This week was the perfect weather for that awkward clothing item:  the long sleeve t-shirt.  My favorite of these clothing items is from an event I helped plan for my old job in Chicago.  The job was to help manage a program that got out of school foster kids back into school.  We had about 17 alternative schools that were part of our program.  At each school we had one to two full time mentors who were, sometimes literally, a life-line for these students.  My job involved making sure our funders got what they needed and to manage those mentors.  Each year we planned a retreat for our amazing mentors.  We used the word “retreat” loosely since it was paid for by our funders, and they didn’t want to pay us just to have fun.  Go figure.  So we did quite a bit of training and work at the retreats.

One year I was particularly inspired by a Japanese concept:  Wabi-Sabi.  Beyond it having natural implications for our work, it has become a paradigm through which I see the world, and a means to re-evalute how I measure worth.  I won’t pretend to be an expert in all things “wabi-sabi”, I’ll just imperfectly share how this concept has wormed it’s way into my life and how a revelation from God’s word this week and an event at church served as great reminders and illustrations.

The short explanation of wabi-sabi is:  life is perfectly imperfect, and that’s a beautiful and good thing!  Even the words that are combined to form this concept are imperfect.  In their original context they were negative and even pejorative!  However, over time the negative aspects were peeled away.  Wabi went from describing sadness and poverty to contentment, and sabi transformed from death and brokenness to appreciating change and the inevitable marks of time and aging as seen on people and things.

Amidst the research for this topic, one quote was particularly powerful:

I don’t know anything about the quote’s author, Elisabeth Kugler-Ross.  However, I know Jesus Christ.  And I believe that when we become believers and the Holy Spirit indwells us, the Light of the World can shine through us in spectacular ways.    Yes, there is a bit of the divine in all of God’s creatures (Gen 1:27), but for those regenerated (John 3:5, 2 Cor. 5:27, 1 Peter 1:23, Ephesians 2:10, 1 John 5:4) – that divine light increasingly reflects Someone greater.  “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.  For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Beloved, what happens when we fail; when our feet get dusty; when we aren’t being holy; when we sin and fall short (1 Peter 1:16, Leviticus 20:26)?

This week’s readings in the Old Testament have me thinking about failure a lot.  I’m now in 2nd Kings and it’s been chapter after chapter of Scripture where people are continuously failing.  Even when there’s a king who does well, there always seems to be a “but” or “except”.  It’s a bit discouraging.  Thankfully God always preserves a faithful remnant (1 King 19:18).  As I was reflecting on all those half-hearted, imperfect people I realized I wouldn’t do much better.  I haven’t done much better.  I’ve been following Jesus since the late 90’s … and I still mess up.

God’s encouragement to me this week was that even though these kings messed up, and messed up bad, Scripture still records positive things about them.  My personality type is an INFJ and Melancholy.  Once I’ve made up my mind about something, I can tend to get ferociously judgmental and demand perfection.  Even though I find it easy to extend grace to others, I tend to be my worst critic.  Scriptures that teach us to examine ourselves scare the crap out of me, because I know I’m not perfectly holy.

I’ve known these truths for a while, but this week the Spirit reaffirmed in my own heart and mind that despite my imperfections, God really does love me.   Even as I type this Pandora just played a new-to-me song that perfectly fits this theme.  And as I’m typing about God’s love for me, “How He Loves Us” is playing.  (If you’ve never read how that song came to be, you should:  http://johnmarkmcmillan.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-he-loves-david-crowder-and-sloppy.html.)

So here I’ve been thinking about how God can be pleased with us even in our imperfections as I’m wearing my Wabi-Sabi shirt, and today the sound system failed during worship.  I love to worship, but despite fervently praying for rhythm and the ability to sing on key, alas, let’s just say I’m never going to be a leader in that ministry area.  The closest I get is helping with tech stuff.  But today was a day off for me, so I wasn’t in the tech booth and I knew the best person to figure stuff out was on the job, so I didn’t even think about trying to solve the problem.

Instead I got to experience this amazing moment in church where the congregation became a spontaneous choir!  The lead worshipers kept playing and the media person kept putting up the words for the songs.  And the “audience” didn’t miss much of a beat.  We just kept right on going.  Imperfect?  Yes!  Beautiful?  Yes!

If that happened every week it would probably get annoying.  But thankfully, it doesn’t. Thankfully these people of God were more concerned about loving on God (because that should be our first priority at church) and loving one another (because otherwise we could all go to our own silos and worship alone).  Or we could join the Quakers or become Amish.  Certainly pursuing excellence in all we do honors God, but those moments where things fall apart are the places where I’ve come to experience God in some of the most tangible ways.  The times where I completely lose my cool clearly reveal the state of my heart and have become opportunities to experience reconciliation and growth.  The times others sin against me become are places where I have to chose bitterness or extend grace.  There are some who get uncomfortable in those moments and even try to brush them off or somehow make them “less of a deal” than they really are.  But for me, really leaning into those messy places … well … that’s wabi-sabi … and more often than not I find the suffering servant (Isaiah 53) and the victorious ruler (Revelation 21).

He loved us first, and perfectly.  We sing broken hallelujah’s.