The Day My Prince Came

There is an unwritten rule on the playgrounds of elementary schools everywhere. It basically states that the primary determining factor in bestowing a nickname is its rhyme-ability.

Fat Matt, Scary Mary, Messy Jessie…it gets worse. Kids can be heartless.

Luckily, in my case they were just dumb. “Thirsty Kirstie”. Ouch.

It was a dud and one that didn’t last long. Surprising, right?

And yet without knowing it, they hit the nail on the head.

I think I have been thirsty most of my life.

The Woman:

I am a 21 year old student with one online class standing between me and graduation from my Christian university. If you are at all familiar with the subculture of Christian colleges or even this age bracket of American Christianity, then you are probably aware that this is the year it happens.

Relationship statuses begin changing on Facebook. Suddenly all the hands raised in class appear to have bright, sparkly rings on them. Save-the-dates explode from the P.O. box. You bump into Amy who you sat by in freshman English or Jessica who lived on your hall last year and they gush to you as if you were best friends. You brace yourself for every.single.detail of how he proposed, fake smile for all ten minutes of the story, then head back to your room... and cry. And cry and cry and cry.

That is, if you are anything like I am…or was…

I have decided to be as naked with you as the current state of my left ring finger. Feeling like the last single standing can be horrible.

At the beginning of this school year I asked the Lord to reveal His purpose for the semester. I approached the Bible like a magic eight ball hoping that if I flipped enough pages I would eventually find the answer I wanted. Instead, He highlighted verse after verse about finding contentment in Christ alone.

Hmm…

My response went a little like this: “Lord, that’s really nice but not exactly what I was thinking. I don’t know if You’ve noticed but it’s kind of my last semester here in the Mecca of Christian men…so um…maybe You might want to give “him” a little nudge seeing as how time is running out and all.”

His response? “My grace is sufficient for you.”

Then He took my hand and started walking me through the biblical account of Leah.

Oh parallel of parallels…

Take a minute to read Genesis 29. This chapter tells the story of a woman characterized by her deep longing. I read Leah’s account and my heart breaks. I feel her pain. I carry her struggle.

 

A desire to be wanted, chosen, and accepted in the love of another.

Her deepest longing, her greatest battle. Yes, I believe Leah was a very thirsty woman.

In my sanctified imagination, I also see the little girl. I picture Leah playing house with her younger sister Rachel. I envision her sitting in her mother’s lap begging to hear once again the story of how her parents met. I see a young woman much like myself gazing out into the distance, waiting for a love of her own.

And He would come.

Just not in the way she had always imagined.

Isn’t that something?

God chose Leah as the blood line from which Christ would one day come.

Years ago one of my favorite college professors said something that would forever resonate with me. We were talking about the love of God, when he said something along these lines…

“Some of you guys think you understand God’s love. And yet, when a performance or play comes along and you need a date, you never stop to consider inviting the fat, awkward girl from class. What about asking her?”

I remember there was an eruption of laughter. The professor’s eyes filled with tears.

“All I know… is I was that fat girl, and Christ asked me out.”

Dead silence. Point made. I still get chills thinking about it.

The Jesus Storybook Bible describes God’s sentiment toward us as a “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.”

God’s love looks beyond my ugliness. His love is bigger than my brokenness.

It renders my unworthiness irrelevant.

Lavish, excessive, crazy, too much, gushing, extravagant love.

Oh, His love is so fulfilling. Do you believe it?

The Well:

Jeremiah 2:13 “For My people have committed a double evil: They have abandoned Me, the fountain of living water, and dug cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that cannot hold water.”

Ashamedly, the above verse just about sums up the majority of my life thus far. I warned you earlier that I have spent far too much time defined by my thirst. But I have this feeling that I am not the only one. In fact, I’m sure of it. You met my girl Leah; now take a look with me at my favorite story in all of Scripture.

John 4 describes the woman commonly known as the “Samaritan woman” or the “woman at the well.” I was reading through this chapter yesterday and verse 6 caught my attention in a new way. Jacob’s well! This exchange had taken place at Jacob’s well.

And I thought to myself, isn’t it something that, after all the years separating Leah and this woman, after all the years between the Samaritan woman and I, we are still drawing from Jacob?

In a manner that is neither accusatory nor condemning, Jesus speaks to this woman about her current state of emptiness. He speaks of the five husbands of her past and compassionately addresses the well she had been drawing from for so many years.

Take it firsthand from someone who has tried to draw meaning, satisfaction, and worth outside of Christ…it never works. I have the scars to prove it. Like Leah and the Samaritan woman, my broken cistern (or container or bucket) of choice has been relationships. I have returned again and again to the well of another hoping for a drop of the fulfillment that never quite seems to last.

Too long I have been disappointed. Too long I have gone thirsty.

Far too long.

Until one day a Man met me at the well. And He was like no other I have ever known.

The Water:

“Where do you get that living water?  Are you greater than our father Jacob?” –Samaritan Woman

I am weeping now because I believe that God has been preparing me for this day for a very long time. This morning a situation straight out of Genesis 29 took place in my own life. A season ago I would have been completely devastated over this course of events. It would have thrown me into a wave of unworthiness, self-loathing, and wreaked bitterness within my family. But see, it’s all different now.  

I have tasted the water.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” -Jesus

It was different for Leah too. Like the rest of us, there would be highs and lows in her struggle to grasp the sufficiency of God. But at the birth of her fourth son Judah, she finally got a small taste of redemption’s unfolding love story. In the face of the same circumstances, she was able to respond “this time I will praise the Lord.”

And through that son Judah, the Messiah finally comes. The One for whom she had always longed.

And oh, how He loved her. How He loves you.

The Messiah shows up for the Samaritan woman as well. She was the victim of so much prejudice, she was deemed unworthy of Jesus’ compassion, and yet He went out of His way to come for this woman. Even His closest followers were shocked by this. Grace for her? Ridiculous, abundant love for her?

Yes!

And this is the part that really gets me, okay? This is the verse that touches, convicts, and gives me hope.

v. 28 “the woman left her water jar”

At the end of her exchange with Jesus, the woman leaves the pitcher from which she had spent her life drawing water. She takes no thought for it. She doesn’t need it anymore.

Wow.

Let me close with a well-known verse I read for the first time from the Amplified Bible.
Psalm 90:14 “O satisfy us with Your mercy and loving-kindness in the morning [now, before we are older], that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”

Now before we are older.

I am writing this for myself as I strive to meditate on truth in the midst of trial. I am writing this for every one of us who has wasted time on broken pitchers. But mostly, I am writing this for the next generation of women for whom God has so burdened my heart.

Learn this lesson now. Draw from His well. Let Him satisfy you with the greatest love story you will ever know. Because when you do, like Leah and the Samaritan woman, it will result in the most fulfilling praise of God. You won’t be able to shut up about His love. It will be like a spring welling up inside.

2,000 years ago my Prince came for me and His name is and always will be Jesus.

By God's grace and after years of longing, I am finally tasting and fully embracing His great love.

And I’m not thirsty anymore. 

-Kirsten

The Gospel in Paperback

The story behind the name of this blog...

Starts in the campus store, a place I rarely frequent...
*(Psssst...you can get most of the same stuff cheaper elsewhere. And when the difference could mean the equivalent of a tall starbucks latte, let me tell you, it starts to matter.)
For my father, however, this store presented endless wonder & mystery. He weaved his way through various Christian literature in eager pursuit. We surfaced somewhere in the Bible section. “Come on”, he said. “I’ll buy you one.”

Fast-forward to me perusing an expansive collection of Bibles. Study Bibles, reference Bibles, devotional Bibles. Audio, DVD, software. Thinline, wide margin, giant print. Don't even get me started on versions. The bulk of the selection was large and leather-bound. Ostentatious. I am no Bible snob, but at the moment it was almost too much to process. The pomp and prestige of them all...in their shiny boxes...lined in tidy rows. I couldn't figure out why it bothered me so much.

Irony has a way of smacking you in the face. It hit me then, how just a couple months earlier I had made one of the greatest compromises in my life. Now I was standing with my dad...in the Bible aisle...of my Christian university...wearing a knee length skirt. Surrounded by people who knew me as the red head (fake) or the Biblical counseling major (often faker). I could easily find my identity in any one of those things. I could dress up my truth. But I didn’t want to, especially when suddenly it all felt like a lie.

My eyes were filling up at this point, looking around at all the clean cut people and all the fancy Bibles. I felt entirely deficient. But just like Eden, it was there in that moment of my complete nakedness, confronted with all my inadequacy and all my failure, when the leaves of my self-righteousness had done nothing to cover the shame I felt inside, that God came looking for me. He found me crying in the Bible aisle. And that, dear reader, is when I saw it. The bible I had been looking for, the truth my thirsty soul craved. The gospel in paperback.

I met back up with dad at the checkout counter. He looked at me with concern because I was a.) crying and b.) clutching a paperback bible to my chest in a death grip. The other shoppers were either moved by my Oscar worthy performance or scared for their lives. A quick glance around suggested the latter. But I chose not to worry about that.

Instead I thought about Jesus. I started marveling at how God himself took on flesh. How Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself” (Phil. 2:6-8). Christ, heaven’s glory and treasure, puts on skin. The Son of Man, the only person on earth ever entitled to bragging rights, forfeits. In John 7:18 He warns “The one who speaks on his own authority seeks his own glory.” Jesus empties Himself, reveals the Father, and invites me to do the same.

That day a huge perspective shift began taking place. It came through books like Elyse Fitzpatrick’s Comforts from the Cross and uplifting articles on the Resurgence. It came from various conversations with friends, was heavily influenced by the life of my uncle Jerry, but was first and foremost informed by Scripture and passages like 2 Corinthians 4.  If you want to really see this passage come alive, Matt Chandler preaches through it like nobody’s business.

In verse 7 the apostle Paul writes “but we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” Clay jars. Paperbacks. Susceptible to wear and tear. Vulnerable to afflictions, breakage, and damage. It makes sense then that ^“what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord" (v.5) The same way that Christ pointed to the Father, we point to Him. We brag on His power at work within us, a power greater than sin and its subsequent death.

And so I am struck again by the irony. That at a point of spiritual weakness, I find myself writing this. I’m tired, I’m beaten, and I’m worn. There’s a sin struggle wrestling against me this week, a lie lurking around every corner telling me that worth can be found outside of Christ, an air of pride threatening to leave me a flesh mess. I feel deficient, I feel disqualified, and I feel exempt. But as true (and truer still!) as these realities, is a Cross which proclaims the same good news that called to me that day not long ago from the pages of a paperback Bible.

I celebrate because I have been entrusted with the treasure that is Christ Jesus. Whose name I am unworthy to even type on this page. I meditate on the gospel at work in me, the Holy Spirit alive in me, the divine power that raised Jesus from the dead. I possess the same gospel that changed my uncle’s life and permeated his death. That caused his life-ending cancer battle to bend its knee in praise to our glorious God.

Quit browsing the shelves of self-righteousness.

Stop shopping the aisles in shame.

Reach out and claim the gospel.

They say that you may be the only Bible some people ever read...
          
     Make much of Jesus.

~Kirsten 

God Knows My Name

There it sat against my hand in all its golden glory, reflecting with the snow the light of the sun. My long-awaited, highly anticipated, seemingly exclusive Starbucks gold card.

This had all the makings of a very important moment. And it would be, just not in any of the ways I had expected. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

My fingers delicately traced the perfection before me until they landed smack dab on the mother of all mistakes. It looked a little like this…

Kristen (last name omitted)

Excuse me while I rant…My name is NOT Kristen. It’s Kirsten. KIR-sten. No, it is not essentially the same thing. We are talking about two completely different people here. One being me, and other being someone whose card was mistakenly mailed to me.

Am I overreacting?

Please understand, dear reader. This is no one time offence. You know the annoying TingTing’s song that was popular a few years ago? “That’s Not My Name”? Yeah, it’s basically the soundtrack of my life.

They call me Kristen

They call me Kiersten

They call me Kirtin

Um…no, no, and heck no.

 “Nothing in my life is mine.” This has become my mantra.

I say it when my tiny dorm room is bombarded with visitors, when the creamer in the fridge is all gone, when the identity of a girl I disciple becomes intertwined with my own.

While a bit martyr-esque, it does accurately convey what denying myself to do God’s will sometimes looks like in my life. Usually though, my life looks more like this…

My blood boils when my paper gets interrupted because someone needs to talk. I curse under my breath when the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door is disrespected. I’m inwardly ticked when the last k-cup goes to a crying friend.

I am spread thin.

Every morning I wake up dreading His call to die to myself. I fight it. I tighten my hold on my time, my schedule, my priorities, my friends, my room, my stuff, and my name.

But slowly and lovingly God is teaching me that what is given from my lack, and not abundance, holds the greatest Kingdom significance. I don’t have to have control.

In fact, I relish in relenting all perceived rights to “mine”.

Because when I surrender my lack of control, He always does immeasurably more. Where He breaks, He also multiplies. When I give of myself, He gives more grace.

So rewind to the Starbucks card, to the misspelled name and the temper tantrum. To the weepy laments that not even my name is my own. Apply grace. It starts looking more like this…

Right now I am breathing deeply. I am raising open hands in praise to the God who gives and takes away. Because when life gets too heavy and I collapse under the weight, the Shepherd carries me in His arms. Today I rejoice because there is a book open in Heaven where the Author and Finisher of life writes forever the names of His ransomed. On one of those pages a particular name is perfectly spelled in the penmanship of His precious blood. And it is mine.

Jesus knows my name.

Lift up your weary head, dear reader. He knows yours too.

~Kirsten

"The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out."

John 10:3