If I were given the choice between learning the easy way and the hard way, I would always, always pick the easy way. Give it to me in a book, or better yet, a chapter. Give it to me straight and simple. Let me pick out a quote and write it on a post-it note for my bulletin board. That's how I like to learn.

I don't like to learn the messy way. The way that requires making mistakes and being wrong. Because that hurts. Because I can't control those lessons. Can't package them in a way that hides the fact that they are actually unfinished and raw and ugly.

..As funny and confident and together as I imagine you to be, you will never be able to exist here in my today. You will always be ten steps ahead of me, and maybe it’s time for me to let you stay there.

One of the hardest things is to admit, present participle tense, that we are right in the middle of the struggle.

I am doubting.

I am searching.

 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)

I sometimes have to stop and think about what it really means that the Word became flesh- that He was a man, made up of cells and tissue with a heart that pumped blood through His thoroughly human body.

Saturday afternoon found me sitting at my kitchen table, drinking too much tea, and trying to figure out how to make the story of Abraham G-rated for a third grade Sunday school class.

You can't get too far in the Bible without coming across some shockingly human behavior. 

If there is one thing that I've learned about grace is that it requires a great deal of forgetfulness. We can never show true grace if we are constantly bringing to mind the sins of others. So we learn to let go, to surrender. To love when we have no logical reason to.

And yet, when I let myself down, when I fail to do what I know I should- or do what I know I shouldn't- I find it so hard to forget. I relive and relive, always thinking of how I should have acted differently. Worded that better. Withheld this judgment. I should have cared more. I should have cared less.

've been back in the US for a week now. A lot of people have been asking me what the best part about going to Zambia was. That one's easy: The kids. Their joy, their unselfconscious enjoyment of life, their humor, and their genuine thankfulness made them instantly endearing. The way they so trustingly opened their lives to me, a complete stranger, made it impossible for me not to love them.

A few people have asked me what I've learned by traveling half-way across the world to a developing country that most people know next to nothing about. That, in truth, I knew nothing about a year ago.

That question is harder to answer.

There’s an orphanage down the road that I love to visit when I get the chance. The kids speak very little English, and I speak even less Lunda, but we laugh and smile and sing and somehow it doesn’t matter so much.

They are some of the most joyful kids I have ever met, but they are still very much kids. One of their favorite English phrases is “And me!” If they see someone else getting something that they want- attention, a turn at a game, a tomato from the garden- suddenly there’s a crowd of little Zambians chanting “And me! And me!”

He knows what I am capable of even when I still have doubts. He knows what makes me come alive, what makes me angry, what fills me with wonder. Wouldn’t the God who thought up my passions want me to use them?

It was a rosy dusk when I arrived. And then, so gradually I almost missed it, the sun started to light up the clouds. First it just touched the edge of one cloud, then it spread, as if the clouds had been dipped in luminescent paint. Soon the whole sky glowed in anticipation of the sun breaking through the horizon. When the sun finally rose over the tree line, enormous and orange, I was filled with an inexplicable joy as well as an overwhelming sense of my own smallness.

Every minute of every day, somewhere in the world, the sun is bursting over the horizon. It’s marvelous, this constantly unfolding drama of a new day.

And yet most days we sleep through it. 

Sometimes I try to explain how God is working and it feels like holding the rain in my hands. I fumble for the right words, trying to turn God’s transformative work into a neatly tied lesson to put up on my blog or teach a Sunday School class on. But I’ve realized that some lessons aren’t meant to be captured to share or save for later. They are only meant to change me.

Faithfulness, I've begun to learn, is not a trait that comes naturally, nor is it a state at which you arrive. It's cultivated- painstakingly, slowly. Faithfulness isn't born in the moments that make for great campfire stories, but formed and tested in the little things, the everyday things that are easy to think of as unimportant.

And I don’t know why it struck me as so profound, but I can’t remember the last time a smell was new to me, at least not in the way that I can’t even compare it to something else. I have no name for it. It makes me wonder how many smells there are in the world that I've never smelled, that I can't even imagine. And for all the pictures that I've seen of places around the world, I don't have the slightest idea what they smell like. Sometimes the world seems so small, but right now it feels bigger than ever.

My grandma, who will be 92 this year and has lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War and more life than I can imagine, looked up at us with world weary eyes and said "Don't wish your life away."

Sometimes I think we go about our lives assuming that when God wants to tell us something, it will be with an earthquake or a fire- something that will be impossible to ignore. Then we realize too late that He was whispering to us the whole time, but we were making too much noise to hear Him.

Forgiveness is above all an act of faith. We hold onto anger because we think that we need to. Whether it's because we want to assure ourselves that we won't make the mistake of trusting that person again or to teach them a lesson by treating them the way we think they deserve, when we don't forgive it's because we think we're in control.  To let go and forgive means to trust that God is truly in control of the situation.

As I stepped to the edge, my worst case scenario mind was going through everything that could go wrong. What if I did it wrong? What if I dropped the rope? What if I hit my head on the platform and knocked myself unconscious?

In case anyone had any doubts, I don't have it all together. I don't pretend to be right about everything. And as much as I confidently talk about God's love, I still can't even begin to wrap my mind around it. Every time I think I grasp just a little of what God's love looks like, I realize that my picture is still so frustratingly human.

The second son did what sons are supposed to do- he stayed. He responsibly helped his father manage the property. Day in and day out. Never asking for anything. Never questioning.

On the surface, it seems pretty simple to label the two.

Good son/Bad Son. Faithful/Faithless. Mr. Darcy/George Wickham. Honor Student/Disappointment.

I have to confess that sometimes when I read the story of the prodigal son, I find myself relating to the son who stayed home more than the prodigal wanderer.