I look forward to the moment when, though worthless, I’ll be made worthy of God’s love.

A couple of my Christian friends have told me they worry about being judged before God at the end of time, as the apostle Paul says will happen in 2 Corinthians 5:10: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that everyone may receive what is due them for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” One friend still anguishes over sins she committed long before she became a Christian. I argue in vain that these sins—along with every sin she’s committed since then and will commit later—vanished from God’s notice for all time when she accepted Jesus’ death in payment for them.

Nurturing and wrenching out discontent at work

I recently quarreled with coworkers about financial gain and the Christian nature of our work. As often happens to me in Christian work settings, those in charge of what I thought was paid labor considered it volunteer work. The conflict undermined my contentment at work. So, as soon as I finished the project, I retreated from the scene. I was pleasant to all involved but evaded follow-up meetings and related e-mails. I pretended to myself I didn’t care, but in reality my retreat was what therapists call “cutting off”: demonizing others and distancing oneself in a conflict. I call it “growing the bitter root.”

I retreated to my garden. For the second year in a row, a friend had given me some sprouted raspberry canes. This time, she scolded, I should plant them not in a raised bed, as I had the first ones, but directly in the ground, where they’d get more water. So I dug up some waterlogged strawberries, replanted them in the raised bed, and then tilled the strawberry bed for the raspberries.

Without an apology, reconciliation often isn’t an option.

From babyhood, my daughter Lulu has steadfastly obeyed the apostle Paul’s command, “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry" (Ephesians 4:26). She must have learned the passage in one of her first Sunday school classes. Somehow, the command’s urgency gripped her baby brain with the fear that whoever had angered her—usually me—might die in the night and she’d be left knowing that her last feelings had been angry and the last words reverberating between us into eternity were hurtful or mean.

Consequently, to this day, whenever we have a conflict, Lulu shows up at my side shortly before bedtime with the demand that I apologize so she can sleep.

How to avoid squelching the strugglers in our midst

I’ve been studying Genesis for the past year and have found the book’s emphasis on violence rather striking. After Cain kills his brother, he worries that marauders in the regions of his exile will kill him. A few generations later, Cain’s descendant Lamech brags about his own murderous exploits. Soon the earth is so “filled with violence,” as God explains to Noah, that God decides “to put an end to all people” (6:13) in a great flood.

What struck me as I squirmed through the horrific flood account was God’s violence in response to human violence. However evil the people of that time may have been—and surely they were no more evil than the people of today—I couldn’t erase from my mind the resulting image of that genocide, the plaintive cries from high places, the gurgling screams and thrashing that must have horrified Noah and his family as all the world drowned. How could a loving God have done such a thing? I wondered. I struggled to understand what God’s violence says about his character, and how it's relevant to my own life.

What eating meat teaches us about Jesus’ death and our salvation

In trying to decide how much violence to retain in editing my recent food memoir, I got to thinking about the spiritual dimensions of being a carnivore. We’ve lost all sense of this violence in our culture.

These days, meat is a substance packaged on a Styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, lined with a sanitary mat to soak up the juices—our euphemism for blood. If we think at all about the violence involved in butchering, we’re put off, so we avoid acknowledging it.

Until my most recent reading of Genesis, I never noticed how violence defines humanity. Cain, Adam and Eve’s firstborn, killed his brother, and soon the earth was so “filled with violence” (Genesis 6:13) that God regretted creating humans and drowned all but a few in the Flood.

Reexamining a friend’s critical remark as a message from God

The other day, while on the phone with an old friend, I confided my struggle to be a better conversationalist.

“I talk about myself too much,” I told her. “I never remember to ask people about their lives. I’m trying to get into the habit of mentally reviewing all the questions I should ask before I call. I’ve got a list near the phone of topics relevant to specific friends in case they call. Even then,” I confessed, “I’m so self-centered, I often get caught up in something I’m saying and forget my lists altogether. I feel so bad.”

“Yeah,” my friend said. “You do tend to monopolize conversations.”

Why growing in faith means walking backwards

Recently I came across a journal I kept when I was a new believer and my children were toddlers. In those days, my husband and I were on our way out of farming, and I taught at the local public school. Mitzi, a fellow teacher—younger than I, but a lifelong Christian—had given me a blank book for Christmas. Its cover was a field of watercolor wildflowers in lavenders, pinks, greens, and Mitzi had labeled its first page “Blessing Book.”

A prayer journal was a new idea for me, so perhaps I misunderstood Mitzi’s intention. Or perhaps I understood it but objected to writing in a book with a cutesy cover (there was even a butterfly) or embracing the lingo of my evangelical acquaintances, who were forever reporting on the “blessings” and “ministries” and “stumbling blocks” of their “walk” and being “convicted” about this or that. To be honest, the entire Christian world in which I found myself as a new believer embarrassed me, despite my terrifying encounter with that passage in Luke where Jesus says if we’re embarrassed to acknowledge him, then he’ll disown us before the heavenly assembly (Luke 12:9).

Finding comfort in the grim circumstances of Jesus’ entry into our world

More than 20 years ago in December, when I was a graduate student, I was held up at gunpoint in a public phone booth, robbed of a book bag containing my students’ and my own final papers, and sexually assaulted.

As often happens with trauma, the days that followed brought afflictions that seemed almost worse than the original crime. Everyone I knew responded that I “should be glad” I wasn’t killed, that I was “lucky.” I can’t explain how deeply these responses hurt me, but the title of author Alice Sebold’s account of her rape, Lucky, references the universality of my pain. To avoid it, I longed to retreat from my friends, my family, the world.

Reflections on persistence in the face of conflict

Yesterday, a student came by my office at the university where I teach and asked if I could recommend a way of getting someone she liked out of her head.

“Well, you might find a new boyfriend,” I quipped. “Or a hobby. That seemed to work for me.”

I was too preoccupied with my own miseries at that moment to advise someone else. I’d just received a rejection on a book proposal and, within the next hour, needed to make an unpleasant phone call, attend a meeting, and get home to my daughters, Charlotte and Lulu.

Glimpses of the Great I Am

Last week in my advanced grammar class, I explained to my students that to be isn't always a linking verb. We looked at a pair of sentences: I think. Therefore, I am.

“They’re grammatically identical,” I said. “Subject + verb. I am simply means I exist.”

Days later, I’m in church waiting for a renovations discussion to morph into the worship service proper. It’s a new church for my family. We sit in our pew, my husband, Kris, pretending interest in the building plans, our daughter Lulu folding a church bulletin into a paper airplane I fear she’ll sail any second over the people in front of us. Our other daughter, Charlotte, studiously copies into her journal scriptural names for God from an enormous banner covering the front wall.

Where real rest begins

The other morning, my husband, Kris, read aloud from Jeremiah 50:7 that God is our “true pasture.” It’s an odd name for God: grazing land for livestock. These days, I hear the word pasture used mostly as a negative reference to retirement: Out to pasture. Chomping grass all day. Getting swaybacked and fat around the middle. Worthless.

The word has special meaning for Kris and me, though. Early in our marriage, when we raised cattle full time, we spent our days in the pasture—checking our heifers, moving cattle into the next field, killing thistle, brushhogging, sowing winter wheat, plowing up a paddock to sprig it with Bermuda grass. We attended all-day forage workshops and devoted entire summers to making our pastures into food for the cold, dry months ahead: cutting the grass, raking it, tedding it if it got wet, baling it, transporting the enormous bales to the barn. To this day, to me the smell of summer is the smell of hay. Newly cut hay. Hay curing in the sun. Hay caramelizing in bales rolled up too damp.

Holiness isn't a difficult task of faith, but a lovely reward.

I'm much given to regret in my encounters with others. I leave most meetings at my university saying to myself, I wish I hadn't said that. Then I spend the next week or two trying to come up with a way to undo my words and the view of me they must have created in others.

The novel I'm currently reading, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (Picador, 2004), offers useful instruction in this matter. In it, John Ames, an aging pastor in poor health, records his thoughts on life for his young son, whom he doesn't expect to see grow up. Just about everything John Ames tells his son simultaneously challenges my spiritual complacency and affirms what I believe to be the essential nature of faith—it's not a behavioral contract with God, but the highest experience of pleasure and safety and utter liberation from worry, fear, and shame. What an impressive feat on Robinson's part—both as a writer and as an evangelist—to communicate the mandate to be holy in such an inviting way. Here's an example:

How can I reconcile my powerlessness to do good with the Bible�s perpetual charges to do right?

One of my main struggles as a Christian has been the pursuit of holiness. My best attempts at being good or holy or just or righteous are, according to Isaiah 64:6, like bloody sanitary napkins: not merely unclean, but too shamefully embarrassing to even be mentioned in polite company. If I accomplish anything good at all, I’m not the one doing the accomplishing, God is.

Nevertheless, much of the Bible explains just what I need to do to be holy. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is one big to-do list of impossible tasks to accomplish in order to, like him, please God. And the apostle Paul, having revealed the inadequacy of mere rule-following as the way to God, can’t seem to stop himself from creating more rules: Don’t cut your hair. Don’t speak in church. Just put on the armor of God and run that race. I can hardly read his epistles without sweating! How can I reconcile my powerlessness to do good with these perpetual charges to do right?

The joy and importance of first fruits

God’s first recorded lesson in spiritual growth is strangely intimate: a series of wistful fatherly questions in the sweeping narrative of Creation.

“Why are you angry?” Yahweh asks Cain, a disgruntled guy who could be my brother, could even be me. “Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?” (Genesis 4:6).

God’s questions seem to assume that Cain knows what’s right—and that readers countless centuries later will know, too. And yet from my earliest days as a Christian, I’ve struggled with the story of Cain’s failed offering. God’s rejection seems so picky. Cain was, after all, offering something to God—“some of the fruits of the soil” (Genesis 4:3). What exactly made his brother Abel’s offering—“fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock”—acceptable to Yahweh when Cain’s wasn’t (Genesis 4:4,5)? What might this story teach us about how to grow in faith and Godlikeness?

Patty Kirk is Writer in Residence and adjunct associate professor of English, specializing in writing, at John Brown University. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas and an MA in English from Tulane University. She’s taught English at universities in Germany and China as well as Northeastern University (Tahlequah), M.I.T., and Tulane’s University College. Patty has led numerous writers conferences and workshops and judges many writing contests. Besides having approximately 50 articles, seminar presentations, and collaborations to her name, Patty is also the author of Confessions of an Amateur Believer. Visit her website: www.amateurbeliever.com.