Walk Worthy

I was twenty-two when I first wanted a baby.

There were many young mothers in the church I attended at the time–some of them not much older than I–and I would stand squished between two pews after the service, holding a baby. I would smile down into its round raspberry face, stare at the triangle mark between its eyes and the grainy white dots of its nose, feel the soft, warm curl of it in my arms, and think, “This is what I want. I want a baby.”

But to have a baby–at least if one wants to honor God’s plan for marriage and families–one must first have a husband. And husbands are peculiar, private things, like teeth or old shoes. One can’t just pick up any husband and make use of him; he has to fit. He has to want you; you have to want him.

Five or six years have gone by since I was twenty-two and wanted a baby. My sisters who were old enough to get married all got married, and some of them have children, and I am just me, Luci, holding my sisters’ babies and thinking how happy they must be to have them. I am not jealous, only wistful. And I’ve started to think lately that something is wrong with me, because I haven’t found someone who fits.

I am too independent, I think. Too free-thinking. Not domestic enough. Too intellectual. Too wild. Not like all the other Mennonite girls I know, all of whom would make lovely wives.

The distinctions are only in my head and probably unapparent to anyone else, but to me the distinctions are real. Somewhere along the way, I began to classify myself as “different.”

I’m not sure when that happened. Maybe after an unsuccessful dating relationship. Maybe after someone wondered if I was lesbian, and confused, I started to wonder it myself. Maybe after I stepped outside the safe circles of my childhood and began to visit among people who lived and believed far differently, maybe after I came back and viewed my own people with the eyes of a stranger.

However it happened, I formed the idea that I was “different” and then that I was “bad” in some way, that I was not good wife material, and that no really nice guy who cared deeply about spiritual things would ever want me.

A friend of mine set me straight on this: “You don’t need no stinkin’ man to make you a wonder of creation.”

I like how she put that. It rings true–more so than the happy platitudes I see so often on children’s toys, on pens, on journals, on coffee mugs: “God made you special.” “Different is beYOUtiful.” “God loves you just the way you are.” All of which may be true, but I’ve heard it too often and too glibly not to be skeptical.

What does special mean, anyway, and what’s so good about it? I’m just one of a few billion people in the world. No one particularly special. All easily expendable in the larger scheme of things.

And different? Being a serial killer is different. Would you consider that beYOUtiful?

The world is full of sinners, not saints. Wouldn’t it be better to say God loves us in spite of who we are rather than just the way we are?

The platitudes, no doubt, are trying to convey in easy phrases the same truth my friend gave, but because she had the virtue of being fresh and original and blunt, her words went deeper than the skepticism. “A wonder of creation,” she said. That sounds familiar. It sounds like it comes from the Bible, out of words in Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

According to Genesis, it doesn’t matter who I am or what I’ve done, whether I love God or do not acknowledge Him–as a child of Adam, the image of God is intrinsic in me.

That’s pretty stinkin’ beautiful.

Revelation adds to the picture by giving a reason for creation. In Revelation 4:11 twenty-four elders worship God, casting their golden crowns before His throne and saying, “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou has created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”

For thy pleasure, the verse says. So as part of His creation, I give God pleasure.

But why? I wonder. And I think about it. And I think of my stories and the joy I have in writing them. How I want to jump up and down, how I want to throw my head back and crow like Peter Pan, “Oh the cleverness of me!” The stories are an expression of myself. They can never express all of me, but they express part of me in a way nothing else can. And so I love them. And beyond me they have a life, living and breathing in a created world I have helped to bring about. And so they make me happy.

God must also feel this way about His creation. And if the great God of the universe experiences on a perfect level the same pleasure in His creation that I feel in mine, the thrill-through-your-veins intensity of it must be unimaginable. It would be a pleasure for me, the created, to look into the eyes of the Creator and see the depths of such joy.

So. I am made in his image. I give Him pleasure. I am a written “story” dedicated to God, but with a life and destiny of my own. As such, my view of myself has changed.

I was reading in 1st Thessalonians several mornings ago and was struck by this verse: “…walk worthy of God, who hath called you unto his kingdom and glory.”

Walk worthy.

I formed an image of myself tall and proud and graceful, walking with my chin up, unashamed. Not bad, not different. Worthy. Because God has called me to his kingdom and glory. He put the world at my feet and an atlas in my hands and told me, “Now walk worthy.”

And because He says I can, I can.

Ephesians 4: 1 reads much the same. “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.”

A vocation is a life’s work, and reading this, I know immediately the vocation to which it refers. It is the vocation of service to God, and I think of words I wrote years ago–somewhere during that same span of time when I was twenty-two and holding babies after church. I remember that I wrote the words on a plane and that I had been reading Ann Lamotte. When I page back through my notebook to find them, they are different, more flowery, than I remembered–but the thought is still the same, and it does me good to be reminded.

I said to God, “Let me know You. Help me to learn to know You above all things.”

And He said, “My child, you don’t know what you ask. That is like a minnow asking to know the ocean, like a bit of space dust asking to know the universe.”

And yet, hearing that, my soul was not totally devoid of hope. Rather, what he said seemed like a promise.

That promise is my vocation, and because He says I can, I will spend a lifetime walking worthy of it.