Be still, my soul

May 22, 2013 By

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(The Long Center / Blue Lapis Light Production)

I am blessed to know creative people. People who understand the need to create, and honor their gifts, and offer sacrifices with a brush or a song or a poem. So a few nights ago I spread out a blanket in front of the sweeping Austin skyline to watch one of my friends dance, thirty feet off the ground, like an eagle taking flight.  The choreography was amazing, with dancers zip-lining off the roof and prancing on suspended platforms and circling large pillars on harnesses that reflected their every move on the outdoor ceiling.  Through the red light it resembled devils at war, prancing and leaping and crouching low.

And the silks, oh the silks.  Without a harness at all, these incredible species of human beings climbed and bowed and swayed and made love to dangling ribbons from the sky, their bodies covered in nude bodysuits adorned with dazzling crystals, and they were the most perfect renditions of angels I’ve ever seen.  The daring moves made me gasp and draw in my breath tight as salt ran down my cheeks.  Sometimes it was too much, like pictures of children being pulled from wreckage and placed in their mother’s arms or soldiers returning from war.  I could scarcely take it in.

And then the duet began, man and woman both dangling in the sky.  She was holding onto him as he swung her free and they twirled and climbed and she trusted his grasp, her back arching and his legs splitting strong and they were so deliciously intertwined. And the concept of the marital union pulsed through my veins, remembering St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians about how two are forged into one.

A new-age voice came pulsing through the speakers, and though the rendition was new the lyrics were penned in 1752, and I’ve sung it since childhood, and I knew that God was there and is and forever will be, even through storms and death and the rubble of tornado tears.

Be still, my soul: thy God doth undertake


To guide the future, as He has the past.


Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake;


All now mysterious shall be bright at last.

Because sometimes it’s not enough to express love in words.  You have to open your eyes and see it, and shut out the world to hear it, and open your heart and feel it.  Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that it’s all too mysterious to explain, and there’s no reason to trust, except you know you must, and you do, and you somehow survive.  God is not simply my friend, or my teacher, or level-headed adversary.  He is not just a crutch for my weakness or a pillow I grasp up in the long nights.

My God is the creator of the universe in which I stand.  He displays love in ways I cannot understand, mercy in a way that I do not deserve, and tears for the lost that is deeper than I can fathom.  And I accept this love, and the creative spirit, and the sweat that flows out of the pores of his children.   I applaud loud, and stand, and bow my head in thanks.

After the dancers swept across the stage and said their goodbyes, I pointed my car toward home.  In that dark and quiet night, I was thankful for the ability to accept mystery through the loud cacophony of life.  Love was born into the world at night with a star blazing, and mystery abounded.  Such love prayed for the cup to pass in the hours which we comfortably slept, but God bled out our sin into darkness once again.  Against the backdrop of the world then, and now, and what is to be.  But the rising, it was revealed.  The son, He rose. And the beauty that resulted was blinding.

Be still, my soul.  At least long enough to take it all in.   

Filed Under: Creativity, Inspirational, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Dreams are for those who laugh

May 14, 2013 By

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I wasn’t sure why I went, really, to this retreat full of writers and strangers all focused on Dreaming Big. In Nebraska, for goodness sakes.  I was at the airport with a heavy heart, telling myself to turn around and go back, back toward piles of undone and unfolded and unclean.  But it was already paid for, and I needed a break, so I boarded the plane with my head shaking slightly back and forth and my hands gripping my purse. What am I to do with dreams at a time like this?  Dreams are for the stable, and the settled.  Those who have things paid for and life wrapped up in boxes.

Dreams are a luxury I just can’t afford.

So I landed and bumped along hills and miles, rounding a corner toward this gathering of souls, through red barns and geese overhead and a landscape peppered with silos. There were speakers and art and writing and coffee, but in the middle of a panel discussion on Saturday afternoon, I rose.  I couldn’t sit anymore.  I couldn’t think anymore.  I was the stoic one in the back who didn’t raise her hands to music. My throat was closing up and I needed to breathe.

So I bundled up and bolted, like I was skipping class and didn’t want the headmaster to catch up.  But as I walked, the pain I left back in the south flew straight into my heart like geese in formation, trudging so predictably back in. I ended up on the edge of a Nebraska lake, all buttoned up in a pea coat to ward off the chilly wind, like I could shore up my own heart.  There were ducks swirling aimlessly around, clucking and dunking and mocking me.  Surely, Lord, you have more in store for me than this.  Surely in time, dreams will arise.  

With the wind and the ducks and the pain chasing my heels, I didn’t feel happy.  I felt like hiding.  And it was then that I heard it, so loud it made me jump. A group of men across the water must have been camping, or having a revival, or playing a mean game of poker, because the only sound I could hear was loud raucous laughter coming from male voices.  Cackling, belly-bending howls that only come from deep inside, where a wellspring of joy bubbles up from within.

Seriously, God?  This? 

And I knew it was my only cure. The one way to break up the sharpness in my chest and shake it up like a snow globe, effervescent bubbles rising from my own soul.  I’d find the funny.  In time, I’d see this season of darkness juxtaposed with jewels of sparkling light, like rubies hidden in Easter eggs found one by one with the passage of years.

Dreams are not for the settled.  For the happy.  For the ones-who-have-it-all.  Dreams are for the broken.  For those who hold their arms out wide and say Lord, I can’t bear it any longer.  Help me find a way, with the talents you’ve entrusted to me, to serve.  To find joy.

To laugh. 

And hope will arise, following you all the way to Nebraska.   You stay up past bedtime, and wit will somehow travel from your brain to your pen and it is the new balm of Gilead that is saving your own soul.

I heard the voice of God, and He was laughing. Either that or it was some big hairy dude on the other side of the lake.  Either way, I’ll take it.

—

photo:

laughter

Filed Under: Humor, Inspirational, My life, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bring on the Rain

May 7, 2013 By

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“Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink . . . Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:17-21

Yeah, yeah.  I read that over and over and just couldn’t get my hands around it. It sounds good in theory, like love your neighbor and tithe and eat your broccoli.  My therapist texted me this verse, with no comment but the underlying “read this, you idiot” and I went home and stared at the words while sucking down a re-heated breakfast taco.  Then I folded laundry, and held my kids so tight they wondered what the heck had come over me, and after they went to bed I sat rocking back and forth like it might sway away the pain and swish out the hate and I then drank wine like the tannins might draw out forgiveness and tomorrow I’d wake up with a dull sense of benevolence.

But I just lay there in silence, drawing mental pictures of hate and revenge and the unfairness of this life.  I curled up tight because all my prayers were spent and used up like tissues, all wadded up and tossed aside.  I drug myself upstairs in the wee morning hours and typed out a long prayer and just demanded that God read it directly off my computer screen, because I was too angry to speak and all I could do was write in a choppy bulleted list.  I sulked and stomped back to bed like an impetuous toddler that had just screamed at her father.  Because honestly.

I want to repay evil with evil, and I am too tired and haggard to do what is right.  Maybe I can just repay evil with a little tragic harm?  The next day, I got pulled over for going 50 in a 40 and I sobbed big fat tears.  I lay my tossled, unbrushed head of hair on the steering wheel because Enough Already.  The officer just handed me a warning and a look that was as compassionate as I’ve ever seen and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he reached over right then and hugged me through the window.  I just drove home with a tear-streaked face, going 20 miles per hour and lusting for a cheeseburger.

Sometimes, it’s easy to hate.  Let’s not kid ourselves – it’s always easier to hate.  Because this life is full of disappointment and pain and fear and when we put our trust in humanity it just bites us in the ass.

What’s hard, friends, is to love.

And I don’t mean love as in butterflies and roses and beautiful cards and elusive smiles on second dates.  I don’t mean love your children or love your mother or love your BFF’s who come over and bring you brownies. I mean loving the man who betrayed you.  Loving the stranger who raped you.  Loving that father who beat you and the mother who abandoned you and that dirty, rotten, self-absorbed, abused pitiful self that you’ve been dragging around for so many decades.

Evil is banal and hideous and frankly, doesn’t deserve your respect.  Because friends, you are above it.  You are mightier than it is.  You have the power of God crawling inside your veins and the Holy Spirit dancing in your vessels and your heart is made anew with light and life and freedom from the chains that only darkness brings.

So bring on the rain.  

Let it pour and soak and drench you with sorrow.  Lament and cry and curl and drink and scream.  But in the end, realize that it doesn’t own you.  Allow yourself to look at that man, woman, teacher, stranger, drug, depression, or self, and say: My God is more powerful than you. You can pound and beat down this house but you’ll never consume me. You are standing in this body and the walls might be falling down around you, but you aren’t dead yet, and you have power unimaginable.  Power that moved mountains and raised the dead and caused the lame to walk.

When the mask is removed, that demon is just a poor needy child, so here’s a sip of cool water for that parched tongue, my sweet darling.  I’ll sit with you and smile at your ugly and stroke your dirty, vodka-soaked hair.  You hear me, darkness?  You can’t survive with me around, because I’m all light up in here and rats flee and Satan runs and evil just bares his teeth but it’s all a mirage that disappears when I get close.  Begone, you fool.  I ain’t got time for your stupid, cunning ways.

What are you afraid of, anyway?  That the person that hurt you most will get away with it?  That they might take you for a fool? That they might get a free hall pass for all the damage they’ve caused?  Oh dear friends, they will have to live with the consequences of sin, and vengeance is not yours to take.  Make room and step aside as God enacts his own wrath.  Our job is only to love, and love when it’s hard, and love when it’s not realized, and love even when we are bruised and torn and left alone in front of that mirage we thought was water.  But we can repay evil with the pure, clear, smooth freedom of love, which washes much more clean.

And then nothing will ever chain us.  Nothing will bind us.  We can stretch out our wings and stand before God with bulleted lists of prayers fluttering to our feet, our soul smiling and our hair getting drenched with dew from heaven, and God’s redemption, and we can know that we are living, leading, learning.  Uncurl.  Unclench. Undo the chains around your hardened heart, and bring on the rain.

Overcome evil with good. 

—

photo:

Rainy Day 4

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, My life, Religion Tagged With: , , , , ,

Circles

May 2, 2013 By

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We were born into this world seeking relationships.  We are members of teams and classes and towns and clubs.  We were created for community, resting safely in the notion that we are never, ever alone. Adam needed Eve and mothers need daughters and we are drawn to fellow artists, Christians, comedians, football fans, runners, and scholars, because it makes us feel part of something.  We shower and praise and ooze so much sweetness it’s saccharine.

But what happens when the cake gets moldly? When the excess, excessive?  We grow spoiled and lazy and bored and tired.  What was once a community of friends becomes too much good and too much praise and the banana turns black, sticky sweet with flies.

The circles we keep, they are suffocating. 

If we aren’t careful, what was once pretty becomes ugly.  What was encouraging  becomes fake. We navigate toward the same cereal, and the same sentences, and the same color skin.  We begin to say phrases in the same awkward manner and the Once. So. Different becomes just another yawning repeated period.  If we aren’t careful, we draw the circle too tight, and choke on all the beauty.

I’m trying these days to appreciate what’s right in front of me and not let hate creep in like a fly through a screen door.  And in order to do that, I have to abandon my post for a while, only to return later like a thirsty dog who needs soul-filling water. Because that’s what your inner circle is designed for – to be a resting place for your tired feet, and to speak truth that is never taken for granted.  It’s the deep well you can draw from when your throat is so parched you can’t speak.  And then you can cry real tears, and squeeze hands with true joy, and your thanks resonate to the high heavens.  We need the upper room because the world is a dry, dusty place.

But when our hearts refuel, it’s time to step out toward unknown territory.  And it’s frightening. You are stark naked without trust of your friends, and your family, and those who know your humor and your insight and your perspective.  You can be targeted and criticized and sometimes attacked beyond measure.  But there are also times your faith is tested, and it miraculously survives, and your witness is larger than a hundred Sundays.  It’s a gamble, and a true test of character to live in different worlds, among various tribes, and try to stay true to your Creator.

I’ve seen people content in their own bubble, happily navigating their upper-class life with ease, befriending those who are guaranteed to reciprocate (out of obligation if nothing else), and then discovering a void they cannot fill.  Or wishing for deeper, more meaningful relationships.  Or just living a life of vanilla.  I desire so much more than vanilla.

So draw different circles.

If you sing, join a group on the edge of town.  If you write, explore magazines that don’t always see things like you do.  If you pray, kneel down in a different place. And if you worship, try holding hands with people who are not like you, who don’t always talk to God like you do, or who might not know God at all.  You have the ability to shine with truth, with strength only the Father provides, and you’ll be amazed at how well those toddler legs will walk.  We are not designed to stay within the lines, growing bored and lazy and dumb.  We are charged to keep drawing different circles and charging forth into the world – a place full of scatter and loud noise and ugly, ragged edges.

Go anyway.  Bring your best self.  Your true self.  Be a better person than you think you can be in a place you are not naturally comfortable. Only then are you the person God designed you to be. Take a deep breath. Push yourself.

Get out the chalk and start drawing new lines. 

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Photo:

i saw william blake at the center of everything : dolores park, san francisco (2012)

Filed Under: Inspirational, Religion Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Trouble I’ve Seen

April 24, 2013 By

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Eleven years ago today, a ruddy-faced doctor in a white coat took off his glasses and informed me that there was a raging tumor living inside my eyeball.  News so strange I had to ask for it to be repeated, the words cancer and melanoma all jumbling up inside my head with other strange words like success rate and surgery and I found myself sitting with my hands folded calmly asking for a tissue.

From there, I headed straight into a CT scan full of beeping red dots and IVs pumping toxins.  My wrap-around shirt landed with a soft thud on the floor while I bore my gown of misery like a soldier, trudging forward to get a mammogram before my thirties had even dawned.  My lungs and my liver and my brain and my breasts were all needled and raped, but it was all in the name of progress because melanoma’s a devil’s son.

A week later, my husband and I headed to the world-renowned expert in Philadelphia, eating cheese steak while hearing bullets zinging around in the distance.  We huddled together waiting to for what seemed like hours to see the doctor, in a room filled with foreign languages and travel-weary patients.  We earned ten precious minutes where I rapid-fired questions to the doctor that I had saved in a three-ring notebook.  Year after year we trekked back through sleet and blizzards and pouring rain, cobbling over stones and bricks toward the end of Walnut Street, crossing our fingers for the joyous refrain that life’s tentacles were still strong, holding us together in times such as these.

But radiation is a sniper that shoots to kill, taking down tissue and muscles and solid respectable youth.  I sat in the waiting room with the grey-haired diabetics waiting for lasers and four-inch needles and news that my retina was simply too weak to stand. It just needed a wheelchair like an old war hero with a slug in the shoulder, so they filled my eyeball up with oil like a slab of wood puddy in an empty, hollowed-out hole.  When I was pregnant with my son, I got a cataract so thick my eye almost exploded with pressure and I endured three hours of surgery without anesthesia, which I would never ever recommend to anyone in a million years of Sundays.  What we do for our children, and concurrently to save our own lives.  Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, I sang to the old people, and they nodded like honey child, I hear you.

I carry stress in my eye, drooping like Friday before lunch, weary of being held together with ribbons. I go back every year praying that a rogue cell won’t burst like a terrorist out of hiding, since it’s fatal and the success rates are hopeless and my oncologist tells me it’s useless for me to come see him anymore since a metastasis only buys me a year, maybe two.  He reminded me of that again today as I asked for another appointment.  What do they know, these doctors. No one wants to stare mortality down like a cobra wondering if it will strike or just slither off into the ether, and the difference between one year and two is hundreds of more days.  It matters, you doctors who count years like pebbles.

Those years, they are diamonds to me.

I think about all the happy times since then – babies and birthdays and laughter like bubbles floating large and fat over the driveway.  It’s been a lovely ride, hollowed-out and plugged, with one eye that’s crippled and propped up like the old man in Weekend at Bernie’s.  But despite it all, beauty abounds. Every day I stumble into God’s masterpiece with a depth perception so poor I can’t even thread a needle, and yet somehow I survive, and see, and have vision beyond my own present darkness.

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, I sing to our babies, rocking and shushing and rubbing their backs until their eyes droop.  But you see, Father.  God and son and spirit and healer, master of this worn-out veteran life.  You plug up this eye and this hollowed-out heart and you never have failed me.  All these years.  All this sorrow.  Nobody but you, Jesus.

Glory Halleluiah.   

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If you want to hear this song sung the way I like it sung, you need to hear it by Mahalia Jackson:

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Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supersonicphotos/4312101907/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Health, Inspirational, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Blogging the Bible: Jonah and the Whale

April 11, 2013 By

Humpback Whale, Megaptera novaeangliae 29 July 2010

I’ve always seen the story of Jonah and the whale as a strange and rather far-fetched consequence of running from God’s calling.  But now I see it as a beautiful lesson in forgiveness, and God’s equal bounty of love, and of what incredible lengths God will go to in order to teach his children about mercy.

Here’s the basic premise:  Jonah’s a prophet, and a good dude, but one day God asks him to travel to Nineveh to tell the wicked people to repent.  Jonah’s like “Those people?  Those rotten, stinking Gentiles that spit on our religion and hate our ways and hurt their own women and children?  No thanks.”  So he runs off to a sailboat and thinks he can hide, but the seas grow crazy wild.  Finally Jonah realizes God doesn’t do hiding places, so he tells the crew to throw him over.  They all get scared to death but end up thinking God is one big-bad motha, and Jonah ends up water-bound.  But instead of drowning, Jonah is swallowed up by a big fish-like thing, and ends up miraculously alive in a bubble of whale intestines where he can apparently breathe.  I’m not sure about the logistics of all this, but if Jesus can walk on water I’m sure people can survive in stomach-acid if God commands it.  So for three days Jonah just floats around in there, praising God for his salvation and for God’s imminent glory, I’m sure all the while stinking like cooked cabbage.

Three days later the fish spits him out on dry land, and Jonah’s response is, “Fine, Lord.  I’ll go.”  So he travels to Nineveh for a bath and a proclamation that their nation will be ruined if they don’t repent.  He’s not really serious about the repentance part.  It’s more of a “You slimeballs will someday rot in hell and I can’t wait to tell my girlfriend back home that I got to say this to you people” type of thing.  But miraculously, the people believe him.  Probably because if they do, he’ll leave, and ain’t nobody want to hang around a dude that smells like chewed up fish intestines. So they all bow down and fast and declare allegiance to God, giving up their evil ways and asking God to look upon them with compassion. And when God hears their heartfelt prayers, he did not ruin their nation and bring about destruction and ends up sparing the people.

Now at this point Jonah’s looking around at all the happy slimeballs like Wait a second. I just told these people off and now I have to eat those words?  They are terrible and evil and you’re just going to wipe them all clean like it was nothing? I like it that God asks him whether he has the right to be angry about this and Jonah’s like “heck yes I do.”  Then he goes off somewhere in the city square, sits down, and sulks.

So as Jonah’s sitting there throwing a tantrum, the Lord creates a vine around him to shield him from the sun, which makes Jonah happy, but then a worm comes along and eats it, and Jonah’s generally pissy about the whole thing.  Then God basically says “you’re concerned about this vine, which sprang up quickly and died quickly, but you don’t care about the entire nation of Nineveh?”  Then Jonah doesn’t get a chance to answer because the book ends.

See? So much more than a whale.

I see myself more in Jonah than most characters in the Bible.  I am stubborn, and I don’t always want to follow God’s commands.  Like Jonah, I see myself as special – not sinful and hateful and terrible like those people over there. And if God called me to minister to those people over there, I’d be busy doing my hair and making pot roast and going on vacation and singing in church. What’s it going to take for me to listen to God’s plan for my life?  How far will God go to reach me? When will those people over there be rated as equal to me? I turn to those people over there and my heart is filled with hate.  I would never do what they do.  I would never turn from God so far.

I am not them.

And so life throws me overboard.  And I fall so very far, and so deep. But from the depths of the grave.  From the heart of the sea.  From the hurling arm of God into the deep waters, “where the currents swirled about me, all your waves and breakers swept over me. . . The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me, seaweed was wrapped around my head.  To the roots of the mountains I sank down, the earth beneath barred me in, but you brought my life up from the pit.” Jonah 2.

And I’m alive.  Somehow in this swirling mass of death I’m caught in a strange pocket of life.  Long enough to breathe.  Long enough to raise my arms in praise.  Long enough to sense a form of leveling, and realize that I am not special.  Those people over there are just as desperate for God as I am, and they are just as worthy of salvation.

Oh, Jonah.  Israel is not the only nation worth loving.  And we, as the body of Christ, are not the only people worth the resurrection.  Everyone, even those deeply rooted in sin and taken over by evil –those who are lost and broken and tired – they are worth reaching.  They are worth redeeming.  Husbands who cheat on their wives.  Executives who skim the margins.  Men who rape and women who hurt and those groups that snarl hate and venom in the name of God.  Republicans and Abortion Clinics and Liberal Media and George Bush and the whole net of us humankind – God’s healing mercy is for us all.

Sometimes it takes sinking in a deep black hole, when life seems to be ebbing way, to set our sights in the right direction. God has to literally build a vine and dry it up, cause the seas to rise and fall – forcing us to put our pride aside and realize that all people get a hall pass at grace.

But Lord, they don’t deserve it, I scream. I sit in disbelief that my life has been filled with worship and their life was filled with decay and at the end we all end up in the same place.  And instead of being gracious about it I turn up my nose and scowl.  I doubt God’s compassion is equal.  I am angry that they are welcomed into the kingdom.  I feel I’ve somehow earned it. And when God asks if I have that right, I’m honest.  “Yes, Lord.  I’m angry enough to die.”

But brothers, we are all in this together.  Those people over there and us.  We’re all trapped together in one stinking whale-belly of a life, and salvation abounds.

—

photo:

Humpback Whale, Megaptera novaeangliae 29 July 2010

Filed Under: Blog the Bible, Inspirational, Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

The Perfume Basket

March 23, 2013 By

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A few months back, my son dropped my bottle of perfume on the bathroom floor, and rose-scented shards littered the tile.  So off I went to Nordstrom to replace it.  I stood there for hours smelling and wafting and scrunching up my nose. Finally I chose one, and as I was paying, the saleslady said she would put my name in a drawing for a gift basket.  Yes, yes.  Something with an $800 value.  Lots of designer fragrances.  I never win anything, lady, so have fun with that.

Fast forward to the following week.  I get a phone call from Nordstrom that says I won.  I stood there in the kitchen, in the middle of loading the dishwasher with a dumb look on my face, speechless.  “Come by and get it any time,” she prattled on.

That afternoon, with two kids in tow, I trudged to Nordstrom to pick it up.  For some reason, I was afraid they would think I was lying about winning, or that it wasn’t really mine.  The minute they placed that shrink-wrapped basket in my greedy little hands, I told my kids to jump into hyper speed and we bolted back to the car.  I wouldn’t even stop at the grocery store on the way home.  I’m sitting on real value here, people, and it needed to be safe on my bathroom counter.

When I got home, I took my time in unwrapping it.  Bottle after bottle was arranged inside a Jimmy Choo shoebox.  Tall and short and heavy and lacy.  Fruity and musky and spicy and soft.  Every perfume had their own emotion, and their own set of colors and meaning.  I felt so guilty, like there was no way I deserved all this value.  I’d save them for gifts, send them to friends, and select one I really loved.

But I didn’t.  I kept them all. 

At first I just sprayed some in the air, or squirted a dab on my arm before church.  But they go bad in two years, and I have all these bottles, and why not use them to their fullest?  What’s the good of saving them and not enjoying them?  So I began my perfume campaign. When friends came over, I’d march them to the bathroom and encourage them to shower themselves in Flowerbomb.  When I feel particularly down, I spray Prada on the pillows.  After my bath, Versace is liberally applied.  I use Chanel as my interior car fragrance, and when the bathroom smells particularly stale, there is always Gucci to make things right again.  You’ll never see such liberal application of Burberry in all your born days.

It’s been magical.

Perfume will never again have the same meaning that it does in this season in my life.  I totally get why Mary anointed the feet of Jesus with rich oils, and why the wise men brought the child of God frankincense and myrrh, both prized for their alluring fragrance.  They were all gifts fit for a King.

I’m no queen, but I have felt so rich. I’m keeping the bottles for my daughter as a testament to His glory, and to the power of our senses, and to explain that in the darkest of days, when the sun hasn’t yet risen, there is power in unexplained gifts, and reminders of beauty.  There is indeed a story woven into all things. But most importantly, the wisdom of the ages:

There ain’t nothin a little Chanel won’t fix. 

—

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilivanili/8097442306/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life Tagged With: , , ,

Freefall

March 17, 2013 By

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I had a dream a few months back that I was dangling on a roller coaster, my hands gripping the sides of a drop-off that went straight down into blackness.  I was in my car with my children, for heaven’s sakes.  I couldn’t risk their lives letting my clunky Chevy Tahoe loose on these metal tracks.  What kind of mother would let go? I couldn’t tell if my car was strapped in or if I would fly off into the cold air.  Where would I land?  Who would provide for them?  What would I do?  Help, Lord!

I shrieked in fear as I sat up straight in bed in a hot, panicked sweat. I have given my life in service for you, Lord, and this is the payback I get?  This is my reward for all those youth mission trips and church services and solos?  Is this really happening? It felt like I just got kicked in the gut, and yet when I curled over to seek some relief, the blows just kept coming.  All I could feel was hurt.  A deep and immense and crazy hurt that I’ve never before experienced.  Worse than cancer.  Worse than my abdominal infection. Worse than death itself. It was as if all the darkness in the world was hurling toward me at once, and it entered my bloodstream like a bad drug.  I was swept under at the sheer the weight of it and was so extremely uncomfortable that I wanted to peel off my own skin.  But I couldn’t, so I just curled up and clenched my teeth, and begged for mercy, and made no coherent sense for months.  And now I’m dangling off a cliff with white-knuckles and I’m a little pissed about it, if you want to know the truth, because I so don’t deserve this.

I’ve lived my whole life professing my faith in God, that he is the ruler and owner and molder of my soul.  I’ve nodded in response to picking up the cross and following Jesus and felt in all earnestness that I was a good believer.  Kind of like most people do on Sundays, before they go home and continue their natural and sinful natures.  And yet here I am, and now it’s happening, and I’m finally tested.   The stability on earth that I clung to with my bare hands shattered and I was dangling on the edge in fear, not trusting God would catch me.  And not only did I lack faith, but I had the audacity to challenge God’s plan, like I put my payments in the God vending machine all these years but all I got out was this crappy mess.  I was such a damn fool.  Or rather, I was blind to what God was really trying to show me.

Now I see more clearly.   What’s so beautiful is that this is precisely my payback for years of loving Him. A realization that I had it wrong, and I wasn’t fully submitting, and all I have on this earth is a cartoon mirage.   Jesus was holding out a hand in my personal crisis to say “Follow me. ”  I could have just said don’t-mind-if-I-do, or thanks, man, or even Cool. My life on this earth is one empty vessel of saggy skin that will rot into the earth, but my soul exists for Your glory, and this is a chance to live into it.  I could have said all sorts of lofty things, but I didn’t.  Instead, I screamed like a girl and asked God to somehow put my Tahoe in reverse.  I basically said to Jesus, “You’re a great teacher, and I’ll take what I think applies to me, but this total submission thing?  This fall-off-a-cliff dependence?  That’s a good one, dude.  Now let’s quit with all the crazy-talk.  I want my old life back.”

I see now what I could not before.  That my old life wasn’t life-giving.  It was full of decay, and stagnant water, and salt that had lost its flavor.  I was saying all the right words about faith and thinking I was in the right camp, like I could fit God within the walls of my upper-middle class lifestyle and would give God my budget surplus.  I liked to go to bible study and talk about Godly things and sit on the front row to be entertained, but the real lesson of Christ?  The die to self part?  Well I’d find time for that later, after dinner and bathtime and lunches and writing and friends and phone calls and facebook and photo sessions and, well, me.  I’d find time for that after me.

But God doesn’t do surplus. He won’t accept lukewarm, or dependence when it’s easy, or prayers only on Sundays.  He doesn’t believe all religions are created equal or we can just slide by unnoticed or half-ass our way to salvation by putting ourselves first.

We have to let it all go.  Not because our palms are sweaty and we just can’t hold on any longer, but because we want to.  And friends, there is joy in submission.  Joy that envelops fear, and pain, and deep, dark wounds.  Joy that frees us from the beating and torture and darkness that penetrates.  It’s in these moments where you have nothing else to hold onto but God himself, when you see His amazing grace mostly clearly. A smile starts to crack, and then it widens, and joy enters in.

So here I am, starting over.  It’s liberating, in a way, to see how God works.  To see how He uses people and circumstances and turns bad into good for the sake of His glory.  And the fact that I can be of some service in the great commission is fascinating and humbling and makes me want to fall down in reverence with tears streaming down these saggy human cheeks.

Lord, thank you for this pain.  With every fiber of my being I scream to the heavens a resounding and echoing thank you, for I have finally let go, and I trust you’ve got this, and I am finally free.   If my luck holds out, I won’t get bugs in my teeth on the way down.

—-

photo:

Millenium Force

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Setbacks

March 3, 2013 By

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We are a culture of moving forward.  When tragedy strikes, you ask for prayers and nights out and oversized glasses of wine.  You sob and wail and girl, you let that mascara run.  But then, after the shockwave hits, you want to be that person who picks herself up and dusts herself off, bopping and smiling into the future.  You don’t want to be that number who shows up on caller ID and people think “Oh no.  There she goes again with the same sob story.  Move on, already.”

But you can’t.  You need to repeat the hurt and say the same lines over again and hear words of affirmation.  You are strong.  It will be okay.  This too shall pass. It may take months of re-living the same hurt over and over again just to purge it from your system.  It just takes as long as it takes, and not one day less.

The bottom line is that you are strong.  You are healing.  Your future is bright.  But all of a sudden out of freaking nowhere you catch yourself moving backwards, or spinning in circles, and dwelling on some stupid tiny detail over and over.  You just want to crawl in a hole and hide, or put on a good face and shut the hell up.   And yet deep down, you know you need to get the ugly out.

Get it out, friend.  Pick a few very close confidants and a therapist you trust and just keep repeating yourself.  It’s 2 steps forward, 1.75 steps back.  But you’re still moving forward.  It’s just slower than you expected.  Like the tortoise, one day you’ll cross that finish line and not have a clue how you made it so far.

Setbacks are discouraging.  You want to think you’re tough and all that pain is helping establish perseverance. And yet we all relapse.  We have moments that we need to vent and monopolize the conversation and suck the energy out of a phone call.  There are times we just need to relive the hurt and lock ourselves in our closets for three minutes for a best friend to tell us we are going to be okay.  I recently had such a conversation.  It went like this:

“Talk to me,” my friend said. We’re so over hellos these days, because when I call at dinner time there must be a problem.

“Oh man.  The kids’ show is almost over and they need to get in the bath and I’m such a wreck,” I say before inhaling a large anguish-filled breath.  “The pain, it just won’t stop.” I don’t wait for an answer, like respectful people do.  I just launch into a tirade and wait for words of affirmation to come out like a vending machine on the other end.  Which is completely selfish.  And so totally vain.  And yet I need it like a drug fix so I long ago quit apologizing.  Because if the tables were turned I would do the same for her.

“You are strong,” she says.  “And you will get through this.”  And she means it.  She tells me I deserve more than I actually do, and that I’m more incredible that I actually am, and that God’s got this, and I nod and wipe my face and smile through the tears when my son comes busting in the closet.  I sing a bath song and we hold hands and I somehow make it through the next three hours with a half-smile on my face.  It’s a victory when I walk into the kitchen after the kids are down.  I’m miraculously still alive.

Everyone has setbacks.  I’m told they are normal, albeit annoying as hell, but each time they are a tiny bit easier to get over and I can rebound a little faster.  And in the end, I think I am developing perseverance.  I think God is working in the silence.  But being refined by His fire is hot, and it sometimes hurts, and it’s never easy.

Stay in the heat.  Grit your teeth and read the Word and keep burning.  Talk to God when he doesn’t seem to be listening. Because someday the impurities will be gone, and God will restore, and you’ll find yourself thankful for the process. Like down-on-your knees-in-praise thankful. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.

Setbacks happen.  Keep moving forward.

Photo:

Sad beauty

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Battle Scars

February 20, 2013 By

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I walked to the ring with a swagger, silk brushing against my skin as my ego staggered before me, a blur of crowd voices and cigarettes and the smell of sweat.  Before me fighters had come and gone, but this one was mine.

Let’s do this life thing because I am young and I am fierce.  

But I got sucker punched in the gut, and kicked in the face, and a string of a hits I didn’t expect.  I tried to remember all the training and practice rounds, and yet my coach’s words were grey and hazy.  All I could see coming was a left hook, a little too late it seems, and I found myself falling and slipping and heading for the mat with greasy sweat streaming from my pores. I lay face down while the crowds grew, my left eye swollen shut and my chest managing to heave in and out despite the blows.  I shut my eyes hard.

Please Lord, no.  I can’t bear to lose.

But the referee declared it, and the victor was announced, and all I could do was lay there in all that deafening noise.  The mouthpiece held my lips ajar and I could hear my own labored breaths.  I couldn’t break the pattern, for my body was surviving on oxygen alone.  I stared at the side of the ring for a long while, unable to move. My eyelids shut like curtains and I thought it was over.

I’d failed so miserably, and I’ll never be able to stand again.

But after a while I drew my legs close. I turned and raised up my back like a Halloween cat and hoisted myself to a knee.  I felt the drool and sweat and blood dripping, and when I raised my head I just saw the janitor in the stands, sweeping cigarette butts and popcorn kernels and picking up sticky beer cans.  We were alone, he and I, nothing but leftover smoke and spoils. I managed to stand on my shaky knees.  Fearful of the damage that had been caused.  Of the wounds that remained.

But somehow, miraculously, my legs found their footing.  I planted my feet apart and I raised my head.  I was alive and tall, and tears mixed with sweat as I raised my right arm above my head. The janitor stopped his sweeping and stared at the display, the loser standing in the middle of the ring, one arm raised, fist-pumping the sky with a crooked, bleeding smile.

I might have broken lips and battle scars.  I may nurse bruises and broken bones.  And yet I rose.  I stood.  I won.

It’s not the one who shows off for the crowds, or who drinks champagne at midnight, or who gets to display the trophy that counts.  It’s the one who rises, and regains footing, and manages to lift their head.  It’s the ability to make it out alive and fist-pump the dirty, rotten air.

This fight did not define me.  It did not break me.  And through the tears I walked off the rink, and past the janitor, who had laid down his broom.  He clapped, and I smiled, and I knew I wasn’t ruined.

Victory, as it turned out, was mine. 

—

Tough

Filed Under: Inspirational, My life, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

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