We are, all of us, still forming. And it is in stillness, perhaps, that we form the most.
I am posting this message via my new Sprint mobile broadband card in the comfort of my very own home. Wow, how liberating it feels to be sitting on my bed as I type this message on a very live Internet connection. You have no idea. Join me in a great big cheer of thanks to my hub for a great birthday present! *HOORAY*
(Continued from Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)
Prefatory Note: In the last couple posts of this series, I have been telling things that happened 7-8 years ago, when I was a junior in college, recently married, and discovering my desire to write and edit books. I was also starting to get my life flipped upside-down spiritually. (And in every other way, I should say. Can anything not be termed spiritual?) In this installment here, you'll find that we've taken a significant leap forward in time. I am telling about things that happened about a year and a half ago, when I was recently divorced and had been turning my interests to the more intellectual life of the written word. Where this story picks up, I have no longer been asking questions about my dreams for a writing life. Those were dreams that, I guess you could say, had gone safely underground.
About a year and a half ago, I attended a C.S. Lewis conference in Oxford and Cambridge, England. (You can learn more about that conference here.) Before I went to the conference, I had been planning for my life to be about academics -- first with a PhD stint in literature, then on to a teaching post at university, and then on to writing articles that would extend the literary conversation in those academic circles forever and ever, amen.
But I had, a few months prior to the conference, been denied a graduate studies spot at Baylor University. This had rocked my world at its core and left me aimless, confused, and even despairing. I had just come out of a divorce and was living on my own for the first time in my life. I was loving it, as I was getting to make my own decisions about how to spend money, spend time, and spend life. I was getting to decide what my life was going to be about, and I had decided that it would be about academia -- something I had always done well.
In pursuing this goal in the preceding months, I had turned my interest in the novel on its head and decided to pursue programs that would let me think and write about how our theologies of creation affect our theories of creativity about the novel. With a proper determination to do things "right," I proceeded to conduct all the appropriate online research for schools, write all the appropriate e-mails to faculty, and even take a few of the appropriate out-of-state jaunts to visit programs I liked. After all that work, I was positive Baylor was the place for me. I was, I thought, finally on my way to the life God had always wanted for me.
Until I got denied entrance.
Like I said, this completely unglued me. I started questioning all the things you're bound to question in these sorts of situations. Things like "Did I misread God? Do I really know how to hear His voice? Will I ever be able to trust myself to make a big decision again? Does He even care about me anyway? How could He let me get so lost?"
When I had the opportunity about five months later to attend this study conference in England, then -- a conference that was academic at its core and filled with opportunities to hear from PhD after PhD after PhD -- I was ecstatic and intensely hopeful that something meaningful would come from it. I was still caught up in my hopes for an academic life of teaching and writing journal articles. And I was especially excited to learn that the keynote speaker was none other than one of the key figures from Baylor who had drawn me to study there in the first place. I looked forward to connecting with him again and learning from his lecture.
Once I got there, however, God had other plans in mind. The plenary sessions with the PhDs began, and my heart dried up to a crisp. The academic life became dead to me, right then and there, as I sat in my cushioned seat at St. Aldates. What real impact could it have, I wondered, when there are people walking up and down the street outside these doors who just need a real conversation? Who needs the theoretical jargon when it comes to connecting with very real people living very real lives?
It all started to crumble around me, right there on that very first morning, and after that first lecture I sat in my chair and began to cry. At this point, Kirk was good enough to lead me out of the building and down the road to the nearest coffeeshop in order to disassemble what was going on inside of me. Basically, I sat there crying and staring at my dried-up heart on the table until I was finally able to ask the question, Could God really pick my life apart yet again? (And the obvious answer is, of course He could.)
As the conference went on, I realized I was absolutely willing to let Him pick my life apart again, but who even knew what that meant? I thought about C.S. Lewis -- the man around whom this conference had been inspired -- and marveled at his ability to write for the common man. Here was this brilliant man who studied at Oxford and taught at Cambridge but published books that almost anyone can pick up and read and get even today. His books change real lives. They are so accessible, even though they're so smart. There has to be a way to reach more people the way he did, I thought, and I want to be someone who does.
And just like that, my life changed. Gone were my illusions of a life in academia. Gone were my intentions to dissect the classics until I could do nothing but eat, breathe, and sleep them. Gone were my desires to get caught up in conversations only 1 percent of the world was likely to join. I wanted to find the source of bubbling life and offer it to everyone else!
Kirk was a Godsend at that conference (for more reasons than one), particularly by the way he helped me step into my new skin through this whole process. On my own, I wasn't really able to see what all this was supposed to mean. But a couple days into the conference, when we were walking behind Christ Church toward an outdoor French cafe for lunch and talking about how our individual experiences of this conference were blowing the roof off the measly ideas we'd had for our lives beforehand, he asked me to share what a day in my ideal life would look like. Though my idea of this ideal life has changed a little bit since then, at the time I said that I would spend my mornings reading books by great thinkers and jotting down thoughts and impressions about what they said in a journal and then spend my afternoons writing creatively, either in essay or story form.
"Hm. Interesting," he said. "And where would you find time to teach in this plan?"
Um, I guess I wouldn't. That's when I realized I had been trying to fit myself into the life of a college professor without having any real heart to actually do it.
The next week, when we stepped off the coach in Cambridge to begin the second week of the conference, I finally embraced my identity as a writer, and here's what I mean when I say that. Up to that point, whenever I thought of becoming a writer, it always felt like something I was putting on, like something I was trying to be, like a persona. But in the exact moment of stepping down from the coach onto the pavement, surrounded by the old, old buildings of the colleges and the fantastic shapes, sizes, and personalities of its old, old trees, I just knew: I am a writer.
It's not something to be proud or arrogant about. It's not something that makes my life more privileged. It's something that just . . . is.
Later that week, Kirk gave me an antique brooch that's a curio of (we've both decided) Jane Austen. It's diamond-shaped and silver, with the oval-shaped curio in ivory with a black background right in the center. I pinned it to the side breast pocket of my aquamarine-colored corduroy jacket, where it remains to this day. Every time I wear that jacket, which I have since named my "writer's jacket," I am reminded of that transformative moment stepping off the coach in Cambridge and Kirk's good heart toward me in God's surprising plans for my life.
When I was talking to my friend Laura on the phone last night, I got pulled over for what must be the most violations one person can rack up in 30 seconds.
Violation #1: Driving with one Starbucks in hand and another between legs. This is the real reason I thought he had pulled me over because I had just attempted to make the sharpest right-hand turn into our neighborhood with only one hand on the wheel, and I overshot it real bad. I figured he thought I was drunk. So as he approached my car, I rolled down my window and waved the frappuccino and venti iced chai out the window.
"I'm driving with two Starbucks," I said. "That's why I was so clumsy on that turn." At least I knew I could pass any breathilizer or walking test he may throw at me, since I was as sober as a stick.
"I can guarantee that's not why I'm pulling you over right now," he said.
Oh. Hm. What, then?
Violation #2: "Your back tailights are out," he said.
"Really?" I asked, incredulous. "But I just got them both replaced!"
"Well, they're out. I even checked your headlights when you were turning at the light, in case maybe you'd just forgotten to turn on your lights in the first place, but those ones were on."
Ah. There's the problem, I thought. "My headlights go on automatically when I turn on the car." (I drive a spunky white 2001 Jetta.) "But how long have you been following me? Because I was talking on my cell phone and forgot to turn on my lights until just a minute ago."
Violation #3: Driving without lights. "Oh, so you mean I have to give you a moving violation, too?" he asked.
Shoot. Crud. DARN it. I looked at him helplessly. "I'm so sorry," was all I could say.
Plus, nestled in that last exchange was Almost-Violation #4: Talking on cell phone while driving. Thankfully, this is not (yet) a crime in central Florida. But it did make me worry that I'd been doing something wrong on that count, too, that I didn't know about.
"Just don't forget to drive with your lights on," he finally said, easing up on me. "I wouldn't want some drunk person hitting you, even though your car is white."
And with that, he wished me a good evening and stalked back to his car. I'd never felt so thankful in my life. Well, that's a gross exaggeration, but it was incredibly relieving. Laura and I got quite a great kick out of it. Don't you?
Also, thanks to Laura for the great idea for this post's title.
For the past few weeks, Kirk and I have been enrolled -- pretty much against our will -- in something we have come to call PTP, or the Patience Training Program. We have encountered far too many situations within this short period of time -- and often in multiple forms at once -- that, taken as a whole, seem too bizarre to blame on human ignorance or obliviousness. We've concluded God must be storing up deposits of patience in us for the future.
Oh, boy. I wonder what that means about our future.
It was encouraging, however, to discover that He's made progress in us over the past few weeks of this after seeing the way we responded to the five -- count 'em, five -- hours we spent on the tarmack in Baltimore this past Sunday night, trying to get home from the conference.
When we boarded the plane at 2:45, it had begun to very lightly snow. It was pretty. We watched it blow softly in the air from our seats by the window. But after everyone had boarded within the next half-hour, they decided they needed to de-ice the plane. This required waiting for the de-icing truck. And then finding out, after we'd been sitting there for about an hour, that the buildup of the very light snow (which was not so light anymore) would require a second session of de-icing the plane.
Only then the de-icing truck broke.
What happens when a de-icing truck breaks? According to the flight deck, it means you call the authorities and find out about getting a new truck dispatched over. And then waiting and waiting for them to come. Only to find out there isn't another truck to be dispatched, and then waiting some more to find out what we're supposed to do now.
At this point, we'd been sitting on the tarmack over 2 hours. It was about time for all of us to be catching our connecting flights in Atlanta. Some people, like those going on from Atlanta to Germany or Tel Aviv, wouldn't be able to catch a different connecting flight and so decided they wanted to get off the plane. Which our flight crew allowed, but this meant harnessing another jetway and ground crew to get them all off the plane. Chalk this up to another hour of waiting.
Finally, finally, finally we heard back from the authorities who said we could make our way over to the de-icing station and get our plane hosed off from there. Hooray! Cheers erupted from every row. Except that when the flight deck spoke with the de-icing station directly, they found out the station didn't know when they'd be able to fit us in. Delta flights don't come to the station itself, they told our pilots. Trucks go out to meet those planes at the gate.
Well, of course they do. Except, of course, when the only truck available is broken. What now?
We'll see when we can fit you in, they said. Which meant more waiting. When finally they had a spot for us, we pedaled our plane on over there, only to find out that after a 10-minute wait for the plane in front of us to finish, it was going to take another 45 mintes to get ours de-iced. Argh!
I should probably tell you that at least there were no screaming babies on this flight. However, there was a group of about 12 high school girls sitting directly behind us who not only started out trying to solve the crossword puzzle at the back of the airline-provided magazine as a collective group (complete with calls across the aisles and rows about their guesses to each query on the puzzle) but also proceeded to call their parents after every announcement -- and we got announcements about every 15 minutes -- to reiterate the news we'd just gotten. Usually this news was that we were still waiting. Which all of us already knew. We were pros at this waiting game by this point.
Finally, after the 45-minute de-icing session, we made our way to the runway. Our pilot said we were third in line, but we were able to watch six planes go up ahead of us before we finally hit the runway with a vengeance and got ourselves on up into the air. But at least we were in the air finally. Hooray! More cheers from every row.
All told, we caught a new connection in Atlanta and made it home in Orlando by 1:30 in the morning, just six hours after the time we were supposed to be home on the original plan. Whew!
I say all of this quite tongue-in-cheek because all of us on the plane were intoxicated with a little hilarity by about the third hour of the wait, but actually it didn't seem altogether that terrible for Kirk or myself. We were surprisingly calm. Though the gaggle of young girls had been disruptive and somewhat annoying at the beginning, pretty soon I grew to find them intensely amusing. I started laughing at their attempts to make up dialogue for the movie on the screen that no one was watching, for instance.
And all Kirk and I could do, after we realized we weren't at all freaked out about this situation, was shake our heads in amazement and say, "God must be making some good headway with us on this whole PTP thing." Thank goodness. I don't think I would have responded with even half as much amusement and grace if this had happened in December.
Kirk and I are off to Maryland today to attend a Wilberforce Weekend honoring the life of William Wilberforce, the parliamentarian who was responsible for eradicating the slave trade in Great Britain in 1807 -- after a 20-year battle with Parliament to get it approved.
The movie Amazing Grace, releasing February 23 on the exact 200-year anniversary of the abolishment of the slave trade, tells the story of his life. It is a truly great film on multiple levels, and I'll share more about that soon. For now, you can check out more information and even watch the trailer by clicking here.
Wilberforce has been a longtime spiritual hero for Kirk, so part of this weekend is a birthday gift to him. (His birthday is today; mine was yesterday.) The other part is that it's going to teach us a lot about the issue of modern-day slavery, which is more prevalent now than it was in the days of the "old slavery."
When we get back, I'll share some highlights with all of you. Until then, we will be at this beautiful place at Osprey Point in Maryland. Ta-ta.
Tonight I was sitting alone in my house at our kitchen table -- the kitchen table we've pulled out of the kitchen and placed smack-dab in the middle of the big main room. (We live in a very small space.)
I was sitting there by myself, and Kirk wouldn't be home for an hour. I was worn out, tired, pooped, and yet stirred up inside my spirit. I've had a somewhat discouraging 48 hours of life.
Where else could I go but the source of life? I cracked open the Bible and continued my reading of Matthew. In the way that it has of doing, it moved my spirit beyond exhaustion and confusion unto the point of praise, so I started singing. That's just what I do. I can't help it sometimes.
As I've written in a previous post, my cats get, um, a little stirred up in their affection for one another when I sing by myself in the house, and this time was no exception. Thankfully it didn't get too out of hand this time; though I think they moved toward the inevitable scratch-and-claw two times total by the end, the exertions were brief and at least stirred them out of their all-day lethargy of sleeping themselves into comas on the bed. Maybe Solomon even lost a few calories out of it. (And goodness knows he could stand to lose a few thousand of them!)
Eventually, though, after I had read some more and the cats had settled back on the bed, I decided I didn't want to sing old psalm melodies anymore so I popped in a CD. I started singing along with Jennifer Knapp and Mac Powell the words to a song that goes, "All creatures of our God and King / Lift up your voice and with us sing . . ." It's a great song; very earthy and sultry and raw.
So there I was, singing it out with the J-Knapp and Mac, my eyes closed and arms eventually raised to the ceiling, even, until at one point I wondered how the cats were doing with this one. I opened my eyes and looked over toward the bed. Diva, who had hitherto been laying on the bed in her lethargic state again, was perched with an astounding alertness on the corner of the carpet by the bed and facing me, her paws placed just so in perfect cat-watching stance. She was staring straight at me with her blue, blue eyes, like she was sincerely listening to me sing. Like she actually understood the words behind the song: "All creatures of our God and King / Lift up your voice and with us sing . . ."
Spooky.
But also thrilling.
Could it be that when I sing praises to Jesus, my cats actually respond to Him too? This may be something of a stretch, but I think it's also highly possible, for "all of creation groans to sing His praises; they eagerly await the day of His return" (my paraphrase of Romans 8). Who knows? This may be what their always-predictable friskiness when I sing is ultimately all about.
Did you know Mother Teresa didn’t even want to become a nun? When she was 12 years old, she wanted to become a missionary to the poor. However, when she learned that she could only become a missionary if she first became a nun, she changed her mind. “I didn’t want to be a nun,” she recalled years later in an interview with an Italian journalist (later recorded in Teresa of the Poor by Renzo Allegri). So she put her missionary dreams on hold.
Six years later, when she was 18 and the time for choosing a vocation had become imminent, she found her desire to serve the poor remained unchanged. If becoming a missionary required that she first become a nun, then so be it, she decided. This time, she took her holy orders.
After her novitiate period, Teresa’s superiors sent her to teach in a prestigious high school for wealthy girls in India. This was not the life she had in mind when she committed her life to the convent, as it was a far cry from serving the poor and disenfranchised of the world, but she kept at it for eighteen years. Eighteen years! And during that time, out of obedience, she worked at it with all her heart. She did not look to the right or left. She committed herself firmly to her students and her colleagues and was quickly beloved and admired by all. Eventually, they named her principal of the school.
Then one night in August 1946, she was in the train station on her way to a weeklong private retreat in Darjeeling and found herself surrounded by the homeless, the fatherless, and the poorest of the poor. It was the night she later referred to as “the night of her conversion”—the moment her eyes were fully opened to the misery of her brothers and sisters in the world, and the moment she saw Christ in each and every one of them.
In that moment, Teresa knew that Christ was calling her into a brand new kind of life. She had no idea what it would entail, and it ended up costing her a great deal. “No Catholic religious congregation had set forth the ideals that Mother Teresa intended to carry out,” Renzo Allegri wrote in his book. “The new plan she had for her life was unheard-of, highly unusual, and totally unfamiliar within traditional church organizations.” But she decided to fulfill it anyway. After all, she had pledged her life to Christ, and as His bride she needed to carry out the plans she distinctly believed He was calling her to do.
What I find so enrapturing about this part of Mother Teresa’s story is her undivided obedience for those eighteen years before she received permission to pursue the truest desires of her heart. Even though the girls she taught in the high school regularly visited the poor communities right outside their cloistered walls, Teresa never accompanied them or spoke with them about it. She had committed herself to what God and her superiors asked of her in that present moment, and she did it unwaveringly until He or they spoke otherwise. How many of us would do the same?
Our friend Kenny, the one who rents us the little studio where we live, gave us a very generous Christmas gift in the form of a $300 giftcard to the Ritz Carlton Spa in Orlando. (This is linked to the JW Marriott resort where we did our second Navigator's Council in September, if you recall from this blog post here.)
We're stoked!
We decided to use it this weekend, so today we are going in for massages at 1pm. Kirk is getting the 50-minute hand and foot massage; I'm getting their 50-minute full body signature one. After that, we get to use the spa facilities for the rest of the day. This means pool. This means jacuzzi. This means gym. This means yummy natural foods cafe. Woohoo! :)
Then next weekend we're flying up to Maryland for a William Wilberforce weekend conference, hosted through the Trinity Forum. I'll explain more about William Wilberforce in an upcoming post, but suffice it to say that he has been a longtime spiritual hero to Kirk for many years. Kirk is even a graduate of the Wilberfoce Centurion program put on by Chuck Colson in Washington, DC! This conference next weekend is a precursor to the release of the Amazing Grace movie, which maybe you have heard about that releases in late February by Walden Media, a Christian-based film production company who also produced Narnia and Charlotte's Web. I'll be posting a review of the film in the next couple days so you can get the word out early within your own spheres of influence.
So this weekend and the next should be filled with quite a bit of goodness: one for the body, and the other for the soul. Looking forward to it.
Kirk informed me of my birthday present early, since he said he wanted to get it in place either this coming week or even this weekend. (My b-day's this coming Thursday, on the 18th.) Hm. I wondered what it could be. Then he gave me a one-word clue that caused me to jump up and down in my chair and start hooting and hollering with excitement.
And the word was: Access.
Our living situation hasn't been conducive to online access, so we've been forced to hunker on down to the library, or to Panera, or to a retreat center nearby to get online. Kirk's lucky, since he can get online at school. I, on the other hand, used to check e-mails and blogs at work during my breaks or lunch period, which was pretty convenient, but decided recently to stop. That whole "being above reproach" thing. But that decision, in a word, has been hard. Especially because when I get home from work I have absolutely no desire to go sit in the parking lot of the library to check e-mails and try to update this blog. So you suffer, and so do I.
Kirk's birthday gift to me, then? A wireless internet card that gets you online anytime and any place, so long as it's a place your provider gets access. We're going through Sprint, who is our cell phone provider, and we get great access from them around here, so we should have no problem.
This is a great blessing, indeed. It means I can be more regular on my blog. It also means I can respond more promptly to e-mails from those of you with whom I dialogue on a deeper level. Needless to say, I'm thrilled.
The latest issue of Relevant Magazine hit the streets two weeks ago, and I devoured every page of mine over the course of about seven days. Nestled in the middle, under an article by someone I'd never heard of before, was something that has caused an interesting turn of events in my life.
The article was called "Jesus Wrecked My Life." The author was a guy named Shane Claiborne. Ever heard of him?
He lives in Philly. He grew up in Tennessee. He walked the mainstream evangelical life for most of his youth but, disenchanted and disillusioned by it in college when he started hanging with the homeless in the downtown streets of Philadelphia, he went to visit Mother Theresa in Calcutta for a few months. There, he served the poorest of the poor, the dying, and the lepers, and even befriended many of them and learned what it meant to see Jesus incarnate on the earth. Then he came back to complete a one-year internship at Willow Creek in Illinois. (Big culture shock.)
The culture shock propelled him back back to Philadelphia, where he and small troupe of believers started something they called The Simple Way. This is centralized around a house (of the same name) where they live in community and exist to serve the poor and the homeless. They dish out food and dispense clothes. They plant gardens in concrete jungles and rehabilitate abandoned houses. They play with children and pray with prostitutes. And this is their daily reality, birthed from a passion to live the gospel Jesus brought to the world, not just theorize or talk about it anymore.
I was disarmed by Shane's sparse, deceptively simple message. And I wanted to go back to part of the source of it: Mother Theresa. That same day I read his article, I checked out three biographies on Mother Theresa from the library and settled into reviewing them in bed. From last Thursday to this past Sunday, I have pretty much lived and breathed Mother Theresa. She has been pretty much all I have talked about. (Ask Kirk. He now knows more about her life than he ever knew before, too, since I've been sharing whole passages about her life from one of the biographies, and we even rented and watched a movie about her on Sunday.)
Now I'm reading Shane Claiborne's book, The Irresistible Revolution. All of this is pretty much wrecking my life, too. I'll share more as my thoughts have time to surface and make sense. In the meantime, you should check out his book. Be prepared to start thinking about life in a whole new way.
This is the first year that I actually feel the newness of the New Year. Kirk feels it too. Heck, even my mom, who was here for a one-week visit and just left yesterday, feels it. Something is afoot this year. I think my soul is about to be re-formed into a new version of itself this year. Do you feel this way too?
So, Christmas Eve was hard. It was the hardest of all the days leading up to Christmas, as it was the day I turned from gleeful to moody, happy to despairing almost every half-hour, like a mood ring turning from green to blue to green again at any fantastic or ordinary moment. It was also the day I finally broke down and sobbed my eyes out. I even called my mom to let her know how hard things were going and had to repeat myself through sobs three times before she could figure out why I was calling and what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, really. I just missed home at Christmas.
Christmas day was much easier. It was fun, really. Kirk and I exchanged gifts on the sofa, and Solomon and Diva made quick to join us. Diva sat sweet and calm and pretty between us, amid our pile of gifts, while Solomon, in his penchant for all things paper or plastic, made a mess of the pile of wrap strewn about the floor. He dragged some of it to the bed. He also chewed through all the ribbon.
One thing cool to discover about our exchange of gifts was how zeroed in both of us were on the heart of the other person. For example, I got Kirk two gift subscriptions for the upcoming year: one for a great, relatively new journal my friend Sara told us about at Thanksgiving, called Conversations, which is a deep and fantastic exploration of the formative life of the heart and how spiritual transformation happens or doesn't happen in human beings, headed up by David Benner, Larry Crabb, and Gary Moon four years ago; and the other for Paste Magazine, which is a very engaging, with-it, yet tasteful pop culture mag we just discovered that is owned by a believer Kirk has known for years and deeply respects. In the span of two small gifts, Kirk got slices of manna for a year that will feed his inner life of the spirit and his outer journey toward impacting culture through creative media and the arts.
As for me, I told Kirk a few weeks ago that I want to master two things in 2007: the personal essay and the Italian language. (I took two semesters of the language in 2004 but still have a long way to g0.) What did he get me, then? First, a boxed set of resources for Italian, which includes 10 CDs, a common phrasebook, a workbook, and a few other things; plus a beautiful photo-box-sized striped box with a whole handful of tools inside for mastering the personal essay. These "tools" include two striped journals that match the box -- a small one for "thoughts on the go" and a larger one for "deeper musings" -- as well as a book of essays on the personal essay by people who've already mastered it, such as Eudora Welty and Annie Dillard. With that group of masters, plus the works of Anne Lamott and Donald Miller to "mentor" me through the process, I'm sure to get some full-length essays finished and out the door by the end of 2007. Maybe I'll even apply for the low-residency MFA at SPU I've been dreaming about for years, too, through the course of it.
Kirk also found me an amazing book of poems called The Wild Iris by a poet named Louise Gluck, who, among other recognitions, won the Pulitzer Prize for this one. These poems riveted me from my first glance at its pages, and the first thing I did once we finished exchanging presents was settle deeper into the couch and read the book from cover to cover. The poems in this book are so deep and profoundly, spiritually moving that it will take many, many reads to plumb the depths of them, and I can't wait to get started. Here's just one example for you to enjoy. Maybe you'll stagger under the weight of it, like I did.
The Red Poppy
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.
Most fans of Christopher Walken have likley seen this, and those who haven't shouldn't. Those who've never heard of him or Fatboy Slim can't help but laugh, either. Check it out, and count it a gift of Christmas cheer (?) from me. Enjoy!
I was at church this week and overcome so suddenly with a massive wave of homesickness that I had to course it out with tears outside. I've lived in Florida six months now; not too long, but not too short, either, and with a transition that's been incredibly easy by most people's standards, I'm sure. I haven't felt homesick much. I love Florida's weather. I love Winter Park's pure adorableness and am still finding things within a mile's radius of our house that I never even noticed were there, almost every day. I love our little cottage, and I love our little life. Learning to be "in life" with Kirk has been pretty much the single easiest thing I've ever done, with a few snags here and there, of course, and I'm reminded every day of the blessing a true marriage made in heaven can be. This is life like I never knew it before, and I know enough to be incredibly thankful for this. We both are.
But, the homesickness this week. It should have been expected, especially at Christmas, I know. Some might say it should have been expected sooner, even. But I think the excitement of transitioning here to be with Kirk after over a year of living apart, plus the fact of our great compatibility and the adventure of making a new life in a new place and all the discoveries that come with it, kept me from experiencing much of this homesickness.
Here's what got me to the sad place: realizing how much I love Christmas morning at my mom's house, with my siblings there or on the way, coffee brewing in the coffee pot, coffee cake and other brunch fixings warming up the house as they cook in the oven, and the presents laden 'round the Christmas tree. I'm really going to miss padding around my mom's place in my PJ's and socks on Christmas morning, a coffee mug in hand and a smile on my face, laughter bursting out of my mouth when Bobby makes a joke. Plus, I don't get to voice that "This is the best Christmas ever!" which is what invariably pops out of my mouth without my even realizing it every year after all the presents are done.
Darn it. I guess there's no way to have them both: the old life and the new. I'll try to learn from this bittersweet moment, though, without wishing it away, because it teaches me much about the love inside my heart for those I've left back home. And soon I'll get to share about the things I'm learning from this first Christmas here, in the home and life that we have made together.
The thing is, I’ve been through all this before. About 8 years ago, my life flipped upside down. (If you’ve been following the “What Writing Means to Me” series, you’ll know my most recent post in that series began to cover this.) Out of one paradigm-shattering experience—that of reading a book—I began a life journey that still hasn’t finished and I guess could be classified under the ornate, kaleidoscopic umbrella of what I’ve now termed “falling into love.”
About two years into this journey, my then-husband and I moved to the beach to be nearer the fire academy he had to complete for his fire school program. We were in need of a church, and some good friends suggested Rock Harbor. At the time, Rock Harbor was a church about three years old, had about 2,000 regular attenders, and was under the leadership of its founding pastor. Now, six years later, its membership climbs upwards of 5,000 every Sunday, spread out over seven distinct and vibrant services, has moved to a team leadership model, and has finally inhabited a building it can, and does, call home—a chock-a-block-style warehouse in one industrial neighborhood of Costa Mesa, California, the insides of which were gutted and completely redesigned in vintage urban style by the skilled and artistic hands of Rock Harbor’s very own volunteers.
Then as now, the truth of attending that church was the same: in order to find community, you have to do more than show up on Sundays. So we joined a life group that met on Wednesday nights in someone’s home. At the first meeting, I was dismayed to find people ranging in age from 20 to 50, to find well-seasoned parents and brand-newly-weds, to find singles as often as I found couples married upwards of 15 years. Having been used to groups that clustered around the “life phase” model—college-agers meeting with other college-agers, new-marrieds meeting with other new-marrieds, and so on—this was quite an adjustment of style, and I wasn’t sure I would like it.
But I’m really glad God opened me up to “doing life” with that whole host of folks. It was exactly what I needed right then, when I was starting this long process of unlearning how to perform in order to receive life from the vantage point of grace. That diverse and eclectic group of weekly company helped me see that human beings are, in fact, brilliantly stunning. That they are unique and they are soulful. That they are bizarre and they are funny. That they are caring and suffering and kind and forgiving, too. And that they are, each and every one, learning to walk this journey home. Just like me.
This experience of weekly life with that small group is where God began showing me how to love people right where they are—to let them be themselves, because their selves engender wonder. To listen to their stories and their struggles and their joys, because these lay bare the truest mirrors of their souls, souls that are wrapped in tender sleeves of skin that won’t be born in any other form again, ever.
This is a big part of what “falling into love” really means, I think. Not that I’m an expert on loving people the way God loves them, of course, but I’ve found there’s a certain grace extended—a grace that’s born of heaven, I believe—when we allow others the space and freedom to be exactly where they are, right now, in this very moment. A grace unburdened by expectation. A love that delights in the brilliance of that person’s beauty, which is the beauty of the Lord shining in and out of them. They are, in fact, the image of God made flesh, and dwelling among us.
Finally, when it comes to God offering us this kind of love, we get love in its highest form, perfected and rained down from on high. This love encompasses our entire being whether we know it does this or not, every moment of every day of every year of our lives. And this love waits quietly, patiently, givingly, for us to fall backward into its extravagant, billowing pillow once we have given up trying to achieve some other cheap form of a high somewhere else. And that’s what I’m learning to do right now.
I told Kirk the other day that I couldn’t see what trading in my dancing shoes would do. I know what they say—that God’s fixing to help us find His valuation as our greatest treasure, the truth we hold most deeply in our inmost being. And I know some people can’t help but weep at the invaluable grace of it all—the relief of this highest prize—their hearts blowing wide open that this captured hope was poured out into the world and over us for no apparent reason, other than that He rendered it good.
But I don’t see it that way yet. If God doesn’t change—if His love is always constant and can never go any higher—that means I can never wow Him or be held higher than I am right now, even if just for a moment. It means, ultimately, relinquishing my addiction to that skyrocket high that comes when someone thinks I’m great, a high I get to shoot into anytime I want, up to 10 times a day, even, just to feel I’m alive and good. A high that’s akin to standing at the sheer edge of a mountain’s starkest ledge, shocked into momentary madness at the marvel of its 4500-foot-drop and the massive roll and tumble of hills and sky just within reach, I can almost reach out and touch them.
Who wants to give that up? Not me. Because what do I get in return? Absolutely nothing near it. Just the constancy of God’s love. Just the same old me when I wake up, day after unending day, never getting to be thought even better. Compared to the thrill of being thought to be the bee’s knees for something I did, this life of constancy with God just doesn’t sound that exciting.
After sharing this thought with the friend from my last post, I said, “So, what do you think?” It seemed that they got it when I shared it, them nodding their head in all the right places, that they got how the high is such a rush and such a hard, hard thing to give up, and maybe not even worth it. But after thinking for a minute, they said, “It makes me sad.”
Why? Because I’m such a mess for being addicted to it? No, they said. For the fact of this never resting. For having to generate to get results. For not realizing the deepest love is experienced in our weakest, most vulnerable moments.
Our weakest, most vulnerable moments, I protested—who wants that? Why should our weakness be the connecting point for love? Isn’t weakness what caused Adam and Eve to fall? Why would God want to reinforce that? Drawing us into love through our weakness couldn't possibly be what He has in mind—right?
Well. I’m beginning to think maybe it is, but it’s going to take one more post to untangle this web of questions. I hope you stay tuned.
This isn't a post on how I met and fell in love with Kirk, though such a post would be fun and, I think, redemptive to write at some point. Rather, it’s about learning to fall—and be caught—by the billowing pillow of love that exists right behind us all the time, if only we could learn how to fall into it.
Someone recently observed that I seem to let other people govern what’s true about me, and I have to admit that I do. If I receive a compliment, some skyrocket high kicks in that believes I’ve been rendered immortal and can now do no wrong in this world. If I’m judged or criticized, then I burn in shame and condemn myself for valuing or representing the thing that’s been judged. If I turn around and happen to impress someone, then I believe again that I can accomplish anything and that no hope is too high for me to capture. And if I fall short in someone’s eyes in the next day or hour or minute, my stomach jumps into my throat and I can’t breathe too well, and I believe I’m beginning to die a burning, scorching, slow, humiliating death.
This seriously goes on in me every day, for as long as I can remember.
What stopped me up short was when this same person followed up the observation by saying, “I don’t actually want that kind of authority in your life. It’s not why I’m in relationship with you.”
Really? I’m embarrassed to admit this was an actual shock to my system. I’ve been walking around all this time believing people actually want this power—that they want to judge and praise and condemn and coo and see people run in a windswept frenzy to meet their preconfigured sense of reality. I have danced that dance every day. But could people—mature, compassionate, loving people—actually want something different?
I’m coming to see that living at the whim of other people’s valuations makes you crazy. You can’t win. You never rest. You inevitably fail. You’re left running and jumping and dancing for life, just to keep up and not die.
How does one let it go? If you’re a trained performer, how do you become untrained? Can a ballerina unlearn the five positions? Can a pianist unlearn the width of an octave? My next post will be an attempt to answer this question, primarily based on the new belief it's all about this falling into love business.
Or, I should say, none for us. That just didn't rhyme with "Christmas tree."
There's a bona fide Christmas tree forest about 45 minutes northeast of our house. You can actually chop down your own tree! How many of those places are left in this less-and-less green world? Not many.
The place had a petting zoo, too, with ponies and rabbits and lambs. You could take a hayride out into the forest, and they'd even pick you up on the way back so you didn't have to cart your tree by hand all the way to Santa's cash register.
We don't have any room for a tree in our little place, but there was definitely room for a wreath made of Christmas tree cuttings! A large pine wreath, all bright and sparkly with a brilliant red bow, now hangs next to our front door (which, consequently, is also right next to our bed). Smells great, and makes the Christmas season draw near!
I'll post pictures of the forest and cute little downtown Winter Park at Christmas soon.
For those of you especially interested in dialoguing about the state of green life on this earth, and perhaps striking upon some unusual but promising ways our world might remedy this crisis, check out my friend LL's blog, Green Inventions Central.
I’ve been gone for a while, I know. God and I have been having a battle of wills about who is in charge of my life. For the past week and a half, I’ve been trying to convince Him I am. This, as you probably know, is a battle lost from the beginning. But I guess my humanity convinced me otherwise, because we really got into it.
Over the course of the past week, I have learned how much my heart is full of itself. I’ve been made aware of how much I plan for, well, myself. I’d stitched together quite a nice plan, I thought, and was quite sure God would follow along with it.
But I became increasingly aware that He wasn’t following along, and didn’t seem to have any plans to. He seemed to have other plans in mind, in fact, that were in direct opposition to mine. And that really got me riled.
Eventually, I got to a place where I could talk it out in a mature way: “God’s doing something with me,” I’d say. “I’m trying to follow along. It’s tough.” I didn’t really believe it was true, though. I tried to believe it, but not really. But deep down, I knew it was true, and that’s what really peeved me off. I wanted to be right, and I wanted it my way.
What’s interesting is how even things that don’t seem grievous on the surface—the death of our plans for our lives, for instance—still take stepping through the grieving process to be rid of them. I walked through them all in this past week: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, finally, acceptance.
Because at first I ignored it was happening at all. I was convinced I was in the right, that God would get in line with my plan eventually. You know, that He would go along, of course, because I’m one of his good kids. Or at least, if He wasn’t on board right now, after a while He would be. (That’s the bargaining part, obviously.) When neither of these things panned out—when I came to the slow, dawning realization I wasn’t ever going to win in the match against God for my life—I got angry. I told everyone around that I didn’t think God got it, that He couldn’t possibly have my best interests at heart, that He was, in fact, stingy.
After the anger and bargaining wore itself out, then came the depression. I limped along for a couple days. I didn’t have it in me to do much else. I couldn’t even think about God and what He might be trying to do. Couldn’t even fathom the truth of His words. What was the point? I was going to have to give up on what I knew about how to operate well in this life, and that seemed too large a task. How could I possibly do it? And how could He possibly expect me to pull it off? It depressed me that He didn’t seem to care. I couldn’t find His care in this whole thing.
I got to a point where I had to ask Kirk to pray for me because I could sense something was wrong. I believe in the whole Galatians 6 thing, that there’s a supernatural realm existing all around us and that it’s our part to assist with the angels in fighting for God’s side. I say this because I believe at one point spiritual warfare got involved—that the enemy actually tried to keep from happening what eventually happened.
Because what eventually happened was an intense, all-out battle of wills . . . that, in the end, I lost.
I began duking it out with God. I could actually feel Him trying to take my own will from me, but I could also tell He wouldn’t take it without my glad offer of it, and I sure wasn’t racing to do that! The thing is, my own will was all I had. It was how I’d learned to operate—my instinctual coping mechanisms for life. I knew how to make life “work,” how to be good at it, even if that didn’t seem to be working now. I was sure it eventually would, at some point. It always had before, if I just tried hard enough and pleased enough people.
No such luck. He kept at me. I don’t know why. Like I said, I could actually feel Him inviting me to hand over my will, and it felt like a huge, football-sized mound of a rubber band ball, like the kind you find underneath the top felt layers of a tennis ball. A big old mound of will, and mine was the size of a football. I was clutching it to my chest, and He was putting one hand on the ball and one hand on my arm, and saying very quietly and calmly: “Come on, Christianne. Come on. You can give it to Me. Will you let go and let Me have it?”
The thing is, when we’ve found a way of operating in the world that works—even if it is from a wrong place, like the power of our own wills—that’s something like a death knell on our souls. As Kirk and my friend Sara both like to say, the worst thing about the false self is when it actually works. My false self—the power of my own will to exist in this big world—has been alive and well for years, and has done its job very well. It had convinced me that it worked.
God, however, was going ever deeper in His plans for me. “Won’t you let it go?” He wanted to know. After about a half-hour of this literal tug-and-war fight one night, what can I say? He finally won. God won my life—at least for one new day. Will He win again today?
(Continued from Part 4.)
Okay, I lied.
I told you that we would continue this series with a discussion of the writer-poser, but I’ve tried writing that part of the story at least five times and have decided I just can’t do it.
It’s not that I can’t confess what it was like to be me in that place—that part of the story is definitely going to “go public” real soon—but instead that I can’t plunge into a description of the writer-poser self without detouring into the spiritual upheaval God began working in me at about that same time in our story.
Along about my junior year in college, right after I had gotten married and right before I discovered the path to creative writing and editing, God flipped my life upside-down. Really.
I should stop here and say that this is not the sort of thing that’s good for a brand-new marriage. But when God begins flipping your life upside-down and you’re 100 percent sure that it’s Him doing it, it would be kind of pointless and self-defeating—in the truest sense of the word—to ignore Him, brand-new marriage or not.
So, I listened. And here’s what He did: He had me read a book.
An adjunct professor I had during my sophomore year of college knew a guy who wrote a book. The guy was Clifford Williams, and the book was Singleness of Heart. This was a book about the spiritual journey, my professor said, that pulled from lots of great, classical works of literature in its explanation of the spiritual life and the human heart. Since my instructor knew the author, he had tons of copies of the book, and he was willing to give a copy to anyone who wanted it—free—so long as we promised to read it.
Free book? Spiritual journey? Great literature? Where do I sign up?
Well.
When I finally picked the book up, a few months after I got it, I had no idea I was holding in my hands a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode. And of all the things I learned from that book, here are two of the most mind-blowing realizations it created for me at the time.
First, I came to admit that I had no real understanding of grace, didn’t really believe I needed it, and, since we’re being completely honest here, didn’t see what the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, had to do with me. Ouch. Who admits these things, really?
Second, I came to see that I had been living with doubleness of heart my entire life. (Remember the title of the book? Singleness of Heart. The goal of the book was to get you to see your own doubleness so you could, with God’s help, find the path that leads to singleness instead.) Despite what I knew about the traditional stream of doubleness—namely, the path of the hypocrite who lives an out-and-out existence of perversion without shame—this book defined a subtler side that shined a mirror back at my own face.
You could be double-minded, Williams said, and not know it. You could be double-minded, in fact, and still love God with what you thought was your whole heart. And you could do this in one or two ways: through the unwitting mechanism of ambivalence, which means living with an authentic proclivity and aversion to someone or something at one and the same time, or through the equally unwitting mechanism of illusion, which means thinking you want or act on behalf of something you don’t actually want or act on behalf of.
These are incredibly simplified ways of describing what are quite delicate and complex ways of being—and without any of the author’s helpful, more thorough explanations—but the truth basically boils down to this: You could be living a life of doubleness, via ambivalence or illusion, and be completely ignorant of this fact. And that was exactly me.
Thus, the sturdy boat of my life began to leak and, eventually, break. Thank the Lord God above.