Ragamuffin ~

One of the first things I learned this morning, between walking my dog and sipping my coffee and deciding if I could get away with this messy hair on a Saturday, is that Brennan Manning died.

I was sitting on the couch when I found out, and I burst into tears.

I never met him. I heard him speak only once, and that was years ago in a small college-town auditorium where some friends and I were stashed away in the cheap seats, so far from the stage that his small frame was barely visible.

But his dog-eared, highlighted and underlined books are tucked into every shelf space in my home.

His words are carved into quiet, internal places I return to when I need to hear the voice that reminds me that I am God's beloved child, that we all bear that identity.

Brennan Manning was one of the first Christ-lovers who helped me to see a life of faith with new eyes, with a new heart; not as an endless, duty-filled list of assignments: to do, to do more, to do better, to do it all with great strength and without fail.

Instead, he invited me to see myself as he saw himself, as a ragamuffin: a bit bedraggled, a bit scruffy, a bit of a mess. Not the kind of person marked by perfection and sought out by power and influence and beauty; but rather, a person marked by a growing awareness of their belovedness, an awareness that comes from letting God come a little closer, and then closer still, over time, and finding in that gritty intimacy, all that a life of faith can bring: famine and feast, brokenness and wholeness, waiting and wonder, disappointment and hope, death and life, every bit of it held by a God who has come so near that I get to call him "Abba" ... daddy. 

I'm so grateful I was introduced to Brennan Manning, to his faith, to his heart, to his journey. I'm so glad to have his books in my home, his words tucked away in those quiet, internal places.

"My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it." - from The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning

God bless Brennan Manning, God bless us in our missing his presence. God bless us in living into our belovedness.