For The Times I Feel Too Much

"Look to the lady; O, she's but o'erjoy'd."
-Pericles by William Shakespeare, Act V Scene iii


"So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss / and my heart turns violently inside of my chest . . ."
-"How He Loves" by John Mark McMillan


"Love the Lord your God
with all your heart
and with all your soul
and with all your mind
and with all your strength."
-Mark 12:30




I need to write. I have been learning a lot lately, mostly about how desperate I am for worship.

Ah, worship--golden harps on clouds, or placid-faced people singing during a church service but checked out mentally. Isn't this what worship is?

I have wondered.

At the same time, I have struggled with a lot of temptations as a theatre person. I have talked about them a lot here on this blog, but suffice it to say that it is so true that "broad is the road that leads to destruction and narrow the road that leads to life and few find it."

I have struggled for years to find the antidote for my heart-wandering. I want to do what Christ wants me to do, and not because it will make him love me or because it will save me, but because this lover-God loves me and has saved me, and my heart is now designed to hurl its allegiance at Him.

And it is as if I have been holding this huge knot of questions, the kind of knot that you get in a thin necklace when you pack it badly on a vacation, where the knots' tangles have bred other tangles and seem to have conspired to create a heaping mound of mess and confusion. And over the last couple of years, as God has been patiently teaching me that--wonder of wonders!--prayer and Bible reading and confession are foundational to my Christian walk, I have seen the knots start to be untied, one by one.

Guidance has come alongside me, steadily and patiently.

And over the last week, I have been learning about worship. I have learned that I can't follow Jesus without it, that I can't live without it. And I have been learning about what worship might mean.

You know when you are watching a really great movie, the kind that sucks you in like it is a magnet and your mind is a shard of metal, and you don't notice the room around the tv screen anymore, and you don't hear what people are saying outside the movie, and you lean forward when there is a suspenseful part? It is as if your entire heart, soul, mind, and strength are invested in this one thing.

I think that is what worship might be like.

The problem with the human soul is that we see something amazing and start to worship that thing instead of refusing to worship anything but the creator who made every thing that we see. This may seem like a minor point, but I am starting to think that it is in fact foundational to our very existence and vitality and crucial in avoiding sin, which "so easily entangles" (Hebrews 12:1).

I am in a play right now, Shakespeare's Pericles, with The Rude Mechanicals here in Tuscaloosa. It is going to be Shakespeare in the park, which is one of my favorite kinds of theatre. I am playing Thaisa, which is a gorgeous part, and so I am all fired up about this. I had not read Pericles until about a month ago, and it is now one of my favorite of Shakespeare's works (questionable partial authorship aside).

I had an experience the other night that worked to help convince me of how much worship is a part of my deepest inner needs. We had finished the Pericles rehearsal in which we had blocked the last scene of the play, and I left in a state I have been in before at the end of a meaty rehearsal. Here's what I wrote in my journal, trying to use words on the page to purge myself of my uncontrollable and inexplicable emotions:

"I honestly don't know what to do with myself after a rehearsal like that . . . . [The scene we blocked tonight] was just too much like heaven. The longing for worship was threatening to tear me apart inside. I didn't know what to do with myself.

All of this deep-seated core longing for the real, final return of the king had been stirred up from my depths. I was being quieted, silenced almost by this sublime experience of eternal longing, of "sehnsucht" . . . . My heart, soul, spirit, and body were longing for the day when we will see that stories like Pericles are just faint "echoes of Eden" as Jerram Barrs puts it [in his book of the same name], when we will realize the consummation of our deepest longings and desires, when we shall

see him face to face.

We are a bride in waiting.

'How long, oh Lord, how long?'

This is weighty and I can feel insecurities wanting to come in and patch up the gaps. I just looked at pictures of myself on my phone and wondered why [I was doing so], and realized I was trying to figure out if I'm beautiful enough to be called a princess.

It is by your grace Lord.

I feel my heart has been broken open by acting that scene and now I am standing, vulnerable, unsure of how to get covering.

But that is what you want to find onstage, isn't it? Isn't your heart supposed to be open and vulnerable onstage?

I don't know what to do with myself right now, how to cover myself, so I will let you do what you want with me. I give me to you--that is the only place my broken open self--suddenly so aware of her deepest longings and suddenly so exposed and vulnerable--can be safe.

I hide myself in YOU."