Jealous? Weepin'?

If you haven't heard it yet, you might like to listen to Iron & Wine's Flightless Bird before reading further (click here).

This fall, I kept this song on repeat. I would listen to it while I walked Eevee, while I got ready for school, when I drove around town. 

There was one line in particular that caught at an old sadness and tugged, tugged -

Have I found you? 

Flightless bird -

Jealous, weepin'

And the immense tenderness and light in the artist's voice lifted and shattered a buried brick that had weighed on my heart since I was little.

For most of my childhood, the fiercest and most defining emotion that I can remember feeling was also the one of which I was most woefully ashamed. And I had somehow come to the conclusion that it was the one emotion that Jesus couldn't have empathized with, because how could he ever possibly have felt it?  

Jealousy. 

I was wracked with it. Jealous of my sisters. Jealous of kids with cool clothes. Jealous of girls with straight hair. Jealous of anyone who achieved anything better or earlier or with more panache than I. I remember one of my sisters whipping the awful accusation at me one day, voice dropping with shame that I would walk in such blatant Sin: "you're just ... jealous!" 

And I couldn't argue with her. She was right. I was that despicable thing.

And worst of all, I wasn't a blazing, honest sort of jealous. No; I was a squirming, crying, angry, pretend-it's-about-something-else sort of jealous.

I writhed.

I longed to be one of those people who could celebrate others, who could love the good things that came to them instead of envying them. But I could not. 

I was walking Eevee through a gloriously orange October sunrise. Flightless Bird came through my headphones like it occasionally did, and suddenly I heard it, the tender chorus that was like listening to a song sung by a very kind, a very wise, a very deeply happy Creator:

Have I found you?

Flightless Bird,

Jealous, weepin' -

And the absolute drenching beauty of sunrise washed over me as I listened to it on repeat. I could see it now: little Janelle, jealous and weeping and raging over the unfairness of existing as a flightless bird. Of course weeping. Of course jealous. Wings bound tight. Raging, and longing.

Jealous? Weepin'? What else could I possibly have felt?

Have I found you?

I cried like a baby. Watching little Janelle through His eyes was so healing.

Yes, he found me.

I wept for the whole world.

Bound. Jealous. Weeping.

He found us.

He found us and he keeps on finding. He found us in Bethlehem, in Cana, in Galilee, in Gethsemane. He found us in the dark dawn (jealous? weeping?). 

He finds us.

Wherever we are, whatever our burdens.

And (sometimes out of the blue on a sunny morning) he sets us free.

Xo.