Send Me
chapter twenty-one - from Misfit Table: let your hunger lead you to where you belong
I have spent all my life hungry.
The compulsion to drink the depths of life like an ocean went out with the tide and washed up a hunger to take in the Word of God. I didn’t do anything to get this new hunger. It lies within me like a seashell, waiting to be picked up.
This is how I remember it beginning.
I notice it when a new youth pastor comes and preaches from the old book, and then more as I go through a Bible study and find these words coming alive to me, breadcrumbs leading someplace bright.
I find I want more. I find spending time with his words lead me to God himself. The words are more than words though. Like ink spilled on wet paper, they get absorbed and spread. That’s what the words must do.
Slowly, ever so slowly, his words bleed into my heart, then out from my heart, into my everyday, ordinary life.
I begin—not even consciously—hungering for things I never did before. Without trying. Instead of waking up in the mornings to get the kids and I ready and getting housework and dinner started, I want to learn what God is like. Who he is. I want to talk to him and I want him to talk to me. So I make time for that by getting up before everyone else.
New life intersects for me in this small rural town in Missouri, where God’s words find me, and I am awake to them. This waking is like coming out of anesthesia, like rising after a long sleep.
It doesn’t take long for me to sense my taste buds changing. I don’t want the comforts I wanted before; now I crave these words that fill me in a way I’d not known was possible.
Then my thought patterns begin to change as well. I begin to rearrange my life to position my cold heart next to God’s campfire.
I suddenly see habits in my life that I knew God was gently calling me away from. Slowly, he begins melting my heart, changing me from the inside out. It isn’t anything drastic all at one time. Rather, it is a slow interior work, invisible work, what Eugene Peterson calls “a long obedience in the same direction.”
We all want outward, immediate change. But this is a slow work on the inside, sacred work. But I can feel it taking root, and soon others start to see it too.
The pastor asks me if I would like to help with Vacation Bible School, then if I would help teach a single women’s Sunday school class. I begin to harbor this love of studying the Bible and sparking this love in others.
I love seeing the women’s eyes light up when God shows them something they hadn’t seen before. I love letting them know how much he loves them. There are all kinds of single women. Divorced, mostly. Some have little children, some have grown children, and one is a war veteran who lives her life in a wheelchair. All of us are hungry for holy words.
When I read, eat, and act on words from the Bible, they go down deep into my insides, penetrating my surface superficiality, my negative narratives, all the way down to the deepest dark, secret places.
When I read the Bible, the words burn deep inside me. They alleviate the ache. When I spend time reading them and talking to God, I don’t want to play it safe. Something in me wants to come out and do something brave, and it scares me.
The girls live with Jake and I now, while Reece stays with his dad.
We live across the street from this church. The church yard and our yard are only separated by a neighborhood street. We walk to church three times a week.
Pastor Jedidiah, our youth pastor, is an answer to my year of begging God to bring someone to the church to help me. He’s proof that God sees me, hears me. He and his wife and children are staying on campus at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. They came all the way from St. Kitts to a small rural town in Missouri.
Our tiny church hired him as our youth paster at the pastor’s recommendation. They are a black family in an all-white church. I can stick my hand in the water and feel the coolness of the current when he stands up to preach for the first time.
I am sitting in my usual third row pew, full of expectation, like I am pulling up a chair to the best meal I’ve ever had. He stands up, opens to Isaiah 6 (MSG), and simply reads word for word:
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Master sitting on a throne—high, exalted!—and the train of his robes filled the Temple. Angel-seraphs hovered above him, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two their feet, and with two they flew. And they called back and forth one to the other,
Holy, Holy, Holy is God-of-the-Angel-Armies.
His bright glory fills the whole earth.
The foundations trembled at the sound of the angel voices, and then the whole house filled with smoke. I said,
“Doom! It’s Doomsday!
I’m as good as dead!
Every word I’ve ever spoken is tainted—
blasphemous even!
And the people I live with talk the same way,
using words that corrupt and desecrate.
And here I’ve looked God in the face!
The King! God-of-the-Angel-Armies!”
Jedidiah continues reading:
Then one of the angel-seraphs flew to me. He held a live coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my mouth with the coal and said,
“Look. This coal has touched your lips.
Gone your guilt,
your sins wiped out.”
And then I heard the voice of the Master:
“Whom shall I send?
Who will go for us?”
I spoke up,
“I’ll go.
Send me!”
Jedidiah’s accent makes the words all the more beautiful. The words begin connecting dots in my heart. Papa is writing my story! But it is bigger than me. I see it is for others too. I haven’t been on my own! He’s found me! He picks me up and carries me to his table. I don’t have to do anything but let him.
It feels like God pulls out a chair for me to sit down. He breaks off bread and says open your mouth, my love. I want to give you food for your heart.
I am surprised. Words, like honey, make their way over my palate. Slow and sticky. All the way down to that hollow ache. I am tasting things I have no language for.
I begin to week. I can’t hide the sound, so I muffle my mouth with my hands as my body is wracked with sobs. God is real. He sees me. And he wants to help.
He wants to tell me what happened to me. Why I hurt inside. All eyes are looking at me, and I try to quiet the voice in my head telling me I’m embarrassing myself, but I can’t stop crying. I need these words, this food for my soul. I’ve been so hungry for so long.
“Who will go for me?” Jedidiah reads, and my hands shoots up.
“Yes, send me!”
I feel exposed, but for the first time, I don’t hurt.
When I leave the church, I know I have heard God’s voice deep in the center of me. He fought for me there. He set a table for me there. He fed me there.
It is a safe place.
***
You’re thirsty, gulping words like water, letting it spill out of the edges of your lips, but you don’t care.
This is the medicine, little one. This is what you’ve been searching for since the beginning. You’ve been drinking polluted water, trying to quench your thirst, trying to be made well, but it doesn’t satisfy, nourish or restore.
There’s more to life with me than a simple sinner’s prayer or walking down the aisle. Little one, soon my words will find you and gather you up. My words will be your map, leading you to Papa’s heart.
Little one, when you go where I send you, you will speak what I feed you. You will keep reading Isaiah 6 and what he is to say to the hearts of my people.
There is so much more ahead for you. I will lead you. I will not lear you or turn my back on you. I’m not going anywhere. Ever.
I am leading you into the wilderness where I will awaken your heart to my love. I will use circumstances, affliction, adversity, and yes, even the enemy to knead the orphan out of you.
I am remaking you into my daughter. I am calling up the beloved warrior buried inside you. Watch—she is about to rise.
—PAPA
***
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Too often the world speaks words of harm, and too often we believe them--and so we live stories God never intended for us. Yet God longs to rewrite and redeem your story.
Tiffini Kilgore, founder of the lifestyle and design boutique House of Belonging, grew up in a broken home before marrying at the tender age of sixteen. Years later, divorced and with three small children, she remarried. The seasons that followed brought two more children, another broken marriage, chronic disease, major surgeries, and cycles of abuse--leaving Tiffini feeling alone and unloved.
Hungry for healing and a safe space, Tiffini began seeking Jesus through journaling and soon found breadcrumbs of grace leading her down a new path. There, she found a rich table set for misfits just like her--a place of nourishment and restoration. Where she was fed lies of worthlessness, God fed her truth that she was his treasured daughter. Where she was told she was a helpless victim, God offered her the cup of his strength. Where she once held an empty future, God gave her hope and a fresh start. In cultivating an ongoing dialogue with her Abba Father, God transformed Tiffini's pain into passion, and ultimately, fierce belonging.
Tiffini writes as a modern-day mystic, with lyrical force and deep tending of the soul, in this book for anyone who has ever felt out of place or at odds in the world. Each chapter features compelling narrative as well as a poignant response from "Papa" God as Tiffini calls him, and the result is a stirring invitation to come home to where you belong. Come and sit, take and eat, and join the battle cry to take God at his word.
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