During the last year of seminary I was as dry as desert sand. My Spiritual Direction’s professor, John Weborg, had warned us, “You’ll end up having a big head with the knowledge of God, but your spiritual life will have shriveled”—or some such words. My life was shriveled. I cried out to God borrowing words from Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21,

“I pray that You would grant me, according to the riches of Your glory, to be strengthened with power through Your Spirit in my inner being, so that I may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”

“Please, Lord, let me know again your love—not just in my head—but in my heart!” His answer came wholly unexpected: memories of a chalkboard.

A memory came back to me which I hadn’t recalled in many years. When I was in third grade I was enrolled at Christian Academy in Japan, a boarding school on the outskirts of Tokyo. In our classroom our teacher had an extra three paneled chalkboard on the side of the room opposite the windows. At the beginning of the quarter, she announced that throughout the term she would give us oral math drills. She told us that based on our performance she would write our names on the board with the top scoring student’s name on the top of the left hand panel, and the bottom scoring student’s name on the bottom of the right panel. Without ever saying it, we all knew that the left panel was for the smart kids, the middle panel the average, and the right panel—the stupid. At the end of the day my name was on the bottom of the left panel! I was one of the smart kids—for a day. Over the next several days I watched my name plummet until it was on the bottom of the right panel. Each morning coming into the classroom I had to stare at my name at the bottom of the right panel, no words in the silence save an unspoken and solitary, “stupid.” After several weeks I didn’t care anymore. I just accepted the fact that our performance defines who we are and that I was nothing.

I had asked God to show me His love. Instead, He brought back to mind painful memories. “Why God—when I’ve asked You to reveal Your love for me—have you brought back, of all memories, this memory?—memories of a chalkboard.” Some days later, sitting in the stillness of our apartment on Christiana, the whisper of His voice came to me in my spirit, “Grant, in My kingdom there are no chalkboards. In My kingdom your performance doesn’t count; it’s My performance that matters!” And I found myself once again basking in the wide open spaces of his boundless, extravagant, wasteful, generous-to-a-fault love. I still struggle between a life lived out on the chalkboard of my performance and a life lived out in the wide open spaces. My prayer for you too, is that you will come to know that in the reality of His kingdom you are already living in the wide open spaces of his boundless, extravagant, wasteful, generous-to-a-fault love! Because in the end we are not defined by our performance, mere memories of a chalkboard, but we are defined—entirely—by His love…