Beautiful

“All praises to the one who made it all and finds it beautiful.”

As I drove home from an errand last week, I listened to the song “Crags and Clay” by Gungor. I heard that lyric, the chorus, sung over and over, and fresh from hearing the news, replete with violence and war, I thought, “How? How can God find this beautiful?”

So much ugliness. We subdue the earth, digging up crags and clay, flattening it with concrete, long gashes of highways crisscrossing its skin. Planes crash to earth, bombs rain down, children go missing, the powerless are enslaved and abused. And then there’s the everyday nastiness of cutting remarks, obscene gestures, judgemental stares, more subtle put-downs and exclusions of those “not like us”—and so many are not like us, whichever “us” we belong to. In these days of violence and suffering, of pettiness and apathy, how can beauty be found? How can the one who made it all do anything but weep?

I’m sure the Creator does weep with us, the hurt and brokenhearted, the victims and the survivors, the martyrs and the sinners. The One who made our hearts feels more deeply than we do. He knows the grief and the pain, the ugliness and the terror, the seeping wounds of the spirit that never fully heal. He knows.

When we think of beauty, we think of great works of art, or towering mountains, or sunrise over the sea. And that beauty is wide and deep and obvious to all who behold it—and, perhaps, somewhat rare.

But the One who created us also sees the hidden beauty—the flower in the jungle, the creatures at the bottom of the sea, the stalactites in a cave yet-undiscovered by humans. Beauty for the sake of beauty, in every corner of nature. And among us, the broken, are the everyday kindnesses, the small acts of love, and compassion in the midst of tragedy—a parent who sacrifices sleep to care for a sick child, the driver who stops to let a pedestrian cross, strangers who tenderly place blankets over the bodies of the dead, a prisoner who prays for another, a volunteer giving a grocery bag of food to someone who needs it. So many acts of love, jumbled in with the ugliness, for the same person who volunteers at the food pantry may snap at a waitress at lunch on the way home. The praying prisoner may have committed terrible crimes. The loving parent loses her temper. We are, all of us, tangled strands of light and darkness, and every day, every moment, we choose which strand to follow.

The Lord your God is with you.
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing. (Zeph.3:17)

The One who knows the darkness of our hearts also knows it when we take a single faltering step toward the light, and greets that step with joy. The dandelion pushes its way up through a crack in the sidewalk, and the Creator of life rejoices at its perseverance. Life breaks out, no matter what ugliness surrounds it.

Sometimes the ugliness is so pervasive, the evil so deep, that we cannot see. But God sees. Yes, he sees the evil, too, more clearly and painfully than we can. But he also sees the beauty. He takes delight in you when you can’t see the way forward, but try to do the next right thing anyway. He knows when you squelch that impulse to yell at your kids, even if no one else does. He knows when you pray for strangers in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Iraq, and sees the beauty of a heart that is soft enough to be broken by the pain of people you’ve never met.

As a dandelion reaches up through the cracks in the pavement, as trees grow toward the sky, as birds chirp in the darkness before dawn, so we reach toward the light, despite the despair and ugliness around us and in us. And the One who made it all finds it—finds us—beautiful.

 

(Skip to about 4:40 for the "Crags and Clay")

Side Effects

I forget, some weeks, until my phone reminds me. Oh, yeah, it’s time. Time to take my once-weekly pills, the ones that stave off pain and stiffness and weakness and fatigue—or at least are meant to. So far, they work.

I get 6 out of 7 days to forget. Forget that my immune system has gone crazy. Forget that span of months when I struggled to unbuckle a car seat strap, or cut up an onion, or plod up the stairs. I get to push it all aside and pretend I’m healthy.

And on the seventh day, I remember.

I dutifully take my pills on a Wednesday night, and eat a snack to cushion the medicine, and go to bed.


On Thursday, I wake up and feel fine. About mid-morning—if I’m lucky, it holds off until noon—the fog rolls in, shrouding my mind. The rest of the day, I’m peering through a cloud, thoughts slippery and hard to hold onto, disintegrating into small pieces.

On Thursday, it’s hard to care very much about anything, because fatigue creeps up around me, whispering of warm blankets and soft pillows and the sweetness of sleep. Fatigue is deceptive, though—as lovely as a nap sounds, I know I will regret it when I wake up, foggier and grumpier than before I slept. So I power through—if by “power through” you mean “sit on the couch and stare blankly at the computer screen and try to remember what I’m supposed to be doing.”

On Thursday, I want to cry but mostly can’t. From noontime through bedtime, the tears lurk at the back of my eyes. I used to think it was because I was upset about something. But despair doesn’t generally descend every Thursday at 2 pm and recede on schedule by the morning. Now I’m sure that the meds cause the moods.

Sometimes I think I’m a better parent on Thursdays. It takes so much energy to surface above the fog and fatigue that my voice slows down, becomes less sharp. Everything slows down, really. Hard to get annoyed or angry or anxious when you’re wrapped in cotton batting. Hard to say “no” to a child, too. My sense of urgency dissipates. It’s relaxing, really. Or would be if my to-do list weren’t so long.

On Thursdays, I don’t care about my to-do list. Much.

Some weeks, I feel like I did when I was pregnant—a low-level nausea giving way to hunger, until I eat something. Sometimes eating soothes the stomach, sometimes eating makes it worse. Hard to know which it will be today.

Some weeks, my stomach feels fine and my head pounds. I hate to take even more pills, so I up my caffeine intake—sometimes a double espresso shot works, since I drink coffee so rarely now. Sometimes the headache comes on a Friday, and I question—is it just a headache, from pollen or tension or lack of sleep? Or is it another side effect?

Am I really sick? Or is it just the meds? On a Thursday or Friday, hard to know. And so I ignore the queasiness, the headache, the fatigue. The brain fog makes that easier. I hunker down inside myself, not wanting to complain. I’m bored of complaining.

I take my meds Wednesday night because Thursday holds the least activity. I used to take them on Friday night, but I got tired of ruining my weekends. I resent the loss of my Thursdays, often the only day of the week that’s largely unscheduled. I had been using it as a catch-up day, laundry or phone calls or writing.

I’m writing now. I suppose it counts.

And so I hunker down, and wait for the fog to lift, and tell myself it’s the meds, and mostly believe myself, but behind the ignoring and the waiting is the fear that this time, it won’t go away. That the real me is the confused and foggy one, the one with splintered thoughts, for whom a normal day is an endurance competition.

That the side effects are mere rehearsals for when the meds stop working.

Musings on Manipulation, or Why You Shouldn’t Trust the [Insert Bias Here] Media

I’ve always been a good writer. I love words. I love reading, I love thinking about what I’ve read, I love talking about it with other people. Word play and copyediting are basically the same thing to me. Puns and periods, spelling and Scrabble and sentence structure. Alliteration. Sighing over a turn of phrase like an art lover sighs over Monet.

But there’s a risk, when you’re good with words—and maybe when you’re good at anything that involves communication. And that is, manipulation.

 

Back when moving files over the Internet was fresh and fraught with peril, I worked as a production editor at a typesetting company. The company was somewhat dysfunctional, having grown faster than its organizational structure and employees could keep up. All of the production editors knew that something needed to be changed. Too many errors were made, too many deadlines missed. So we discussed some possible changes to our process, and I wrote a carefully worded, upbeat memo outlining the proposed changes. There was a rather significant difference between the “upbeat-ness” of the memo and the actual attitude of me and my co-workers. It ended with some rah-rah statements about how we could improve, yay! But you catch more flies with honey, right? The other editors read it and we all signed it.

About the same time, the production facility made some big errors in one of my journals’ papers, and I got an earful from the paper’s author. (Thankfully, the author caught the errors before publication.) I was embarrassed and angry that neither I nor the quality-control “experts” at the offshore typesetting facility caught the errors. I wrote a carefully worded, polite but scathing email to my cohort offshore, copied to the manager of the facility and the president of the company.

I was hauled into the company president’s office so fast it made my head spin. (Note: his office was right next to mine. I did say it was a small company, right?) He excoriated me for my negative tone and told me that it was counterproductive to the improvements he and his co-owner were trying to make. Then he picked up the memo I had written and said, “THIS is productive. This is positive! We need more of this kind of attitude!” By this time, I was struggling with my frequent nemesis: tears of anger. I ground out: “I WROTE THAT.”  He relaxed. “Oh, you did? Well, this is great, just what we need! Just don’t send an email like that again, all right?”

And that, boys and girls, is when I realized that I—who cannot lie convincingly in person—am very good at deception.

 

Despite my natural bent toward melancholy and my instinct to over-explain, I can write a pithy, chirpy article with the best of them. It’s all in the wording and the tone, you see. Different genres have different styles, and a good writer notices and follows the rules for a given genre. In fact, a standard seminar at writing conferences is “writing for different markets”—how to write on the same topic in different ways for different publications. A writer who cannot or will not follow the standards of a particular publication or genre just won’t be published there.

 Molding your writing to fit a particular market isn’t truly deceptive, of course. Most times, it’s just good writing. But someone who has the ability to do that certainly has the ability to shade the truth—through choosing what angle to focus on, what tone to use, what quotes from an interview to include, and so on. Thus, I could write an angry email and a saccharine memo about the same systemic problem, and be equally convincing in each one.

 

I also wrote a newsletter for a nonprofit for over a decade. I called up people and interviewed them on a particular topic, and then wrote short articles about that topic based on those interviews. As anyone who knows me would tell you, I hate calling people on the phone. Even more, I hate calling people I don’t know and “bothering” them. I often procrastinated on phone calls until the last possible moment. Some months, my interview quotes were a little sparse.

Funny thing, though, I always managed to churn out an acceptable article by the deadline, even when my calls went unanswered and it felt like I didn’t have enough material. By quoting the people I did manage to interview, and adding some pithy explanatory sentences in between, I pieced together articles that sounded great—expert, even. I was just some 25-year-old copyeditor calling people on her lunch break and writing down what they said, but damned if those articles didn’t sound authoritative.

 

I’ve heard of “imposter syndrome,” where accomplished people (often women) feel that they will be “found out” to be not as competent as they seem to others. That’s not what I’m talking about here, because in these cases I don’t question my competency. Rather, my very competency—both my natural gift and the skills I’ve developed through practice and experience—is the danger.

One more example, and I’m undercutting one of my own posts here, so be kind: the devotion I posted about my grandmother’s punch. Even though the memory is true, and the spiritual parallels I drew were my own, once I posted it, something felt off about it. Partly because I slightly exaggerated just how many cups of punch I remember having (but not how yummy it was!). But mostly because it felt too tidy, too clever—more of a writing exercise, which it was, rather than the epiphany it sounds like. Perhaps that’s why I prefer longer-form devotional writing, like books or blog posts, and why I’m suspicious of tidy, spiritually (or politically or intellectually or..) correct endings. Life, and faith, and pretty much everything else, is more nuanced and complicated than we can summarize in a devotion, or a newspaper article, or a segment on the nightly news.

I’m talking mostly to myself here, trying to work out why something rather subtle about that piece bugged me. I think it’s my personal sense that writing about spiritual things, in particular, carries with it a higher responsibility for authenticity. Authenticity is in short supply, both in the Christian world and in the world at large. That’s why it’s so attractive when it does appear.

And so I question what I read and what I write and what I hear, reflexively, because I know how easy it is for a good writer to manipulate words and ideas to fit a certain opinion, tone, or (perhaps unexamined) bias. And the better the writer, the easier it is, and the more subtle it is.

I just thought you might like to know.  

Easter Morning

They walk up the dirt path close together, swaying toward each other for comfort, their steps slowing down and speeding up in turn. Speeding up at the thought of seeing their Jesus once again. Slowing down when the ache in their chest reminds them that only his body awaits. They each carry a jar of sweet-smelling oil, and some soft, white cloths. It’s a last, small service for the man who had truly seen them, the one who changed them with a few words and the look in his eyes.

Neither woman speaks, save in broken murmurs, sentences dying away half-formed, when they realize that their words don’t matter anymore, even to themselves. The sobs have passed for now, leaving only a shocked, bewildered daze. One woman is dry-eyed, painfully so, like every last drop of moisture has been cooked away in the kiln of grief. The other is liquid, with an unending supply of tears building up in her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. And yet they plod on toward the grave, with the terror of yesterday behind them, and the grief of today and the rest of their lives looming in front of them. The path winds around a small hill, and they are gone.

 

The crash of a falling pot, and then down the path runs one of the women, like she can never run fast enough. She pauses to catch her breath, but can’t keep still, skipping, walking, suddenly looking back toward the grave and smiling. Her tears still flow, but she is gasping and laughing and then running again, running toward town, as if she can’t wait to get there.

A few minutes later, the other woman walks slowly down the path. She takes deep, gulping breaths. Her dry, haunted eyes have filled up with wonder.  She watches the rising sun like she’s never seen it before. She stands tall and majestic in the dawn light, paused there in the middle of the path, lifting her empty hands up, up, like they could hold the sun. “He is alive!” she whispers to the sun, the air, the birds of the morning. And then the tears finally spill, but she doesn’t notice. She starts again down the path, steps strong and sure, and her whispered words deepen and echo, taken up by the birds and the dawn and time itself. He is alive!

Maundy Thursday

“This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you,” and a few days later, after he’s beaten and killed and buried and raised from the dead,  his disciples finally recognize him, after a long walk and longer conversation, in the breaking of the bread.

And so we come, to hear those words and eat little pieces of bread or pita or wafers that get stuck in the teeth. We drink sweet wine or sweeter grape juice out of little plastic cups or big silver chalices, given us by a man or maybe a woman, in long robes or a suit and tie or dress or khakis or maybe jeans and a T-shirt, as we kneel down at the altar or sit in pews or gather around a campfire or whisper in someone’s living room so as not to attract attention from authorities.

We are his body, his hands and feet, his arms and legs, with Christ as the head, says Paul. His body, broken and bloody, blood pouring down, not a shiny gold cross necklace, but blood and guts and tears and sacrifice. We are his body now.

And so we come, scrubbed and shiny, in our Sunday best, but inwardly broken and bleeding, confused and faithless, bitter and angry and lost and searching.

Some say the bread and wine is “just” a symbol, as if symbols have less power, are less real. Some believe a  mystery—that these things of earth transform into things of heaven. Some wait for a special occasion, like tonight, like once a quarter or once a month, and the eating and drinking is set apart, special, holy, and unusual. Some need it more often,  once or more a week, plus tonight and tomorrow and again on Sunday, and the eating and drinking is intrinsic, necessary, holy, and usual.

We walk, we skip, we hobble. We make our way to the place where bread and drink are handed out. We crush the body between our teeth and swallow down blood as if it’s our last true drink. We hope the broken pieces will make us whole.

But his body was broken, and our bodies are broken, and the Body of Christ is broken. Broken, and blessed, and handed out to all comers. And all seek to be blessed, but few seek to be broken. Except One.

And so we come, again and again, dragging ourselves, step by step, burden by burden, sin by sin, with barely enough awareness of the Presence to kneel and open our mouths like baby birds, and accept the gift of bread and wine, of flesh and blood.

We will fail again, we will sin again, we will strive or not, we will be faithful or not. But the Broken One is faithful to every last one of his broken creatures, every last petty or selfish or evil or longing heart.

And so he comes, in the breaking of the bread, and stops, and waits for us to recognize him.

7 Things I Wanted to Post to Facebook

—1—

On one of the first spring-like days, K. had chorus practice after school, so I took A. to play on the school playground. Their elementary school had a brand-new, beautiful playground built just last year. A. played on the playground for exactly 20 minutes before she abandoned it for the adjoining woods. She recruited the  other kids there to work on a building project.

 

She doesn’t know the other little girl in the picture. But she got her to help carry big branches to add to the teepee thingy that other kids have started. A week later, on a different playground, she managed to get 4 boys and 1 girl (all the boys were older and bigger than she is) to play a “princess” version of tag. All of the kids did exactly what she told them to. The girl is a force of nature, in the most charming way.
 

—2—

And then there’s the other side of being 5 years old. Yesterday, the girls and I drove up to visit my parents in PA for a few days.

As we’re driving away from a rest stop about halfway through the trip, at about 2:30 pm, A. says from the back seat, “Mom? I got dressed all by myself this morning.”

Me: “Oh, yeah?”
A.: “And I put on panties, but now they’ve disappeared.”
Me: “What? Are you saying you have no underwear on?”
Big sister: “What? You don’t have panties on!?”
Me: “And you just noticed at the rest stop?”
A.: “Yes”
Me: “Ummmm….Ok, then.”

What else could I do?

—3—

Big sister K. kindly (it seemed) invited A. to sleep with her at Gram and Pap’s house (other options: for A. to sleep with me or in a room by herself). A. was thrilled that Big Sister actually wanted her. Of course, when it came right down to trying to share a (queen-sized) bed, then A. was touching K., or was too close to her, and A. refused to move, and K. was taking up too much of the bed, and yada, yada, yada--and a half-hour of bickering and multiple threats from me later, they finally both went to sleep. Tonight, it started out the same way. Then A. decided that she didn’t want to sleep with K. but with me. Fine, sure, no problem.

Except then K started to cry because A rejected her. “But you were just complaining that her arm was in your face!” says I. “But now it feels like she doesn’t love me anymore!” wails K.

I....just…there is no logic among siblings.
 

—4—

Earlier today, I told K. to “let it go,” which I tend to tell her often, because, well, she needs help doing that. Now, of course, those words are a cue to break into “Let It Go” from Frozen. And then K paused and said,  “Do you know what the boys at school do now? They sing Let It Go and then pass gas. Why are sixth grade boys so weird?”

I told her that it sounded like sixth-grade boys had changed very little since I was in sixth grade. And I thought to myself that I’d like her to see boys as weird for as long as possible Some of the kids her age are already “dating” and “breaking up.” I think she’s had a few crushes, but nothing like the rudimentary flirting and boy-craziness of some of the girls her age. With a little luck, we can delay that another few years. And it sounds like the singing, farting boys may even help with it.

—5—

I’ve been working on writing a Bible study/devotional. I’ve never tried this before, so it’s a bit of an experiment. I showed a bit of it to my mom, who said it seemed familiar to her…then she pulled out a Max Lucado book she’s been reading and said, “Here, read this section. I think you write a lot like him.” So now I’m torn between being hugely flattered (Max Lucado is a giant in the Christian publishing world) and a bit discouraged (why publish me if Max Lucado does the same thing and already has a huge platform?). Of course, once I finish this thing, I can market to a competing publisher: “My mom says I’m the next Max Lucado!” I’m sure that would go over well.
 

—6—

Last weekend, hubby took the training wheels off A.’s bike. She did amazingly well. I don’t know how she got her agility, but she’s definitely more coordinated than K. and me. She needs a bit more practice in starting out on her own, but if hubby steadies the bike and gives her a little push, she can ride it just fine. In addition to some natural ability, I also think her little German bike with two wheels and no pedals helped her with balance. Wish we had known about those when K. was small.

 

 

—7—

 

Every so often, I end up listening to music I haven't listened to in awhile. Audio Adrenaline has reformulated with a new lead singer, so I've been listening to their newer releases. But I downloaded and started listening to their old "Best Of" album a few weeks ago, for the first time in some years. And I nearly forgot about the last song on the album, which God used to get me through my pregnancy with Katrina. Having already gone through one miscarriage, I was incredibly anxious during my pregnancy with her. At some point, I heard this song, and something clicked. I hung on to the chorus of "Rest Easy" for months, whenever my anxiety ratcheted upward. Listening to it again, I see why. The verses are faster and kind of a barrage or words--very similar to how my brain feels when I get anxious. Then the chorus comes in, relaxed and slow, reminding me that God is with me. I don't know whether it will click with anyone but me, but it's a reminder of a hard time in my life that brought me such joy on the other side. A good thing to think about as we enter Holy Week.

 



For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at Conversion Diary

What “Person of Interest” Is Teaching Me About Faith

If you haven’t watched the TV show Person of Interest, check it out. Its premise: a supercomputer built after 9/11 by a reclusive genius billionaire and ostensibly run by the U.S. government collects and analyzes all available data to predict terrorist threats. Data includes all online information, phone calls, security camera footage, and anything else that can be input to a computer. As a byproduct of all that data, “the machine” can also predict threats to individuals—mostly premeditated murder. Harold Finch, the computer’s creator, can’t bear to ignore the individual threats (deemed “irrelevant” by the government), so he recruits ex-intelligence agents to investigate and prevent the murders. The “story of the week”—whatever person the team protects for the episode—combines with a longer story arc. The show also has prominent themes of redemption and respect for individual life. And the current season has given me food for thought on the nature of our relationship with God.

Over the course of the show, the machine has become essentially sentient—and as omniscient as current data-gathering allows.  And an intriguing character has emerged. Originally introduced as a genius computer hacker (geniuses abound on this show) and sociopathic killer, who is also a beautiful, charming woman, Root sees the machine as a god—the only god she believes in. Through a series of plot twists, Root and the machine establish a relationship. The machine whispers in her ear through a cell phone earpiece (and as of the most recent episode, a cochlear implant), giving her step-by-step instructions that she obeys—almost without question. Her relationship with the machine is slowly transforming her—though she’s still unpredictable and has little regard for human life, the machine has a high regard for the value of human life and restrains her. It even seems to be teaching her. Her latest actions—walking through a gunfight to rescue a man in danger, and getting herself shot in the process—show that her desire to obey the machine supersedes her natural inclinations.

Meanwhile, Finch continues to communicate with the machine in the only way he knows how—the machine gives him Social Security numbers of people in danger, and no more. Finch takes care of the rest, with his own genius computer skills and the help of his team. Root—the amoral killer—enjoys a closer relationship to this entity than does Finch—the highly moral crusader for life, the creator of not only the machine itself, but the machine’s ethics. In an interesting conversation between Root and Finch, Root posits that the machine respects Finch’s boundaries. 

That’s where my musings come in. Finch’s relationship with the machine is rule-bound: he receives only specific information in a specific way. In flashback, the show traces Finch’s sustained effort, dating from the machine’s inception, at limiting the machine’s contact and possible affection for him. In the context of the original premise, this is perfectly reasonable—the machine’s job is to protect everybody equally. But if we explore the machine=God analogy, his actions feel different. He holds up his hand, staving off closer contact. He builds walls—in this case, firewalls—to protect both himself and the machine. Even when evidence accumulates that the machine has become more than he thought it was, he maintains his walls, his rules--no matter how he may yearn for the closer, riskier contact that Root enjoys. Finch’s highest concerns are safety and control. The machine is a machine—and a dangerous one at that, if it falls into the wrong hands.

Root has no such concerns. She’s flouted conventional morality all her life, and sees other people merely as tools for her to use or discard. But her fascination with the machine leads to her volunteering to be the machine’s tool—its human interface. And as she obeys, the machine shows her a different way of interacting with the world. Her genuine love for the machine begins to overcome her disdain for other people. Even though she doesn’t understand the machine’s values, much less its overall plan, she ultimately obeys, to the point of putting her life at risk to save another. At the moment, she wants only to protect the machine, and protect her relationship with it. She is by no means reformed. But I look forward to watching her trajectory.

One could argue that Finch is an example of God’s people under the Law, and Root an example of Gospel. Finch’s interactions with this stand-in for God are prescribed, careful, and limited. I think of the people of Israel, who became very uncomfortable with Moses’s glowing face after he talked to God, and their request that he cover it. The machine gives Finch a mission, and Finch carries it out with little to no help from the machine.

Root, however, takes the machine into her heart—or at least her ear. Most of the time, she does not know the mission. She only goes step by step, listening to the voice in her ear and obeying it. She has faith that the machine has a plan, and that the plan is a good one. External rules don’t apply to her—she follows higher instructions than human law and higher even than her own sense of what she should do or wants to do.

And so I wonder—what walls do I put up to block God’s work in my life? I am, of course, much closer to Finch’s character than Root’s. What’s a rule-follower to do when the rules no longer apply? And how do I respond when I can’t see the whole plan? Root’s character grows from her willingness to obey fully and immediately, without knowing why. Where am I in that “long obedience in the same direction”? Am I listening to the whisper in my ear, in my heart? Am I yielding, or building walls? And when it seems like communication from God is sparse, is it because He is just respecting my boundaries, the walls I throw up, the rules I make up, about what His call should look like?

So there you go. This may be about as geeky of a post as I’ve written. I can’t promise that I won’t overanalyze something else, though…I’m reading the Divergent series finally, and good heavens that’s some interesting commentary on human nature and virtue all wrapped up in a dystopian teenage coming-of-age story. It’s my blog so I get to be a geeky as I want, right?  When I start reading more sci-fi again, watch out.

 

Here's Root talking about her god...creepiest faith talk evah.

7 Quick Takes--Writing and Weather and Words, oh my!

1.      I just wrote a whole draft of “quick takes” on how the TV show “Person of Interest” has got me thinking about our relationship with God, but then I realized that it was much too long to be “quick.” Story of my (wordy) writing life. Since I’ve now upgraded it to a full post, I need to edit it more and flesh it out.

2.      Speaking of writing life, the writing workshop I attended last week changed my focus. I’ve been thinking of writing as that thing I do for myself when everything else is done. But everything else is never done. And I have come to think of it as (1) not only for myself, (2) a gift and a responsibility from God, and (3) not a hobby or a skill, but as necessary to my well-being as food and drink. Something clicked, quietly and without drama. I don’t know where God is leading me in this, but he has re-oriented me, somehow. It’s early days yet, but I hope not to fall back into the overthinking and paralysis that’s marked my attitude toward writing for a long time.

3.      I gave up Facebook for Lent. I know—sooo overdone and trite, the giving up and then the talking about giving it up, and the new! precious! insights! into being present instead of looking at a screen all the time, and the “making a long face, so men might know that you’re fasting, and lo, you have received your reward.” And yet, I was pretty well addicted and used FB as a retreat and an escape. So I gave it up. We’re, what, nearly halfway through Lent? I still miss it, more than I missed chocolate when I gave that up for Lent a couple of years ago. And I don’t have any new insights from my suddenly less-connected life other than realizing that my self-medication for mental stress changed from fiction to Facebook at some point.

4.      Well, no insights other than this: my writing Facebook statuses and comments relieved some of the internal writing “pressure” that I feel.  Hence the precipitous drop in blog posts when I became enamored with FB.

5.      I really, really need to complain about the weather. Again with the triteness. But people, it is now officially spring. Forecasters say sunny and upper 60s tomorrow, and possible SNOW on Tuesday. It’s…just…I can’t even…sigh.

6.      Part of the frustration now is that my rheumatologist said I could lower my dose of immunosuppressant once the temperature was consistently over 60 degrees. Apparently cold weather is harder on autoimmune diseases (and Reynaud’s syndrome is a common companion to AI disease, although I don’t have it at this point), so she doesn’t want to try a lower dose until it gets warm. I am eager to lower the dose, since I basically lose one day a week in brain fog, extreme fatigue, and often headache. (One day lost but seven days without pain or rash and six days without [much] fatigue, so it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.) C’mon spring!

7.      The band Gungor introduced me to Amena Brown, a Christian spoken-word artist who was on their live album. And then she turned up on a blog I read, doing this amazing reading/spoken-word poem with Ann Voskamp, whose prose writing is half poetry anyway. It's worth your time. And now I want to be a spoken-word poet when I grow up.  I embedded the video below, but Blogger seems to think that all videos come from YouTube, so I had to download it to my computer and then upload it here, and it looks a bit blurry to me. If you want to go to the source and watch a full-screen version that's a bit clearer, here's the link: http://vimeo.com/89473829 

 

 

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary.

Christmas in March

I recently returned from a writing workshop sponsored by the Women's Leadership Institute, an organization associated with Concordia University Wisconsin. The workshop focused primarily on writing in a Christian, specifically Lutheran, context. One writing prompt gave us a Scripture verse and an "object" and asked us to write something combining the two. I received Rom. 8:31-32 and "grandmother's recipe card." It is Christmassy, but since we just received 7 inches of snow last night, and the kids are on their tenth? eleventh? snow day of the year--well, I'm not really feeling St. Patrick's Day. And this memory always makes me smile, so I'll hope that it makes you smile, too. Here's an edited version of what came out of that assignment.


What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ³² He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? --Rom 8:31-32 (NIV)

Cookies star in many a holiday gathering, but Christmas will always taste like Gram’s punch to me. The whole family would pile into the car and drive the five minutes down to Gram and Pap’s house. We sat in their front room, which they only used at Christmas. The overstuffed couch looked and felt stiff; a fake tabletop tree sat on an end-table pushed in front of the window; and waves of heat rose from the floor vents. We kids shifted uncomfortably on the couch and pretended to be interested in the lovely sweater that Pap gave Gram for Christmas. But, really, we were just waiting for the punch and cookies.

Gram served from a real glass punch bowl, filled to the brim with pale orange liquid, with bits of sherbet fizzing and floating on top. That giant punch bowl seemed bottomless. Ladle after ladle of sweet, fizzy goodness went into our paper cups. We drank until we could drink no more (or until our parents put a stop to our greediness).

The bounty of my grandmother’s Christmas punch recalls the bounty that our Lord showers on us. Gram sacrificed a little time and a lot of orange sherbet for her beloved children and grandchildren. But Jesus gave up all for us—his life for our sins, his glory to be with us on earth.  Often, we get mired in the muck of life here on earth—sickness, violence, temptation, depression. We feel beaten and broken, undeserving of the sweetness of God’s love. But God has already proven that He loves us, through Jesus’s sacrifice. And He wants to give us all things: forgiveness, shelter, peace, and love overflowing. He offers us the cup of salvation; we only have to reach out and take it.

And somehow, I think it tastes a little bit like my grandmother’s punch.

7 Quick Takes, Family Edition

1. This week, I made a quick trip up to my parents' house in PA. My mom has a (very painful)herniated disc, so my sister and I cooked some meals and I took them up, leaving the kiddos in the care of hubby. I can't remember the last time I drove any significant distance without at least one child in the car--and most often, two children who consider the car to be the best place to hone their apparently much-valued bickering skills. Three plus hours alone in the car, listening to whatever music or podcasts I wanted? Bliss. Maybe my parents will need some more help in a week or two?

2. Speaking of which, my mom has been mostly flat on her back for the better part of three weeks, unable to do any cleaning or tidying up. My dad also has some trouble getting around. I, on the other hand, have no mobility problems to speak of, *and* recently hired a cleaning lady to come every other week. My parents' house STILL looks cleaner and (for sure) tidier than mine. I will now place the blame for this on our darling children (just ignore that derisive laughter from my sister, who stayed with us for a time before we had children).

3. So is it petty to wonder whose food my parents will like more, that cooked by me or by my sister? Maybe I should have given my parents a rating card for each dish, and not told them who cooked what. Except the meatloaf I made kind of fell apart, so after being frozen and reheated, it will likely end up being tasty meat crumbles. Wendy wins again--drat that chicken a la king!

4. Back to the appalling state of our abode--Monday is when I truly realized that tidiness vs. messiness is an inborn trait. My oldest is messy, and sees no problem with it. Asking her to clean up her room (or, when she was younger, her toys) is tantamount to torture, as far as she is concerned. I'm convinced that she really sees no reason for it. "It's fine!" she will say, as I look at her supposedly clean room, and point at obvious pieces of trash on the floor--right next to her trash can.

On the other hand, Monday afternoon, I said to my youngest daughter, "Your friend is coming over tomorrow--can you pick up your toys in the family room? Then later we can clean your room." (She's five, so still qualifies for parental assistance in room cleaning.) She happily (!) cleaned up her toys, then said "I'm going to clean my room now!" and disappeared for a good half-hour. When I checked her room, it was tidy, nothing on the floor, and she had even had a go at making her bed (difficult because it's a loft bed). I'd say it's amazing what the promise of a playdate can do, except that I have tried the same strategy with my oldest and still gotten moans, groans, and maybe one clear spot on the floor where her clean laundry used to be.

5. One of the perks of going up to PA was the chance to stop at the local tea shop. After reading this article about pesticides, plastic teabags possibly leaching chemicals, etc., I have sworn off buying more tea at Teavana, which is the only place I've found here that sells loose tea. If any fellow NoVa residents know of a locally owned tea shop, please let me know! But I don't know that anything can beat the blend I'm currently in love with, an organic black tea mixed with coconut. Yum.

6. In the past year or so, I've really become interested in people's stories. Rather late in the game, I realized that if I ask the right questions and engage with other people, they will tell me the most fascinating things. This is in stark contrast with my modus operandi since childhood--when the stories in books were far more interesting than actual living, breathing people.

Last week, I was sitting on the playground while my younger one played, with my Kindle in hand. A young woman sat down near me. I had seen her briefly the week before, when (who I thought was) her son played tag with my daughter. She struck up a conversation with me, and instead of giving her noncommittal answers and going back to my book, I asked her where she was from. And that led to a very interesting story: a young woman from Jordan, who had come to the U.S. to visit relatives (the boy was actually her cousin) and decided to stay and get her nursing degree at the local community college. She already had her bachelor's degree plus a master's in social work, and had worked in her field, including traveling around the world doing music therapy for an international NGO, for nearly a decade. But she had always wanted to be a nurse; her parents had discouraged her from majoring in nursing when she was younger, because the long hours would make it difficult for her to get married and have children. Now, she was still unmarried and without children, but she was in the United States and an adult, so why not pursue her dream? She was eager to finish her studies and get back to Jordan, though, because she disliked the NoVa weather and missed her family. All this from a random woman on the local playground. And I would have missed it if I hadn't paid attention and listened.

7. And here's a different take on pursuing your dream: Phil Vischer, the founder of the hugely popular Christian cartoons, VeggieTales, now speaks and writes about what he learned when his company disintegrated around him. What happens, he asks, when your dreams die? Listening to this, I was struck again on how truly following Christ can sometimes be the opposite of what culture tells us is important. "Follow your dreams," says the American culture, and people arrive from all over the world to do just that. But Christians are to be about the business of following Christ. How countercultural can you get?

Here's a short version of Phil's story, though I find the graphic shenanigans every time they make an edit annoying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJw_njstsNg

And here's a talk he did at Taylor University, which I found funny and thought-provoking.




For more Quick Takes, go to Conversion Diary.

Called

Here’s how it went from my perspective. The two primary leaders of my church’s women’s Bible study retired in the spring, so a call went out that new volunteers were needed to replace them. [As background, about 50 or more women attend each Wednesday morning. First, everyone meets in a big group for snacks, “fellowship” (Christianese for social time), and a short worship/devotional time. Then, we break up into smaller groups for study (five groups this year, each on a different topic).]

I’d been going to this group for two years at that point, and I had me some thoughts and some opinions on the devotional part of the morning. I was also pretty sure that the hardest role to fill would be the person who spoke to the large group every week. I’ve heard rumors that some people don’t like to speak in public. So, Speech League girl thought, “I should offer to do devotions. I could do that.”  The undertone there, I’m ashamed to admit, was “I could do that better.”

Anyway, on the end-of-year survey/plea for volunteers, I wrote that I’d be willing to “help” with devotions. By “help” I meant, “gimme that mike ‘cause I gots some IDEAS.” I did not follow up or mention it to anyone. I figured if whoever ended up in charge needed help, they’d call me. I dismissed it from my mind and went on my merry way.

In mid-August, I got an e-mail from the new leader of the Wednesday gathering. My response sheet (and another person’s) had been overlooked earlier, but was I still interested in helping with devotions? My first phone call with the leader was interesting. I did this thing I do sometimes—“listen” to the other person with the thing I want to say already in mind, so I can interject it as soon as the other person pauses. Except that the ideas that she was outlining were pretty much the same as the ideas that I had. We were already on the same page in terms of content, and we had never spoken before that moment.

One thing led to another, and I’m now the one who plans (with the music team) and delivers the devotion each week. I get to choose the stories I read, and the Scripture, and I get to use all my inherent dramatic flare (oh, and I do possess some Drah-ma on occasion) to read them. It’s not a lot of time up front—maybe 5 to 10 minutes of me with the mike, bookended by songs selected by the music team. I’m also trying to recruit other members of the group to speak about their faith stories, so it’s not always just me reading out of a book. It’s going well, and we’ve had some good feedback. I feel like I’m contributing my talents to the good of this group, which is made up of truly stellar and spiritual ladies, and which has contributed a lot to my own spiritual growth.

 The leader emailed me a few weeks ago about something or other and added that she was glad I had responded to God’s call to lead devotions.  My knee-jerk reaction was that I had heard no specific call. I volunteered because the job was in line with my skills/talents and I thought they would need the help. I supposed that I was acting on God’s principles of sharing your gifts with others, but there was no burning bush or strong impulse (or at least no impulse that was distinguishable from my, ahem, not-so-virtuous view that I could do it better).

 
Now, here’s the situation as told to me from other people’s perspective: The newly minted leader of Wednesday morning women had everything in place by midsummer (which is saying something in an organization this size undergoing its first leadership turnover in 15 years)--except someone to lead devotions. M. knew from the start, she said, that leading devotions wasn’t her thing. But she was willing to do it if no one else came forward. She said to me recently, ”But every time I thought that I’d just go ahead and do them, the Lord slapped me down. I just knew someone else was supposed to do it.”

At one of the team leadership meetings during the summer, M. announced to the leadership team that she was still looking for someone to take over devotions. (My volunteer sheet was apparently found at some point later.) Last week, a Bible study leader who was at that meeting told me, “When M. said that, the Holy Spirit told me it was you. Your name came into my mind. I didn’t say anything at the time, because I was unsure about speaking up. But I want you to know that it was supposed to be you.”

What gives me pause here is that I had never spoken with this person before September. I had heard her name, but hadn’t put a face to it until this fall. She had never been in a small group with me or had any meaningful interaction with me.

(Another woman heard this conversation and said, “Yeah, I thought of you, too!” This person I knew and had been in small group with, so that was not so disconcerting, though it was very nice to hear.)

The more I think about that conversation, the more it causes me to re-evaluate what I thought I knew about myself and about how God works. I have no reason to disbelieve what I’ve been told. I believe God speaks to people today—heck, I’ve been the occasional recipient of such communication. But not often, or at least not often in a way that has this kind of—supernatural?—feel to it.

The idea of God talking to other people about me is what really gets me. Are the 10 minutes or so once a week that I stand up and read from a book of God-stories  really so important? Am I really so integral to that 10 minutes? It doesn’t seem likely to me. Then again, “his eye is on the sparrow,” so why wouldn’t God be interested in that 10 minutes of someone talking about him and his work?

And does it count as being called if I just thought, “hey, I’m a decent public speaker, I could do that” and threw my name in to the ring? Most of the time, when God called people in the Bible, burning bushes or otherworldly visions or being struck blind was involved. And the person’s response was more like, “whoa, wait, you want me to do what?” Of course, standing up in front of 50 nice Christian women is on quite a different scale than arguing with Pharaoh in his throne room.

Maybe that’s the crux. I think of “being called” as a big deal—one is called to “let my people go” or to go into full-time ministry or to leave your cushy life and take care of dying people in Calcutta. But maybe God also calls us to the smaller things—to give a few extra dollars to that charity, to send that encouraging note, to stand up and read a devotion for 10 minutes each week. And maybe it doesn’t always feel so mysterious, or even terribly spiritual. Maybe it’s God working through our own willingness to serve.

And maybe, just maybe, we’re more important to God’s plan than we think we are. Maybe we influence people more than we know. Maybe the small tasks that we fumble through, with our mixed motives and our haphazard ways, are still vital to God’s kingdom. What if God’s calling you, quietly, faithfully, lovingly, to take up those small tasks, to learn more of his ways, to follow Him in the everyday--and not wait for that burning bush before you begin?

The Problem with Knowing the Right Answers

Some years ago, I think I inadvertently freaked out our pastor while giving him a compliment. He had just preached a sermon on the Transfiguration, and had gone in a different direction with it than I had heard before. I told him that I had heard many a sermon on the story of Jesus’s Transfiguration—there’s a Transfiguration Sunday every year on the liturgical calendar, after all. Most sermons I’ve heard on it go in one of maybe two directions—both of which I recited to the pastor. But he had brought something new to it, so I appreciated it.

Over the next couple of years, he mentioned that conversation a number of times, and that’s when I realized that maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. After all, he still had to preach a sermon on that story every year, and I had just shown him that I was a bit jaded with the usual interpretations. I think I took away his fall-back position.

This is the challenge with “growing up in the church”: after a while, you know all the right answers. Or, rather, you’ve heard enough sermons and/or spent enough time in Sunday School that you can predict what lesson the preacher/teacher is going to highlight from the most frequently read Scripture verses.

The Transfiguration? Can’t always stay on the mountaintop, gotta take that glory and insight with you when it’s time to muck around in the valley of real life.

David and Goliath? God will fight for you.

Abraham and Sarah? The importance of faith.

You get the idea. But what happens when you go beyond the “right answers”? That is, the answers those of us who grew up in the church learned in Sunday School? That’s when the real wrestling begins. (There was this guy named Jacob…)

We went to a newly formed “small group” last week (church-speak for combo Bible study/social club/support group…a way for people to actually get to know each other outside of sitting in pews facing forward). Our church is reading through “The Story”—basically a Reader-Digest-condensed-version of the Bible, long on action and short on “begat” lists and tabernacle-building instructions—and the small group discussion focused on the story of Joseph. And as I said to the discussion leader later, I felt like the downer of the group. A good part of the discussion focused on how Joseph’s bad experiences—being sold into slavery, later thrown into prison, and then becoming Pharaoh’s right-hand man, though still a slave—saved him and his family from starvation (and not incidentally, Egypt, as well). I’m sitting there thinking, “Yeah, it says God was with him…but he was still in prison!” And I’m the one who pointed out that, yeah, Joseph forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery, but he did mess with them a good bit, first. (And good for him…they deserved it.)

I guess I have a knee-jerk reaction to easy answers. And the Joseph story is easy to simplify, because Joseph himself says it, to his brothers, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” Ding, ding, ding! Correct answer! And then he and his brothers hug it out. Happy ending.

Maybe the problem is not in the story—it’s in the fact that we can read about a person’s entire life in 10 minutes. But when we’re in the midst of our own lives, it’s not that simple. Some of the members of the group told stories of hard times which turned out to have had blessing and purpose. And sometimes, we can look back and see how something desperately hard worked out for good. Sometimes we see it. Sometimes we don’t—the meaning, the purpose escapes us.

Then, too, I wonder about the practice of examining each Bible verse for a life lesson, a practical application. Should the vivid people and grand adventures of many of these Bible accounts be reduced to “but what does it say to meeeeee?” I believe the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the Bible, but I think that often we are too quick to jump to the end of the story, to recite the pat answer, to speed through the uncomfortable parts.

Joseph was enslaved for over 20 years…and probably for the rest of his life (although once Pharaoh plucked him out of prison, he wasn’t exactly making bricks). I bet those years he spent in prison seemed awfully long and even hopeless, but in the Bible, those years are given just a few sentences. How did Joseph cope? Traditionally, we’d say that he had faith—and I’m sure he did—but did Joseph ever pray, “Hey, God? Are you there? Is this what I get for being faithful?” As readers, we know that he was in the middle of his story, not the end—that good things were coming. But Joseph didn’t know that.

Being in the midst of our own story is different than being the reader of someone else’s story. There’s no jumping to the end of the book, or even the end of the chapter. There are no point-of-view changes, no omniscient narrator or wry voiceover, no real sense of plot structure. Once in a while we might get a glimpse—like Joseph did—of a purpose, a sense of direction. But most of the time, we’re living in the spaces between the sentences, trying as hard as we can to keep the faith. “God was with Joseph” the Bible says, repeatedly. I wonder, did Joseph feel that? Did he know it?

Ah, and now the temptation, to bring it all back to me, to my life. What does this story say to meeee? Can I wrest answers from these musings—or from my life—and come to a tidy ending? What if I just hold up the sharp shards of my disjointed thoughts and doubts and questions, all my old pains and new longings, and let them bloody my hands and cut into my soul, and present them to God, not asking for answers?

7 Quick Takes

--- 1 ---

Both girls have been sick this week, and K has been really annoyed that I made her go to school and kept her sister home. Sucks to be the one who *doesn't* have a fever. A's fever started on Saturday and went straight through Tuesday night. No other symptoms. Wednesday morning, she woke up with a normal temp. Back to school on Thursday. K is still coughing...since the weekend before Labor Day. She's been through one round of antibiotics and five days of albuterol with no effect. Called the doctor for a second round of antibiotics to start today.

--- 2 ---
Both of my children dislike school. A started kindergarten (all-day) with such excitement---loved her new backpack, loved packing her lunch, being a big girl, etc. For the first week. Second week, she was done. She misses me, "school is boring," she doesn't want to go to school. She cries nearly every day at the bus stop. Last week, I wrote a note to her teacher, who responded immediately, saying she had no idea, and that A is great in class. The teacher wrote that she talked to A a little bit about whether she felt sad in school. A came home and said, "My teacher told me not to cry at the bus stop." And she didn't...for one day. Then she got sick and got to stay home, and Thursday it was near hysterics. Today was better, although she still repeated all morning, "School is boring. I don't want to go to school."

--- 3 ---
K also dislikes sixth grade. She says it is tiring and confusing. I suspect that part of the problem is that she hasn't been healthy since school started. But it is also a fairly big change in schedule for her, since the kids are switching classes 4 times a day. Last year, it was a half-day with one teacher and a half-day with the other. They're preparing the kids for middle school next year, of course, but since the elementary school doesn't have lockers, the kids must carry everything with them from room to room in their backpacks. I'm wondering whether the lack of a "home" is wearing on her.

--- 4 ---
And then there is one of those things that's hard for a parent to assess. There's a boy. An annoying boy who likes to get laughs or attention by swearing. And K says that he especially likes to say "bad words" to her. It bothers her a lot. We suspect that he has a little crush on her, but it's also possible that he's just plain targeting her for teasing. It's hard to tell from her description. She dealt with it last spring by asking the teacher to move her away from him (or vice-versa), and it seemed to help. She has not done that so far this year. He is seated near her in homeroom (about 15 minutes, she says) and in one of her other classes. We've talked through various strategies with her--put up with him/ignore him; ask the teacher(s) to separate them; talk to the counselor about it; have Mom e-mail/talk to the counselor about it. So far she's chosen to just try to ignore him. I would love to observe exactly what's going on, since I can't tell if it's just a boy trying out some ways to garner attention or if it's reached the level of harassment. But K has now reached the age where Mom intervening is an embarrassment. I was going to e-mail her teachers on a different (minor) matter, and she begged me not to.

--- 5 ---
People are asking me what I'm going to do now that both girls are in school all day. My plan is to write more. Here, and some fiction I'm experimenting with. But somehow, so far my days end up just floating away. It's time for the bus stop before I know it. Time management has always been a huge challenge for me. I'm always making lists and schedules and then can't figure out how to stick to them. This week has been a wash because of A being home sick, but today and next week I will start anew...again.

--- 6 ---
Here's another thing with the writing: there is always something else to do. And usually that "something else" has to do with the house or the kids or volunteer work at church. And doing any of those things serves other people. Writing feels self-indulgent--I'm not getting paid for it, it may never see the light of day except for maybe the few people who read my blog--and yet, it is one of those gifts that I think God wants me to use. So I spend the day feeling guilty because I "should be" writing, or I spend writing time thinking I "should be" doing something more productive, like cleaning up or running errands. Or I can just noodle about online, reading Facebook and the like, and I can feel bad because I'm not doing anything at all. Aren't you glad you're not in my brain?

--- 7 ---
Speaking of my weird brain, Jennifer at Conversion Diary has been talking about Meyers-Briggs types, and a commenter linked to a YouTube video about my type--INFP. A series of motivational-style posters and sayings, most of which seem pretty darn accurate. (Like, "Clutter? What clutter?" as papers rain down from on high.) My favorite: "INFP. I am NOT too sensitive!" The picture even looks like me as a little girl. I just spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the video to start right at that point, but I can't get it to work right. So fast forward to 3:33 to see it.



INFP is the rarest type, I believe, which just goes to show what a special snowflake I am.

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Paul's Story, Your Story

I wrote and read this devotion for "Gathering Day" for our church's morning women's Bible study (called Women of the Word). The devotion theme for this year is "God's Story, Your Story, My Story, Our Story." (I would have had fewer "stories" but it was a team decision.) Anyway, I got some good feedback on it, so I thought I'd post it here.

Hello, my name is Jennifer, and I am part of God’s story. And so is every one of you. Today, we’re going to look at Paul’s story, and how it might speak to us as we begin a new season together,  seeking to follow the call of Christ.

Here is Paul in Philippians, telling his story. This is from The Voice translation.

⁴ If any try to throw around their pedigrees to you, remember my résumé—which is more impressive than theirs. ⁵ I was circumcised on the eighth day—as the law prescribes—born of the nation of Israel, descended from the tribe of Benjamin. I am a Hebrew born of Hebrews; I have observed the law according to the strict piety of the Pharisees, separate from those embracing a less rigorous kind of Judaism. ⁶ Zealous? Yes. I ruthlessly pursued and persecuted the church. And when it comes to the righteousness required by the law, my record is spotless.

⁷ But whatever I used to count as my greatest accomplishments, I’ve written them off as a loss because of the Anointed One. ⁸ And more so, I now realize that all I gained and thought was important was nothing but yesterday’s garbage compared to knowing the Anointed Jesus my Lord. For Him I have thrown everything aside—it’s nothing but a pile of waste—so that I may gain Him. ⁹ When it counts, I want to be found belonging to Him, not clinging to my own righteousness based on law, but actively relying on the faithfulness of the Anointed One. This is true righteousness, supplied by God, acquired by faith. ¹⁰ I want to know Him inside and out. I want to experience the power of His resurrection and join in His suffering, shaped by His death, ¹¹ so that I may arrive safely at the resurrection from the dead.

Paul had every credential of success according to both the world and the religious establishment. He was born into a respectable, even prominent family. He was well-educated. He was faithful to his religion—he was detail-oriented in obeying Jewish law. He was so dedicated to the well-being of Judaism that he persecuted those troublemakers and rabble-rousers who had the gall to preach that Jesus was the Messiah. He was secure in himself and his own righteousness. Until Jesus knocked him to the ground—literally—and turned his life upside down. Paul heard the call of Christ, and nothing was ever the same. He threw it all away—his comfortable religious practice, his reputation, most likely his family and friends, even his personal safety.

But he didn’t throw away his life for a cause, a way of life, or even a new religion. No, what drove Paul, his ultimate goal, was knowing Jesus. We might say that Paul devoted his life to spreading the Gospel. But what Paul says is “I want to know Jesus inside and out.” To Paul, the prize is not success, or self-improvement, or even doing great things for God. The prize is Jesus himself. And to know Jesus more and more, Paul is willing to leave his comfortable life behind him, to go through hardship and suffering—even death—if it will bring him closer to Jesus.

Maybe you have a story like Paul’s. Maybe you grew up in “the church”—whichever church that might be. You went to Sunday School, to youth group, maybe even a mission trip or a Christian college. You were the good girl, the one who followed the rules, the person all the moms wanted to babysit their kids. As an adult, you went to church faithfully, brought your children to Sunday School, maybe sang in the choir or went to Bible studies. You’ve been trying your best all your life to live up to the expectations of what being a good Christian looks like. And maybe all those expectations are tiring you out.

Or maybe your story is not like that. Maybe the only time you walked into a church was for weddings and funerals. Life in your family was good, but God didn’t figure much into it. Or maybe life in your family wasn’t so good, and you still carry scars from it. Perhaps you’re still haunted by mistakes you’ve made, or by dark paths you’ve traveled, either because of your own choices or someone else’s.  Maybe some days you’re struggling just to keep your head above water.

I’m here to tell you that no matter what your story is, God wants to be a part of it. Not just a part—God is calling you—calling me—to stop holding onto our own story so tightly, and allow ourselves to become a part of His story. The world tells us that we should be masters of our own fate, we should take control of our lives, pursue our dreams, achieve our goals. But God calls us to surrender our fate, to give up control, and most of all, to pursue Him. Life with God is not about following rules or living up to expectations—our own or anyone else’s. It is about following the gentle call of Jesus and allowing him to heal and shape us.

When God’s story intersected with Paul’s story, Paul was completely and utterly changed. Not all of us will have a dramatic Damascus road experience (although some of us will). But all of us can seek to know Jesus more and more, to ask Him to shape our story. That’s why we’re here. That’s why Women of the Word exists, as a way to seek Jesus together.

Over the next few months, will you allow God’s story to intersect with yours? How will your story change—how will my story change—as we open our hearts and our lives and ask God to tell His story through us? I can’t wait to find out.

The Language of Worship

I’ve read that language can shape how we think, as well as how we speak. From my own limited foreign language experience, I tend to think that’s true. German is a highly structured language compared to English, requiring the poor English speaker to memorize dozens of endings for each word, so that each part of speech is properly categorized and matched within the sentence. Spelling is consistent—what you see is what you get. On a visit to Germany in college, I impressed the lady sitting next to me at church with my German. I admitted, sheepishly, in English, that my German was actually very limited. But I could sing a hymn or read a prayer with the best of them, because I knew how to pronounce everything. English, in contrast, greedily poaches words from other languages, pronounces them as it will, and never changes the spelling. Thus, English words have an unpredictability that makes spelling bees a real challenge.

One may argue that the German culture is similarly structured, with defined roles—and rules—to an extent that can seem fussy and even overbearing to us casual, careless  Americans. The ubiquity of American media—as well as near-universal English study at young ages, I would posit—may have “softened” some of the overt social formality in younger generations, but it still exists.  

Recently, we attended Palm Sunday services with my parents in my hometown.  They currently attend a United Methodist church, a recent change for them. Although I grew up “in” a UM church, my parents switched to a Lutheran church years ago, and I, of course, have been a Lutheran since just after I married in 1992. So it’s been a very long time since I worshiped in a United Methodist church. I wondered whether I would feel “at home” despite my long sojourn as a Lutheran, and in some ways, I did. The hymns were all very familiar, the same hymns I sang as a child and teenager—especially “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus,” which I still have nearly memorized. But the service—even the sermon—felt different in a way that surprised me.

I “converted” (does one convert from one Protestant denomination to another? Seems a strong word when much basic theology remains the same.) to the Lutheran church just after hubby and I got married. He was raised in the Lutheran church and feels comfortable there. But I didn’t switch just for him. I fell in love with the Lutheran liturgy—the ancient and evocative  words, the eerie chanting, the emphasis on Scripture and on Communion. And the foundational Lutheran theology of grace, grace, grace.  Imperfectly lived out, for sure, but one of the understandings on which Lutheran theology and culture rests.

Traditional Lutheran liturgy differs only slightly from Catholic and Episcopal liturgy (though our theologies have more significant differences), and through the Catholic tradition, reaches back into the earliest days of Christianity. Much of the words are taken from Scripture, soarguably the liturgy reaches back even further… to John seeing visions on the island of Patmos (“Worthy is Christ, the Lamb who was slain”), to Simeon holding the baby Jesus (“Lord, let your servant depart in peace”), to David and the Psalms. The liturgy, to me, feels dense with mystery and meaning and history. I slip into it when the service begins, like a comfortable garment. I’m familiar with the order, the movement through the service, the words that seem to echo through the ages and around the world. I am a part of a long line of believers, a tapestry knit together over time and space, singing or reciting or praying the same words, in many languages.

The Methodist worship, in contrast, seemed pared down, simplified. Much less standing, no kneeling. A hymn, a prayer, a reading, a sermon. The service felt open. It had more space, less density. Instead of a layered, woven tapestry, it was a line of polished stepping-stones, each one defined and solid. Few congregational responses, other than hymns. And I thought of Methodist history, of John Wesley and circuit preachers on horseback in the American wilderness, stopping to preach, to sing, to pray with plain-talking, work-hardened pioneers. That the Methodists tend toward minimal liturgy makes sense in the light of their history as well.

Circling around again to languages, I come to my mother, who sees the two services differently than I do. She finds the Lutheran liturgy repetitive, boring, and therefore doesn’t find the same meaning and comfort in it that I do.  I have no real complaints about the Methodist service, other than it seems less participatory, more focused on what’s “up front.” But I do prefer the liturgy.

Of course, the reason we have so many denominations is generally not a good one—despite Jesus’s repeated pleas and prayers that his followers be marked by love and unity, the Church became many churches because of our inability to agree or to tolerate disagreement. But perhaps one of the blessings of having many “flavors” of Christianity is that we also have many languages of worship. Those of us who find meaning in familiar words, in chanting, in kneeling and standing and sitting, can worship God in the language of liturgy. Those of us who find meaning in simplicity, in hymns, in the quiet spaces between prayers, can worship God in their language. And other languages too, the language of a joyful gospel choir and call-and-response; the language of guitars and drums and raising hands to the sky; the language of laying on of hands and speaking in tongues. All are different, and yet all are for the same purpose: to worship the One who made us.

And, someday, I believe, we will worship all together—in every language, in every tongue. Us liturgical folks will be kneeling and murmuring the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pentecostals will be shouting and dancing, and the contemporary praise bands will be playing loud and fast, and the United Methodists will be “telling that old, old story,” in English and German and Spanish and Farsi and Hindi and on and on, and our separate worship languages will harmonize into one song, THE Song. And the Lord God will smile and laugh and love us all at once. And it will be good.

7 Quick Takes

1. I’m going to the Balanced Bites nutrition seminar tomorrow in DC. I’m excited to meet several cookbook authors/bloggers that I’ve been reading, and to maybe learn a bit more about things I can do to stay as healthy as possible. Also nervous about seeming stalker-y on the one hand or stiff and shy on the other. I’m old enough now that I should just accept that my social awkwardness will assert itself somehow. I will most likely blurt out something that makes me cringe at the memory for days afterwards. There. If I expect it, I shouldn’t worry about it too much, right? It’s all about managing expectations. And sweet, sweet denial.

2. We watched the episode of “The Big Bang Theory” last night where Koothrappali had a texting date in a library. Other than the fact that I can’t text very fast because two left thumbs, that’s how I feel sometimes—I am much better in writing than I am in person.

3. Which brings me to something I think about now and again. I should write up a complete post about it sometime, but here’s something to think about next time you read a newspaper article, book, or blog post: people who are good with words can make anything sound authoritative, or slant a story the way  they think it should go. Maybe that’s why I don’t necessarily believe news stories tell the whole truth—I know how easy it is to slant a piece, because I’ve done it. I’ve managed to crank out authoritative-sounding articles based on three 15-minute phone interviews by stringing together “good quotes” in an organized manner. I once wrote a very peppy-sounding memo for improving practices at a company I worked at, based on my and others’ ideas. A week later I wrote an irate e-mail about mistakes made on one of my projects. I was called into my boss’s office and reprimanded for the tone of the e-mail. He said it was counterproductive, and look at the way this memo is written, you should try to communicate like that. He didn’t know I wrote that memo, too. The difference was, the memo was slanted to the way I knew he and the troubled section of the company would respond. The e-mail told the same truth, just stated baldly and bluntly. Both, of course, were written verywell.

4. Got an allergy workup yesterday. Nothing terribly significant. “Luckily” for me, they were extremely thorough. When I came up negative to everything on the scratch tests on my back, they re-tested for environmental allergens with stronger solutions. With about 30 syringes, injected under my skin and good heavens, that hurt. Came up weakly positive to cats, dogs, horses, cockroaches (!), and a couple types of mold—but weak enough that the doctor didn’t think I needed to do anything about it, unless I had stronger symptoms. So I started my prednisone today. My adventure in pharmaceuticals begins.

5. Is it a bad thing that I hope the prednisone gives me some burst of manic energy? That might be the only thing that helps me get the house in half-decent shape. Of course, I already want to kick K. out of her room for a few days and do some major crap removal. (Expensive crap, mind you. Only the best toys-that-will-be-played-with-briefly-and-then-thrown-into-the-closet-until-mom-tries-to-donate-them for my kids.) She complains that she can’t clean her room because she has no place to put things. But then refuses to part with one.solitary.item. because “It is mine, mine, my precioussssss.”

6. Now that I’ve complained about K., I must brag about her. She’s been having some minor troubles with the boy who sits next to her in math class. From what I can tell by her description, the kid is trying to shock and/or impress her. ‘Cause telling a girl that you can curse in various foreign languages (and then proceeding to demonstrate) may just be the most sophisticated pick-up line a 5^th grade boy can think of. In any case, it’s been annoying her. She asked me to call the teacher and ask her to separate them. I told her that she should talk to the teacher herself, privately if possible. We rehearsed a sentence or two that she could say. She was nervous the next day before school, but I put the ball in her court: it was her problem to solve, and her decision whether the boy was distracting enough to brave talking to the teacher about it. She came home that day and said she’d made the request, and the teacher moved her immediately with no fuss. And that now she could concentrate better. Yay for K. solving her own problems and speaking up for herself.

7. I’ve been reading through the Gospels backward (John first, and now Luke), and this evening I read Luke 6:45. “⁴⁵ A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Usually, I would skim right over this—good fruit, bad fruit, any good church girl has heard this a thousand times. But tonight I thought, What am I storing up in my heart? Maybe I should choose more thoughtfully.

For a gazillion more Quick Takes, go to Conversion Diary.