From The Inside Out

From the Inside Out

In a note from a friend whose mother had very recently died, I read these words:

I wear some of her clothes: her socks, her sweaters, her pants; her scarves, mittens, and coats (she was always cold like me!) and think of her embracing my body with her love from the inside out.

Honest confession: I stumbled over her last two words and edited them in my mind to “outside in,” imagining that’s what she’d meant to say.

I certainly understood the comfort she found in wrapping herself in those clothes. I once wore—every night for a week—the T-shirt of a boyfriend who was traveling abroad, and I felt soothed somehow by it in his absence. The reality of him wasn’t in the piece of clothing any more than the reality of my friend’s mother resides in her garments. But the putting on of temporal things is a visceral reminder of those eternal, intangible realities that we cannot touch or see. And her words were indeed more accurate than those substituted by my edit. The embrace, the presence of a loved one is experienced first in the heart, and it ends—not begins—on our skin. The “putting on” is the last step of remembering and identifying, not the first.

Henri Nouwen writes,

Anyone who believes, Jesus reminds us, has eternal life (John 6:40). That is the enormous revolution, that in this fleeting temporary world he comes to plant the seed of eternal life. . . .

Become aware of this mysterious presence and life turns around. You sense joy even as others nurse complaints, you experience peace while the world conspires in war, and you find hope even when headlines broadcast despair. You discover a deep love even while the air around you seems pervaded by hatred.^a

In the places I will go today—some comforting and familiar, others daunting and strange—I imagine myself “putting on” Christ, and letting his incarnate clothing of goodness, mercy, and rightness with the Father be the outward expression of this one, unshakable reality: he is ever with me from the inside out.

As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ like a garment.

Galatians 3:27, HCSB

^a Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning into Dancing (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001), 48.