pencil into his paper absent-mindedly, boring a hole in the corner. This was Ethan frustrated. No words, nothing to offer.

I slid into the bench next to him and he let out something between a grunt and a heavy sigh and scooted in, begrudgingly clumping his stack of paper together and sliding it along with him. I took a sheet from him and reached across the table for another pencil, careful to use the right hand.

“No bumping elbows today, okay? Mommy is going to be like you. We’re going to practice together.”

Ethan raised his eyebrows at me, and I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude that cursive had been dropped from the school curriculum. “Mommy, why did Jesus give us different hands?”

That’s not what he meant, of course. Our hands were alike. Hands that opened doors and lifted soup spoons to mouths and turned pages in books. We’d stood next to each other in the kitchen, him on the step stool, and scooped cookie dough out of bowls. He’d been paying closer attention than I thought when I would help him cut shapes while making art. Mommy always had her scissors; Ethan had his. He reached for the pencil cup and pulled out the longer pair and set it on the table next to his kid-friendly pair, turning them over in his hands.

“I can’t use these.”

“No, Ethan, those scissors are for me.”

I could see him trying to work it out. We both had hands, and yet it suddenly felt like neither of us did.

“Be careful, sweetie. These scissors have a pointy end, see?”

“Mommy, can you show me again?” He dropped the scissors to the side and picked up his pencil, watching me to see what I would do.

I picked up the pencil again and maneuvered it in my fingers a little, trying to replicate what I knew he had to learn how to do. He’d been sent home with a progress report from the teacher encouraging us to work with him on printing in his tablet. I’d been dreading it.

“Would you like Mommy tell you a secret, Ethan?”

A delighted grin swept across his face. The tears had retreated, never fallen. “Yes!”

“Mommy loves your hands.”

It was a foreign feeling, tracing the dashed circles and lines and curves and not having to twist my arm to see what I was doing. Each letter was painfully deliberate, mediocrity at its finest, but the end result didn’t matter. “Look at how I’m holding the pencil, Ethan. Do you see where my thumb is? It’s not wrapped around the pencil.”

Ethan, using his left hand as assistant, bent his right thumb back until it provided the right sort of counter-pressure to keep his pencil from wobbling. As soon as he started tracing a letter, he went white-knuckled trying to maintain his grip. “It’s okay, sweetie.”

He relaxed a little, enough to not crush the graphite as he had before. A few adjustments later and he had completed his lower-case “a” row and moved on to drawing triangles in the margin. A bouncy children’s tune started playing on the TV in the living room and Ethan’s pencil smacked against the table and rolled away while he slid underneath the table, crawling over my slippers and scrambling to his feet.

“You have ten minutes, Ethan!”

I began the next row – one long line, one backwards “c.”