The Heart of Martha.

My heart was beating fast. My hands were shaking, and sweat was dripping down my back. I tried to control my breath. I sat on the airplane, coping with it in all the wrong ways. You would’ve thought I was going to see a long lost lover just home from overseas or a beloved grandparent that had gone years without my hugs. You might’ve thought I was going home for the first time, or you might’ve thought I was leaving it for the last time. Someone that is overridden with anxiety can put images of all kinds in the minds of careful people-watchers. I am doubtful, however, that you would’ve guessed I was going to see my best friends.If there was excitement, it had been successfully numbed. Any celebration had been perfectly excavated, and I was left tired and hollow. I walked off the plane, carelessly hitting my bags on the seats in front of me and shuffling to my friends who stood with arms wide open. To be truthful, I don’t even remember what they looked like standing there. My biggest challenge was attempting to not collapse until I reached a bed. These were people I had done ministry with only a year before. These were women that I trusted with my life in a literal sense, more than once. These were girls who I should’ve felt the safest around to break, yet instead, from irrational fear of judgment and a multitude of other factors, I chose instead to stay painfully intact, my heart begging me to let it just crack, to give it just a second of relief. I chose stubbornness, avoidance, selfishness. I chose pain because I thought it was what I deserved for having lost sight of the things that these girls had spent the last year steadily growing in. I already felt that I didn’t belong, it was only right to act on that belief.I was ready to go walk, the way I had the last few weeks before bed, and all the girls had sat in the basement waiting on me. I couldn’t wait to get as far from the house as possible. One of the girls had offered to come along, and she walked beside me as I fumbled around with words about how I felt stuck, felt tired, felt worthless, felt all the things I didn’t know I actually felt. I slumped down to the curb and pleaded, “I work…I work hard.” She didn’t sit down, but rather motioned me forward. “We need to go back." "Please,” I said, “This is what I need, I just need to sit here." She stayed standing, “No, we need to go back.” In a wave of a hardening heart, I seethed at how this was not Jesus. How Jesus would have sat with the breaking. How Jesus would have this and would have that and none of these people were Jesus.Because how dare they, in my misery, drag me back into a room that waited with love and compassion and patience when I needed to sit in my pity and my lies and “rest.” How dare Jesus tell Martha that Mary may stay sitting at His feet when she needed to be in the kitchen finishing the house work. How dare the Heart of Love condemn His beloved for choosing isolation and hopelessness over community, restoration, and His own heartbeat. Don’t the broken know what they need better than He? Don’t the lies win? Not once.Not ever.It is still a mystery, how in the presence of peace, we can choose the “distraction of the preparations” (Lk. 10), yet we do it nonetheless. We can choose to believe that what we need is to sit in our lies of self-hate and let them fester rather than crawling to the feet of Holy acceptance.There is no loss of hope in stories like these, however.Because of the never-ending hand outstretched.Because of the never-shifting feet of the One who sees perfection in the midst of unprepared food and shattering hearts.Because of grace.Because in all our attempts to make ourselves believe that we know better, the fight for truth goes on. Until all the Marthas are no longer distracted by preparations. And everyone wants only to lay their heads in the laps of their Father and let Him run His fingers through their hair and sing songs of acceptance. It was never meant to be an easy return.Only a beautiful and scandalous one.words by Lauren McLemore and photo by Cate Willis