New Wine

I never liked wine before living in France. As a child I had always assumed that wine tasted like grape juice, so when I took a massive gulp as a youth wanting to try her fathers glass of wine at Thanksgiving, I was rudely awaked to the reality of alcohol - and it tasted nothing like Welch's. I could honestly say after living just one month in France, however, I was quickly hooked. I stayed with a host family who's father was a wine connoisseur, keeping hundreds of aging wines in a cellar below their flat. Every night, multiple bottles would be opened during our three-, sometimes four-, course meals so that my naive little American self could learn a thing or two about good wine. 

While I barely stomached it out of politeness in the beginning, I grew to have a fond appreciation for the many wines that passed through my glass in that first month. Hardly speaking much French at the time, it was difficult to soak in every detail about wine, but a few things made sense and stuck as my French host family bravely and generously stitched together their understanding of English words to help me understand the French counterparts. One thing that stuck was the process of making wine and how, ironically, the best wines come from the poorest soils in marginal climates. In broken Frenglish, I was told how poor conditions stress the vines and how stressed vines worked harder to produce their fruit. The result is fewer grapes, but they are more vibrant and rich in flavor than crops with fertile soil and generous rain seasons.   

I wonder what it would be like to be a grapevine in poor soil - the feeling of dry, crumbling earth and blazing heat beating on my withering leaves. Would I question where I was planted? Would I cry out in misery? Would I beg for the vine grower to water my roots so that I wasn't so stressed to produce fruit? Would I question why my planter wasn't taking better care of me? 

I don't think any of us ask to be planted in dry, crumbling earth. If anything, I think we ask for dewy, fertile, rich soil where our roots can thrive and we are comfortable. I don't think any of us ask to be in unpleasant, difficult places in general.

But it is here, in dry soil, that we often find ourselves.

And it is here that we ask God, "Why?"

We find ourselves in despair, saddened by the reality of things we have lost or things we haven't attained. We find ourselves in grief, struggling to understand how we've lost people or relationships. We find ourselves in turmoil, reeling from heightened emotions that we can't seem to shake, no matter how much time passes. We find our ourselves keenly aware of the fragility of our own hearts and how certain things can make our once seemingly invincible bodies feel like mere dust that could disintegrate at any moment. We find ourselves as crisping leaves, withering in the heat, and we wonder how fruit, let alone good fruit, could ever be produced from our depressed state. 

I didn't ask to be planted here, God. I didn't ask to be in this soil. I didn't ask to feel confused, to feel gutted, to feel powerless or heartbroken. 

But God, in His mercy, planted me there. Yes, in His mercy. And He planted you there, too. In His mercy. 

Tim Keller, when wrestling through a conversation with God, said he felt this distinct answer to his questioning despair: "My child, when a son or daughter of Mine asks for something, I give him or her what they would have asked for if they knew everything I know." 

Would I have asked for this, God? If I knew everything that you knew... would I have asked to go through this much pain and this much suffering that I don't understand? 

In the crushing, in the pressing

You are making 

New Wine

In the soil, I 

Now Surrender

You are breaking

New ground

So I yield to You and Your careful hand

When I trust You I don't need to understand

The first time I heard those lyrics, I remember aching abominably as my heart resonated with each word. I felt the crushing. I felt the pressing. And I knew in my logical mind, yet disconnected heart, that God was using this to grow me so I was supposed to surrender and give the situation to him. 

But you know, I started to understand something else. It wasn't the surrendering of deciding to give things to God. It was the surrendering of having no other option. The surrendering of, "Lord, I don't know how to exist with this much pain....please take it." It was the helpless, reckless abandon of clarity. It was my body prostrate on my bedside floor in a pile of snot and tears begging God to take me as I was - broken, confused, having no other option than to trust in Him. 

Make me your vessel

Make me an offering

Make me whatever you want me to be 

I came here with nothing 

But all you have given me

Jesus, bring new wine out of me 

I think God can and does go into any space that He pleases in our lives. But I think He wants us to want Him to come into those spaces. I think it means something to Him when we ask Him to come and indwell in every part of our being because we finally see that as a need. Because, in His mercy, He has brought us to this place where we see that desperate need for ourselves. It's here that we ask Him,  without restraint, to come into places where we hadn't seen a need for Him to be before. And I think He delights in that. 

I think He delights knowing that our greatest needs are satisfied by Him and that when we get to a place where we realize that He is our greatest need and we actually ask for Him to satisfy that need... that is what He delights in. 

But I also think that if it were left to us, we wouldn't come to that conclusion on our own. We wouldn't ask Him to envelop every fiber of our being because we wouldn't see it as a need - unless He showed us. And sometimes showing us, means bringing us through despair, allowing pain so that the outpouring of our souls would be a broken and contrite heart, an aroma pleasing to God.

So here we are - planted in dry, crumbling soil with the sun beating down on our withering leaves. The budding fruit from our lives is using every ounce of nutrients it can muster, solely reliant on the Vine from where we are growing. Our grapes are few, and we struggle to see our value in such little produce. When it comes time to harvest, it seems a meager portion to offer crisped leaves and small grapes. Nonetheless, we are gathered. And we are crushed. And we are pressed. And we ache terribly, not understanding the process. We then go through the fermentation process, the clarification process and the bottling/aging process. And with each step, we don't understand why we are tossed around, squeezed for our worth and stored up.

We don't understand the art behind making fine wine. We don't understand that there is a sacred process. We don't understand that God, in His infinite wisdom, knows how rich, how sweet, how pungent the finished product will be because of the product our stressed vines created. We don't understand that God, in His mercy, saw it fit to bring us through places of the deepest anguish, so that our hearts would have no other inclining than to surrender to His glorious plan for us.

I don't have to understand the agony, God. Because the agony isn't what matters. It's the closeness to your heart that you have led me to. And if the anthem of my agony became a desperate "make me whatever you want me to be", then I praise God for leading me that place where that is what I would ask of Him. Because the kindest thing He could do is lead me to the space where I would desperately ask, "Lord, make me your vessel. Lord, make me an offering. Lord, make me whatever you want me to be." In His mercy and grace He is making me into new wine.