The List (Thoughts on Thanksgiving)

When November rolls around, people start making The List.

“I’m thankful for my husband.”

“I’m thankful for food on my table.”

“I’m thankful for my favorite sweater.”

“I’m thankful for the chance to go to the theater tonight.”

It's sweet to watch. It reminds me of a kid gathering up all his favorite toys into a pile and feeling all warm and fuzzy about owning them.

But if this is as far as we ever go with thankfulness, The List can also stir up questions.

The List can make us fearful about losing something on it.

The List can make us remember people who were once close to us but proved harmful.

The List can even make us feel a little dishonest, because there are parts of life that have hurt so deeply that what's left feels more like a consolation prize than a grand stash.

The List pokes at us like a finger in the shoulder. We are glad for it, but there has to be more to thankfulness than this.

There’s a story in the book of Luke about a guy who has made The List.

He’s done the inventory, and he's sitting before the pile. It warms him to see his abundance, and he's so grateful that he has made plan to protect The List long term.

"But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’"

The same is true for us. In a flash it could all be gone.

Relationships break down.

People die.

Jobs get lost.

There is violence, and war, and chaos.

There are corrupt leaders and economic crises.

And even though it’s important to be thankful for gifts like snow, or chai lattes, or warm beds, or having your kids home for the weekend... none of that is big enough to turn the inevitable question mark that lingers at the end of every statement of thanks into a period.

The subject of thankfulness is you, but for it mean much, there needs to be receiver for the verb.

Thankful to whom?

The past few years of our lives have been a mighty stripping down.

So many things that would have been on my list ten years ago are gone.

I’ve seen my children hurt. I’ve seen my husband wounded. I've been embarrassed, and angry, and disillusioned, and fatigued. I’ve seen trusted friends turn into enemies. I’ve walked in spiritual and economic deserts. I’ve come face to face with doubts about who God is and why He works the way he does.

And though I could sit down and collect blessings a mile long of things that I still have going for me, the intense pain of our past few years makes me restless.

I can’t make my list without also knowing how untrustworthy it is.

So I’m sobered this Thanksgiving.

I’m sobered to limp up to the throne of God and kneel before a Being who sometimes makes life gentle and easy, and who sometimes tells Job to get over himself, even after that poor man had lost everything he ever had.

Well, he lost everything except for the God who could speak to a broken man like this:

“Have you commanded the morning since your days began,

and caused the dawn to know its place,

that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth,

and the wicked be shaken out of it?

 

It is changed like clay under the seal,

features stand out like a garment.

From the wicked their flight is withheld,

their uplifted arm is broken.

“Have you entered into the springs of the sea,

or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been revealed to you,

or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?

Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?

 

Declare, if you know all this.

“Where is the way to the dwelling of light,

and where is the place of darkness,

that you may take it to its territory

and that you may discern the paths to its home?

It's become one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible, and God doesn't stop here, either. He goes on and on.

I am God. You are not. I am God. You are not. I am God. You are not.

You are here to worship me.

Goosebumps.

The thought of that sort of God is abhorrent to moderns who prefer a flannel board Jesus who never roars so loud that the foundations of the earth would tremble.

But to me it is exciting. It yanks me up out of my melancholy and my silly assessment of knick knacks that I try to use like a pacifier in a troubling world.

It shows me what cannot be stolen from me. Ever. No matter what.

The lover of my soul.

He is other. He is creative. He is mysterious. He is singular.

His strength is thrilling. His complexity is electric. His purity is blinding. His power is infinite.

Such a God chases me.

About ten years ago I prayed that God would give me one passion. Himself.

I didn't think at the time about what that prayer might entail. I was so much younger then, and though I was sincere, I prayed it like a simple request. 

Now I wonder if to answer that prayer, the Lord has had to pull my fingers off The List. I wonder if love is propelling Him to remove what prevented me from holding to Him above all?

Because the parable about the foolish rich man with too much stuff ends with a scold:

"So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

And so it is with Thanksgiving.

Yes, I am thankful for the good gifts that fill my life. But even if all of those things were stripped from me, the Prime Mover, the I AM, the center of all that exists loves me.

This is where the safest, the deepest, and the richest of all gratitude begins.

"Kicking the Carcass: Humility, Hubris, and Facebook Flame Wars (Part One)"

Between second and fourth grades, I went through a stage of pretending like I knew more about nature than I did. I can't remember what got this going. I'm firstborn, and we tend to be bossy know-it-alls, so maybe that's it. Or maybe I read too many chapter books about creative children who could survive in the wilderness because they had read books about creative children who could survive in the wilderness.

These were also the years someone told me I was 1/32 Native American, and even back then I had romanticized opinions about rooted, tribal people who were bound to the land more intuitively than boring, thinky white folks. 

On weekends I would find some place to sit under trees and strain to hear the soul-radio frequencies of ancestors who had walked in those same spaces centuries earlier. America felt more mine than other people's, because I was really from here. I mean really, really from here.

But however it happened, during those years it was important to me to be the person who knew what the earth meant.  And even though I generally had no idea what I was doing, I used pretense to my advantage. 

In the second grade I asked a girl over to my house after school, and when she ended up not being as interesting as a boy, I decided I didn't like her. Needing to get rid of her, I convinced her to walk with me out into the middle of a tall, Ohio corn field that I knew was full of writing spiders. 

After she was sufficiently freaked out, I looked up at the sun and said with confidence, "You know, I'm part Indian. And I can tell by the angle of the sun in the sky that it's late. 5:30 exactly. It's time for you to go home." She believed me, and I was free for the rest of the afternoon.

Then in fourth grade, I was walking with my friend on her farm in Kentucky. We saw a dead groundhog swollen so tight in the August sun that the hairs on its belly were poking straight out. I wanted to be the science-loving tough-girl who wasn't dismayed by dead animal bodies, so while that other girl squealed "Eww!," I walked over confidently and gave it a kick. 

Explosion. Five thousand maggots airborne, like confetti thrown from a parade float, propelled in the solitary flight of their lives. My jeans smelled like corpse for the rest of the evening.

Watching the internet lately brings back some of these memories. So many people seem so certain with so little information. 

It's an interesting trend, if you consider that the strongest attitude of our time is not really authoritative but relativistic. "What's okay for you isn't okay for me, and that's okay," is all that is okay. We mistrust meta-narratives (big stories that claim to know how the world works), because they imply authority. 

Intellectuals argue about what the Bible really says about being rich or being a woman, but the first four words of Genesis are the most offensive of all. 

"In the beginning God." Whatever follows must submit to that much. It's checkmate. 

So we just threw the pieces off the board and declared God dead, thinking it would free us up to make up a game of our own. 

But instead of opening our minds like we had hoped, killing God only created a new morality that is proving just as constricting. We used all our strength to yank apart the iron bars of right and wrong, only to find that ethics are magnetic. They won't stay broken. They suck back into themselves, even in a world that rejects divinity, adopting a human form that is more distorted in its determination than revelation ever was.

"Free thought has exhausted its own freedom," writes Chesterton. Because as we have tried to pull the religious hat off humanity, our heads have come off with it.

What's left? An entire culture that rejects authoritative morality getting on Facebook and Twitter. And what do they post?

Authoritative morality.

"We should __________ with the refugees." 

"Gays should (or should not) have the right to ___________."

"College education (or health care, or whatever) should be free."

"The right thing to do with the Confederate flag is __________."

"Fetuses (or women) should have the right to live (or kill)."

"Guns are _____________."

Millions of opinions. Strong opinions. And if you don't agree with them you are a monster, or a fool, or ignorant. 

Those are harsh accusations, but what is left in the vacuum metanarrative left? We no longer have to love our neighbors as ourselves, and there is no Divine referee to call fouls or to pull out a rule book. We are angry, ignorant children banging on a piano, trying to bang louder than the next kid, believing that sheer volume of chaos equals music.

There is nothing left but this. Nothing we can do but grab on to floating pieces of wreckage that seem right to us. Compassion for refugees. Compassion for the unborn. Compassion for the gay couple who can't visit one another in the hospital because they can't get married. 

We pick, and choose, and fight like hell. We fight like experts. We fight like we know jack. And our beloved virtues are as dangerous as our vices.

I'm going to include a quote next, but don't skip it. It's stinking good, worth the work of chewing until you get it. 

"The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."  ---GKC

(To be continued...)

A Focused Voice in a Scrambled Life

The blog-o-sphere tends to revolve around marketable personas, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. 

When we go to Pioneer Woman's site (or The Very Worst Missionary, or Stuff Christians Like), we know what sort of posts we are going to encounter. Blogger personas allow certain types of readers to find certain types of writers who fit their interests and needs.

As a reader I love this setup, because I don't have time to be wandering around looking for individual posts that fit me. I go to Ann Voskamp's blog when I need to be reminded that God loves me. I go to Tim Keller's sermons when I need a podcast.  I go to Makato Fujimura's page when I need to read about visual art.

But as a new blogger, trying to find this sort of focus makes me nervous. 

For a couple of months, I've been experimenting, testing the waters, messing around with lots of different options. I've not just been looking to see what gets the most hits, I've been looking to see what resonates with people I know and care about.  

I've also been trying to find what is most life giving, because even though writing is expressive, it's also formative. Wherever I park this blog is going to affect how I spend hours and hours of time in the future. It will impact how I study and then preach the gospel to myself. It will become the primary body of work that I leave for my kids and grand kids.

I know I'm not alone in this struggle to choose. Human beings are multi-faceted beings who sometimes get poetic, and sometimes think about metaphysical things, and sometimes make bathroom jokes, and sometimes reason their way through problems, and sometimes laugh until their cheeks hurt. We aren't just one thing.

So there's some natural tension here. We can't decide to walk down one path without deciding to not walk down another.

Anyway, I'll tell you two of my big fears as I'm making the call.

First, I don't want to be inauthentic. I've been in Christian ministry for twenty years, and I've watched charismatic leaders try to sell themselves by morphing into larger-than-life caricatures that don't hold water over time. I sure don't want to do that.  I'd rather just bang around inside the pinball machine and not make too many claims on myself. 

Secondly, I'm afraid that the main voice I choose to communicate will isolate a people group that I care about. 

Writers tend to get beat over the head about staying simple and accessible, but being too simple can isolate certain people, too. I have a diverse group of friends, and some speak science, some speak math, some speak art. Not all of them are going to connect with felt needs or common imagery. How do I speak so that they might still hear?

The Apostle Paul moved into Athens and made himself comfortable in other people's world, and I want to do that. I want to speak physics, and music, and philosophy, or NASCAR, or cooking onions, or whatever it takes.

When I'm writing, the faces of specific friends often come to mind. I've been praying for some of these people for decades, so I naturally move into what would I say to him or what would I say to her. After praying for someone that long, it's not a strain to adopt language that fits the conversation you've been wanting to have.

But the internet is weird, because I can't see who is reading this. I can aim at a target, but I can't always see what connects. Mostly, it's a one-way discussion.

So as this blog grows, I wish I could see who you are and what you need. Are you tired moms of little kids? Are you doubters and armchair philosophers who have stumbled onto this site because I talk about epistemology sometimes? Are you disheartened evangelicals who can tell that I've passed through the regular frustrations of the modern church, but that I still love orthodoxy and a real Jesus? Are you bitter post-moderns who connect with the language of my poetry? Are you atheists, or readers of old books, or listeners to new music? 

I want to know you because I want to speak to your questions. I want to communicate in your language. I'm not sure how to do that yet.

This has been on my mind for several weeks, but I decided to write about it today because I realized I wasn't alone in the struggle. 

Social media has a way of turning us all into public voices. In one 24-hour period I might watch one friend share an angry political meme, a photo of her kids, and a link to a Gospel Coalition blog post. It doesn't bother me to see that. I like knowing what real life looks like.

But have you ever wondered how to maximize social media so that the most important things you are living for rise to the surface? I don't mean that we should post any less, because maybe we shouldn't. But how do we stay authentic while having a core hub from which we speak? How do we write with a focused voice in a scrambled life?

To this point, I've just been experimenting mostly, and I can't tell if that has been reckless, or lazy, or selfish, or courageous, or honest. But when I was updating my blog last night, I had to laugh when I saw the random assortment of posts on here. Whiplash city. I've put you people through it. That needs to change. 

But how, exactly? What's going to become the hub?

Have you thought through this? Any wisdom on it? What answers are you finding?

Love in the Time of Cholera: An Attack on Paris. An Attack on the Courage to Love.

I always try to be brave and say brave things when there is a work of terror. Writers and musicians are put on this planet to collect wounded souls from the battlefield and tend them with beauty, but last night I couldn’t do it. I just sat on my bed and cried for Paris.

Detail from "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso

Memes started flying through my social media feeds, and I was thankful to see that other people had picked up the gauntlet.

Look for the helpers.

Everything sad will come untrue.

Keep calm and carry on. 

But last night I couldn’t help them sing those songs. I went fetal in my bunker and wept like a scared kid.

I teach high school literature, and some of the best writing I know fits one person’s story in the larger context of a troubled community or nation. My favorite television show is Foyle’s War, and (aside from a horrible crush on Michael Kitchen) I love it because Horowitz juxtaposes individual struggles against the larger context of World War II. He gives us the intimate story alongside the movement of faceless armies.

I don’t think it reduces the gravity of either type of pain to do this. Rather, it reminds us that mass slaughter comes back down to devastated mothers grieving at the kitchen table. And it also shows us that a universe of suffering can be found in a single human heart.

That’s how national tragedies tend to come to us, isn't it? We recount our lives by story, so we remember Hurricane Katrina as the year of our divorce, or 9-11 as the year a parent died, and while we give to relief organizations to help those who are in the bloody fray, images of foreign despair somehow (also) take on the job of illustrating the closest struggles of our hearts. We can only love in the time of cholera.

So I will tell you a little of what happened inside me last night when I heard about the news. I was talking to a friend on the phone about my writing, wrestling through what God might want me to do in the future in light of the violence of my own past.

"Violence" might be too strong a word, or maybe it's not. I can't tell yet.

I can tell you that several years ago, my husband was asked to step down from leading a church he had started, which meant that overnight I lost 250 friends as well as my role as their pastor’s wife. People hear that and assume that there was an affair or something, but there wasn't. Church politics propelled the decision.

This isn’t the place to discuss those details, but I can say that after ten years of watching hard things happen among those people, after years of watching my husband try to absorb those ugly things so nobody else got hurt, after years of waiting for the Lord to rescue us, this final blow nearly killed me. I mean that. I barely lived through it.

My body survived that trauma, but I’m not sure my soul did. I’m not sure my husband’s soul did, either. Last night I was looking through old photo albums, and I see different people walking around in our younger flesh.

In snapshots of everyday life I see the faces of people who ended up kissing us in the garden (Et tu, Brute?), and I am a little ashamed, and a little in awe of the fact that we were ever so unafraid and so trusting.

Maybe you know what I mean because you have your own story like that.

I don’t know what you see when you look back at your old pictures. Pictures of your husband before you knew that he was addicted to strip clubs. Pictures of your son before he got stuck in drugs.  Pictures of your life before the economy crashed and you accumulated more debt than you will ever pay back. Pictures of you before the diagnosis. Pictures from high school before the abortion. Pictures of your wife in the hospital after she gave birth to your daughter, and before she left you for another man.

Life before terror hit.

And you grieve the loss of that life, and you grieve the loss of yourself, because we change in trauma.

We doubt more. We flinch more. We can’t relax again. We can't help it.

I realized some of this last night, and I had to do the embarrassing work of writing two different women and confessing that I had been living out of past trauma. These are brilliant women, writers and thinkers, and they have reached out to me to welcome me into their world. They’ve tried to encourage me and help me.

I have admired them from a distance, but I have also been scared of them, because the sound of bombs still goes off in my head. I can’t shake my nightmares, my memories, images of running screaming and bloody from the rubble.  Every noise sounds like an explosion.

So I try to engage with beautiful people from a safe distance now, because I’m afraid that if I let them get to know me, they won’t like me. Afraid that everything that happened once will happen all over again, and I’m not sure my heart can take that one more time.

But here is Paris. And the goal of terrorists isn’t just death, it’s fear. Terrorists want to use 100 lives, or 250 lives, or 2000 lives to make the whole word afraid to live. Afraid to love. Afraid to engage. It’s a strategy they learned from the very pit of hell.

And this is exactly what I have let happen inside me. I've let them win.

I woke up today thinking about what the explosions of my past have done. Thinking about where I flinch now because of what I’ve been through. Wondering where you flinch because of what you’ve been through.

I keep hearing that God loves us, which is easier to believe at the cognitive level than down in our hearts after we’ve been hurt. But if He does love us, that means something about living here is safe even when living here isn’t safe. It means that something about loving people is safe, even when loving people isn’t safe.

And even when the PTSD tells us the only thing to do is hide, maybe one of the first steps to winning a larger war is taking a breath, and looking a single invitation to friendship in the eyes, and not running away.

Last November

You thought it would be easier this Christmas, but it's not.

Last November you were right here in this same spot, giving yourself the same pep talk, "If we can just hold life together a little longer and get through the winter... then I'll figure something out..."

Last November fear and anger rose in your throat, and you had to beat them down so you could stay clear headed.

"Old Man in Sorrow on the Threshold of Eternity" by Vincent Van Gogh

There were the same whispers in the corners of the room then.  Whispers that will paralyze you if you let them.

"That woman took everything I had. She ruined my life."

"I trusted that man, and he betrayed me."

"There's never enough money. Never, ever enough money. I work so hard. I'm a good worker, and I work all the time. I don't know what more I can do."

"I can't make another meal in this kitchen for one person. I'm so tired of being single."

"I invested ten (or twenty years) in that team, and once I gave them what they needed, they dropped me and moved on."

"Nothing in this marriage is ever going to change. I've had the same conversations, made the same requests for so long. It's hopeless. I feel numb."

"Why can't my family organize a simple holiday function without being abusive?"

"If I can just make this car (this jug of milk, this coat, this computer, this dishwasher, this pair of boots) last a little bit longer..."

And it's scary. It's big time scary.

You go through the motions of trying to figure it out, because you are the adult, and you have to.

But deep down you feel guilty, because there are books written about how to do life right, and they say you just have to take these ten steps and keep on keeping on. So you try.

Somewhere in the middle of step five of the Next Thing, you get the letter that your insurance rates are going up 35%, and you need to look for a vehicle right now, and you kind of want to punch Dave Ramsey and John Maxwell in the mouth, because life is complicated. It just is.

The world favors tall, alpha men and beautiful, young women, and charm, and manipulation. Cheaters win. Users thrive. Quitters have more fun.

And if you see one more motivational speech from some dude who was flat lucky enough to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right genes, you're going to lose it.

You've got your forehead propped up on your hands, and your elbows on a table, your brain is pounding, your adrenaline is high (fight or flight), and when you remember that the Bible says that God will never let the righteous crash into smithereens, you wonder if you weren't righteous enough to qualify for the platinum level of blessing, because as far as you can tell, he lets some people hurt awful bad for an awful long time...

And here. Here's where it happens.

This is the volta. The apogee. The opportunity.

"It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that [the human] is growing into the sort of creature [God] wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best."... "[God] wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. [The darkness] is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God's] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."

(C.S. Lewis)

Which means these are sacred snarls and holy tangles.

This is what it feels like to be in the middle of a story.

Hell names the vortex but misses the meaning.

Hell names your best classroom a prison.

I wish I could be the wind, and put my fingers through your hair, and whisper over you.

I wish I could tell you a story and remind you that even dragons and witches have edges.

I wish I could let you know you are seen, and that your best, loneliest decisions have not been wasted.

I wish that I could hold all you fear you have wasted up before you and show you that your life is not lost, but it is here, and here, and here.

I wish I could remind you what is to come when "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Courage, dear hearts. Courage.

Survival Gear and the End of the World and Stuff

When I get stressed, I buy plastic water bottles, which means I own about 653 already.  A few weeks ago I bought number 654, a neon green, small mouth Nalgene. I bought it because it's the color of the spring's first leaf buds, and I get thirsty for that color in the winter months. Besides, water bottles are like urban canteens. They help you survive national disasters.

When I hit the "grande" level of stress, I start to look at shoes. I don't tend to impulse buy there, because shoes are more expensive, but "when despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound," nervous about my kids, or my checking account, or the future of education in America, or Kim Jong Un, I'll find myself staring intensely into the Zappos website reading about arch supports, or streamlined toes that reduce wind resistance, or ergonomic lacing systems, or memory foam cushioning that makes living on planet earth not hurt so much. 

Shoes make a barrier between me and the world, so I get a knot in my throat thinking about boots hand made in Spain, because somewhere out there exists a little street shop with wooden handled tools, and the owner's wife is soft and happy. She has flour on her hands, and she wears an apron, and the sunlight always falls yellow through the windows, and the shop always smells like leather, and 1938, and corn cakes.

When I'm stressed at the "venti" level, I'm looking at jackets, because jackets are armor. In the jacket stage I'm rolling around phrases like, "wind resistant" or  "rain proof" thinking, "Rain proof! Hallelujah! The elements can't get in, and besides, there are seven pockets (pockets!) where I can stash my survival gear (like water bottles), and also my phone so I won't be lonely."

At the top end of jacket level stress I think thoughts like, "I want a jacket with a solar panel on the back. A solar panel that charges a micro USB charger so if society breaks down into chaos, I can still access my edible plants app."

You can laugh at that if you want, but come Armageddon, you're going to want to borrow some voltage.

And I'm mostly exaggerating there, but kind of not, because because the truth is, no matter how ready I've ever been, disasters have slipped up on me like that time my cat got the nervous squirts on the way to the vet, and I only had five Wendy's napkins in the glove compartment, so I tried to have my seven-year-old daughter hold poo poo kitty at arm's length while I pulled up to the do-it-yourself carwash and dropped a quarter in the power washer, and aimed that high pressure nozzle right into the back of the plastic carrier and pulled the trigger without shutting my mouth first. I learned more about the angle of reflection that day than anybody should ever have to learn by experience. 

That's more of how disasters come. There's no prep time. No room to make a better decision. There's just a super slow-mo 1/18th of a second realization that no, this isn't going to turn out well. But there ain't nothing for it, Mr. Frodo, you just have to figure it out from there.

I'm a literature teacher, foreshadowing is one of my favorite devices, mostly because I hate surprises. I like to be able to see what's coming and be ready for it. If an author won't give me that, I get on Schmoop and look for spoilers so I won't get my feelings hurt when the sad part comes.

But there's no Shmoop for life, so I'm stuck buying Nalgene bottles, and rain proof jackets... or what I bought last week, which is trenta level... the apotheosis of survival gear. 

I've wanted what I bought for five years, maybe more. Carhartt quilted overalls for women. $39, and they're normally $110. I'm pumped.

I grew up in rural Kentucky where every Christmas people bought men fancy warm utility socks, and insulated gloves, and overalls, but the women got towels and potholders, which never made sense to me, because women are the ones who tend to be cold all the time. 

Anyway, I'm waiting for my overalls to get here, and it's exciting. I'm feeling like I did when I was seven and had my first pair of Wonder Woman Underoos. (Man, those were amazing... running through the living room, jumping on the couch cushions, "Ta-da!")

I have no idea where I'll wear these overalls if they do fit. Church is probably out of the question. At least I'd have to switch to the contemporary service. We don't have casual Fridays at work. 

But hey, I can go play in the snow with the eight-year-old this winter, or if the house is as cold this year as it was last, I might wear them in the kitchen while making chicken noodle soup. 

No matter how great they are, though, they won't be the mithril I'm looking for. 

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but I spend a lot of life flinching, and worrying, and that doesn't make any sense when I know the God I do. 

People talk about idols as if they were hunks of wood carved into moo-haha ebony faces with yellow bone teeth and wild feathers coming out the tops of the heads, and everybody acts like humanity has grown out of its superstitions, like it no longer carries around lucky monkey feet and tiger bone dust. We go pshaw on all that tribal stuff primitive people did when they were dancing naked around fires trying to appease the curse.

But here we are, owners of a pasteboard battle helmet, and a sword made out of a Christmas paper cardboard tube, and too many canteens, and quilted overalls, and gadgets, and philosophies, and systems, and iphone apps. 

But nothing is safe enough, and there are times when despite all our lesser glories and strainings, we are brought to our knees and fall, and as much as it hurts, it's also a classroom.

King David used to pray "Answer us when we call!" but somehow we devolved to the point that we've got to pray one more prayer before praying that one. "Remind us to call for help in the first place," is what we have to ask, which is a brave prayer, the sort that rumbles the tectonic plates.

This just in.

This just in.

Starbucks was going to release a new flavor of coffee called "Nativity" this season, so they invited a bunch of leaders from the various factions of Christianity to give input on which graphic should be printed on the matching holiday cups.

The Presbyterian suggested, "Peace among men on whom His favor rests," but the Arminian took issue with that and said it should read "Peace, good will toward all men."

A Wesleyan offered the text, "I feel strangely warmed," but the Presbyterian (still a little miffed) said it was irresponsible to evaluate the success of coffee without practical evidence that the coffee was producing change in the life of the one who had partaken of it.

A Dispensationalist wanted the cup to say, "Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns!" At this the Anglican threw all his papers in the floor and stormed out of the room in a huff, saying nobody who believes in the Rapture has the intellectual capacity to understand what that hymn really means.

A Pentecostal got mad because the cardboard cup sleeves were too immodest. The Catholic spent the whole meeting telling people they couldn't understand his ideas because none of them had studied enough, and besides, his idea was a mystery you could only comprehend by faith.

The representative from the Bible church wanted a series of three themed cups, labeled with three-word phrases, all starting with the same letter.

An Episcopalian spent the entire meeting arguing that there should be no distinction between light and dark coffees. "There is one caffeine, and all brews lead to it," she said.

The Emergent church representative said everybody who paid $5 for a coffee while kids were starving in the world would be going to hell anyway, if there were a hell, which there wasn't. Then he put his bare feet up on the conference table and started reading Rumi.

The Baptist didn't care what design they used, as long as nobody put wine in the cups.

The Lutheran slept through most of the meeting, and when he was elbowed in the ribs, woke with a start and asked if Starbucks had ever considered putting hot dish on the menu.

The Gothardite proposed that Starbucks start requiring women to ask permission from their husbands before they drank coffee.

In the end, the Starbucks team was so flummoxed that it decided there was only one way to make peace in the group. All the ideas that were offered were tossed, and the company chose instead... a plain red cup

/www.thistleandtoad.com/istleandtoad.com/2015/11/a-letter-to-starbucks.html

A Letter to Starbucks

Starbucks,

I'm sorry about the hostile response you have received for your simple holiday cups.  I am a Christian, but when I saw the video Joshua Feuerstein made urging customers to respond in aggressive, immature manner, I was embarrassed and sad.

Of course some skeptics are saying the whole thing was just a brilliant marketing scheme on your part. Others are saying Feuerstein made the video to get attention. But you know, no matter what happened to propel this particular video into the world, I've seen his sort of attitude in other people I know, and it's not right. I don't agree with every stance your company has taken, but I do think it's possible for people (and organizations) that disagree to respect each other.

A lot of us are finding it difficult to stay human lately. There's so much fear and anger running through our culture's dialogue. Extreme conservatives are rebounding off of extreme progressives, and extreme progressives are rebounding off of extreme conservatives. Everybody seems to be making extreme mistakes. Regular, thinking folks get caught in the crossfire of all this.

Too little time is spent reading good books in quiet rooms, and too much time is given to television pablum and propaganda. We are addicted to the highs of hate and offense.

Every now and then Don Quixotes rise up among us, confused but wanting to be brave and do strong things for right causes, but they are not sure how to do them. Many haven't taken time to study history or culture, so they don't know where they are in time. Some have irresponsible leaders stirring them up.

In all sorts of belief systems we find radicals who live on the reactionary fringes of truth. Inside my faith, I see scattered ragtag, fragmented, aggressive souls who are doing more harm than good.

I don't think weird, mean Christians are the majority, because I have also seen good, solid thinkers in my faith ... people living beautiful, generous lives who care for the poor and tend the sick. They go into dangerous places for the sake of the needy, and they give money and time to help others thrive. They teach the illiterate to read; they redeem lives out of trafficking and abuse; they foster abandoned children who have nowhere to go. They cook meals for the hungry and give them places to sleep. They help people fight their addictions, and they are involved in the arts. So many therapeutic things are being done in the name of Jesus. Still, it seems like the confused and crazy minority is always loudest. It's harder for the nice guys to make the news.

I don’t mean that true Christianity is easy or pleasant. In fact, there are some ways it is inherently divisive and offensive. Certain aspects of my faith will never align with the humanism of a post-enlightenment world.

The idea that there is a dimensionality beyond the reign of our senses feels foreign and primitive to many of us, because after thousands of years of our culture passing through rationalism and empiricism, the zeitgeist has settled on a sort of existential materialism. Epistemologically, we've become land animals. Stepping back into the world of the amphibians, learning to breathe underwater in the realm of the transcendent, requires instincts and sensitivities our species has not exercised in a long time.

I would feel differently if Christians were making people uncomfortable because of these issues. There are good questions to ask, good debates to host full of questions that both secular and sacred thinkers have chewed on for centuries. But the battles waged in the name of Jesus right now tend to be smaller. They tend to be more about cultural power than faith. More about fear than about holiness.

I wish I could say I’ve never made mistakes like these, but I have. I'm a strong woman with strong ideas, and I can be passionate. Sometimes I can be myopic, too. But when I do mess up and react too strongly, I try to learn from what I’ve done wrong. I try to stay in the classroom of this life and reach for humility when pride threatens my vision.

I get scared of life sometimes, and spew, and roar, but as time passes, I am starting to see how the changes that are happening in our culture are helping me identify what matters and what doesn’t.  My fingers are being pulled away from the peripheral stuff, and I am (slowly) learning how to drop my anchor deeper into the waters of a peace that isn’t rooted only in my circumstances.

As far as I can tell, on the first Christmas, the dark womb of the three-dimensional perceptibility split open, and an invitation asking the tired, heavy souls of men to be reborn poured down on all the earth. I don't know what it was like to be alive back then, but from the ancient literature that I have read, I don't think the essential nature of humanity was all that different from what it is now.

Last summer I read some of the works of Cicero, and I found in this wise man who lived 100 years before Jesus so many of the same struggles and feelings I have today. He seemed familiar and human, not stiff or distant. Since then I have read thoughts from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and in all of these I have found both hope and restlessness. Levity and a thirst for more. Humans are turbulent, beautiful creatures.

The German Romantic philosopher Novalis wrote a book about a protagonist who spent his life chasing a beautiful blue flower that he encountered in a dream. It was a symbol of the yearning we often feel, that sense that there is more beauty to be found just beyond our fingertips. It's Sehnsucht, and later C.S. Lewis would refer to this as "a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy," a trajectory we can follow from all familiar joys, because they are foreshadowings.

The Christmas story is a flicker of beauty that passes like a warm, sunny breeze on your arms. It is not militant. In fact, it is almost comedic, audacious in its austerity, meek as a newborn baby.

The culture to which Jesus appeared was hostile to many of his teachings, but it's interesting to think about why.  Plato's Allegory of the Cave taught that someone who moves from the realm of shadows to the upper world of pure light, and then journeys back to share what he has found will often be killed. Jesus and his followers had seen a different realm, and the stories they told caused strong responses.

But the first Christians weren’t full of the selfish cultural bravado that we find in certain facets of so-called "Christianity" today. And when Jesus was offended, he was offended over things like charlatans, and hypocrites, and religious frauds. He was gentle with the thirsty and the broken.

Just like notes in a musical score run in major and minor keys and in time signatures, just like visual art is governed by various rules of composition and form,  the will of God is harmonious. A soul is like a note written onto a line within a measure of a symphony, and it is possible for that note to be in or out of tune with the deep energies of the universe.

A sour note was struck by Joshua Feuerstein. I don't know why he acted the way he did, but his message is flat and off tempo. He is discordant to the beauty that God's people are trying to sing on this planet. I am sorry for his behavior.

I like the simplicity of your holiday cups because they remind me of a desire I have for my faith in this country. I would like a plain surface, a clean sheet of paper, a chance to begin this dialogue over again. There's too much noise. Too much shouting.

I'm sorry you have been mocked and insulted. The Jesus I know loved you enough to lay down his rights, his ease, and even his life for you. As I have prayed for your company today, asking God to give me his heart for you, I haven't felt anger. I have thought about all the people passing through your doors seeking solace and strength on chilly nights, and I have felt tenderness and compassion.

As you restore others, I wish I could give you a warm drink back, and fill you with good things in return. I wish I could give you lasting things that bring you a joy that is deeper than common happiness. I hope he will show me how to love you with his sort of selfless, generous love.

I hope you have a beautiful Christmas. Thank you for making a warm spot for the wanderers. Let heaven and nature sing.

Rebecca Reynolds

His First Communion

Walking into the handsome old sanctuary of First Broad Street Methodist Church, I see communion sitting on the front table. We don’t do communion every week in my church, so finding it there always makes my stomach flip like the Pevensies at the name of Aslan. This is not just a ceremony for me, it’s a wardrobe door, a direct line into unseen dimensions.

Thanks to John Wesley, you can let your heart be strangely warmed in a Methodist church without a bunch of theologians who never let the living God step past the iron gate of their analysis telling you why inspiration is really just a case of sausage indigestion.

And so I can relax here in that quiet way Methodists do. I welcome instinct and inference into my flickering child soul, where the sacrament becomes a hard reset, a call to lay down my attempts to achieve goodness (or defy it) and like a baby, drink down grace into the thirst of utter dependence.

Today is my son’s first communion. He knows what God’s love means now, and he’s ready for this. He’s been waiting for this day for weeks.

Halfway through the sermon he has to pee, but while he wiggles his butt around on the pew pad and pinches his thighs together, he whispers in my ear, “If we go now, will I miss communion?” I say no, but he’s still a little nervous slipping out the doors.

I love the sacrament, but it also sobers me. Like all holy things, it seems to be alive in a way I can't quite describe. Maybe the bread and wine don't morph into the actual body and blood of Jesus, but something more is going on during this exchange than human animals sucking down crackers and grape juice, and I can feel it. Even if the Catholics don't get it quite right, they are pretty close to whatever it is that is taking place here. Words are metaphorical, after all, and this is both a mystery and an intersection.

In our old church there was a group of twenty-somethings who would snarf the communion remainders after the service. They would laugh and throw down so recklessly, but I couldn’t join them. I don’t mean they were wrong, perhaps this is the best way of all to receive grace. I just mean that for me, I have to take it slowly and let it work through me. It's too mighty to forgive and be forgiven.

One of the smartest agnostics I know can't get over the difficulty of that one concept. Forgiveness. It's a hard math because of the simplify of the equation. Maybe harder for some personality types than others.

A few weeks ago I received a random Facebook message from a friend who lives across the ocean. He was praying and felt like God was leading him to exhort me to lay my bitterness aside and forgive those who had hurt me.

I wouldn’t give much weight to a message like this from a lot of people, but this man is sensitive in prayer. He has a radical sort of trust and sensitivity that has been proven in the past, so I began to ask the Lord what he wanted me to do.

It's true that I've been at an impasse with several folks who hurt me. I’ve reached out to ask them to reconcile so many times, but I've asked with boldness and with open grief, and for the most part, I have only received silence in response.

As best as I can, I’ve tried to forgive and move on. Lines of anger still rise sometimes, but mostly that anger is sadness. I don't want the relationship to end this way.

So when we get to the part of the liturgy that says “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I scrape the insides of my heart and once again chose the grace-in-process that I guess all people choose in the middle of conflict. If I saw their faces right now in the room with me, I would flinch. But they are not here, and I do the best I can.

I pray God’s mercy for them, imagine the best of them, visualize us together one day in glory, and pry my fingers off old claims. “Take it, God,” I say. And I’ll ask him to do that for the rest of my life, I suppose.

Before me are rows and rows of older people... a sea of white puffs of hair and bald heads. I attend this service for that very reason, to watch their beautiful hands on the hymnals, to hear their shaking voices sing and pray beside me, to feel the softness of their palms on mine as they say, "Peace of Christ to you." As far as I can help it, I plan to never worship again in a church that isn’t full of the merry faces of the elderly.

Before service the narthex is a flutter of suits and synthetic dresses. Hearing aids. Faded costume jewelry. Glasses chains. Walking sticks. The smell of roses and powder from a powder box. White foundation smeared over with blush that is too bright. Tidy polished shoes. Ages spots. Lipstick seeping into wrinkles.

Little old men wobble to the parking lots so they can wheel Cadillacs to the back walk and pick up their wives. There are the wealthy ones, too -- the carriage of wealth isn’t moved by time.

Friends in their seventies and eighties exchange the sort of laughter people my age can’t produce. These folks  learned to laugh before the world got cynical, and they have kept their musicality. I love them for being bright and jolly, though it’s a mystery to me how this sort of spirit works. They are aliens. They are Native Americans who gather around strange fires to play Rook and smoke peace pipes. My people have taken over their land.

I watch them twenty feet away and think surely it must hurt somehow to have lived that long. Children and friends betray. There are losses and wrongs done. But their souls float, though they are bent over in their spines, and I know they must have released life's poisons instead of holding them inside their mouths.

When we walk up to the front to kneel, my son holds out his little fat hands for the communion.  “The body of Christ, given for you,” a woman says. She says it intentionally, meaning every word, and I get choked up watching that soft white bread fall on his palms.

He is forgiven, and he will forgive. He is running over with laughter and courage, the same sort of levity as that of the old people who look at him so fondly as he bounces about. They are cut from the same cloth.

Then she puts the bread in my hands. “The body of Christ, given for you.”

“Thank you,” I say, while the faces of those I am forgiving flash through my mind, and while the faces of those I have offended come too. But I can only reflect for a second, because my son shoots up from the kneeling bench giddy. He has done it! He has done it!

2+2=4. 2-2=0. He knows the math of this better than I do. Simple. Free. Moving on to the next good laugh that comes to the light of heart.

The Current and the Resistance

The other day I was trying to get out of bed, still half asleep and uncoordinated, when my hand bumped into the back of my thigh. I thought, "What IS that soft, warm thing? And why is it in my bed with me?"

Pre-coffee brain, but still, I didn't recognize my own flesh. Why? Because it didn't feel strong and lean like my leg feels. Or used to feel.

"Crowded City" by Mark Tobey (1974)

For the past year or so, I have had a quadriceps tendon injury, and I haven't been able to exercise like I want. I've been to the orthopedic twice, but things still aren't right. It hurts to go up and down stairs, to sit down, and to stand up. I tried to hike in the mountains last week, and a couple of steps I planted were dangerous, because I couldn't trust my own balance.

You might not notice the difference if you looked at me. I have an easy metabolism for a woman my age. But I can tell the difference, because I remember how I was before. I don't like the change. I want to recognize myself; I want to be who I think I am.

It's frustrating that a small wound could lead to inactivity, which folds into a sedentary life that - poof - makes weak middle aged people. One injury causes twenty more, and then life begins to serve the body instead of the body serving the life. People get trapped inside themselves this way. It's quicksand.

I've been thinking about it ever since, and I've realized that this is not just a problem of my physical body. When I look at other aspects of my life, I see a similar atrophy.

Sore places in my soul have discouraged me from moving certain muscles intellectually and spiritually:

"My last church hurt, so I won't get so involved this time."

"I've already tried to work through that issue with that person. It's never going to work between us."

"There's so much I need to read, I can't get going, because it feels overwhelming."

"All politicians are corrupt. I'll just disengage."

"The Bible confuses an hurts me sometimes, so I'm going to avoid it."

That sort of thing. I've favored my injuries here and here and here. Relationally, ecclesiastically, academically, artistically, I've restricted my activity. I've let a flinch discourage me from stretching, from working through exercises of rehabilitation. It's been easier to sit still and pass time and hope somehow the problem just goes away without attention.

Thank God for curious, intelligent friends. I can feed off them some. I can trust them to throw good food to the ducks. I can trust them to pull me up to the top of the water when I'm drowning. They lug me onto the beach and breathe their own air into my lungs.

Still, my brain and heart are growing silly and idle in certain ways. I'm on government cheese, snacking on whatever gibblets and scraps come my way.

The internet is part of my problem. It's so easy to scroll through social media feeds, licking the icing off all hundred e-cupcakes at the party. I take a bite of a provocative headline and chew up a five paragraph post, but it's more work to read a book, and it's more work to dig into real research. It's more work to do the work of listening and asking questions. It's more work to gain truth slowly and deeply. Living not doing that work is easy, but it is making me soft.

I'm not quite sure what the solution is. Most of the world is tumbling along beside me in this passive current, and because I'm a writer, I need to spend time here, because I have to be fluent in the impulses and language of our time. My toolbox is the vernacular. I need agility with clickbait and felt needs.

And it's not just a matter of building a platform. It's a matter of love. Let's say I spend hours writing grand and complicated essays that only fifteen people will ever read. What good does that do? If that is what God's called me to do, it does great good. I could ask for no more than whatever he gives me.

But if I do that out of pride, out of self-centeredness, out of an insular or withdrawn heart, what opportunity have I missed? Jesus came down to earth and told simple stories out of love, even though he knew plenty about microbiology and quantum mechanics. And he told me to go forth into the world and make disciples.

Good writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's covered in sweat road dust. It spits and makes mud. It's plebian.

Still, it's one thing to choose simplicity and another thing to be simple minded. I don't want to get soft because I'm not working out my mind or my heart. I don't want to flinch and avoid, and then write what is easy. I don't want to just chew the cud.

I want to do that work of spending time walking on my own two feet, and then collapsing while I'm carried. I want to dig in hard things, instead of just grazing off whatever my friends drop in my tin cup. I want to go dig underground in the annals of the world, and in the vaults of my hardest truth, and get honest, and get stronger in the difficulty. I want to stop running away from this terrific loneliness and sit in its company and see what it has to teach me. In all of that I want to bring up treasures that do people good, because life is short, and I'm here to give.

Wounds are instructive, but so is physical therapy, and so is intellectual therapy, and so is spiritual therapy. What is my laziness preventing me from doing? How can I refuse to let sore spots make make every choice for me, rejecting Coke-bottle spectacled myopia and a belly full of cultural Doritos? How can I fight for what's waiting to be discovered? How can I live outside the box -- no outside the screen -- aware of what is atrophying in my heart and leaning in instead of away?

I haven't figured it out. I don't want to live in an ivory tower. I don't want to depend on the strength of my own will when I need to learn to rely upon God's resources. But I also know sometimes hard things are worth doing, and that the power of the gospel can become even more clear when we take risks like these. I don't want to just resign. I want to do this work, even when it hurts to stand up from sitting; even when I have to fight myself to get out of bed half an hour earlier to push against the resistance band that pinpoints my weakness to make me stronger.

Oh, Jovial King

Little blue earth,

we might sit on the rim of Jove's red storm

like a girl on the edge of a swimming pool

splashing her feet in the water.

Or like Thomas, we could stick our thumbs

into the atmosphere of the Christ who

let an entire planet pass

through the eye of his side.

But oh, jovial King,

You take pleasure in a little tribe of ants,

in those who fear You,

in those who fear themselves,

in those who hope in Your steadfast love.

Free Writing in the Mountains

It is dark where I am sitting, down on these cool, wet rocks at the bottom of the falls. Everything close around me has drifted here in death, bits of branches, yellow leaves caught in little eddies, a fairy circle, a wizard's kettle stirred by Puck's finger, light tumbling to the tops of these dark mountain pools, then running round by currents like a flurry of koi in a hotel lobby in Beijing. 

Halfway round the world from here, humans have reduced progress to concrete and hell smog. I wanted to breathe dignity in those masses, crawling like ants. They have forgotten who they are, and though Americans are proud and fat, it still hurts me to see anonymity more. I think that no one could love a large government who had studied what trust in man has done to those great, old cities. For Babel has always been Babel, and Babel is Babel even still. 

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And yet the Eden-starved soul still carves out divots of grandeur for fish to flicker and dive. We are not fully lost to the crowdings of our highways, to our production, to our cognition, as long as wild beauty speaks to what is yet ruled by the instinct. I have hope for the line of man, for when we stumble upon October kneeling down before the roar of coming winter, we gasp, for it is a holy thing to see a saint die in ecstasy. 

May God give me this death, too -- what the birch trees know as they reach for the sun and catch a vision of the heavens opened, and then burst out laughing while men in dark masks work to cut off their heads. The trees laugh in the face of twenty years or sixty hacked off  and thrown into the trunk of the swing low, sweet Chariot, or the Subaru, or eighty years pressed flat by nursing home pneumonia  --- swing low, sweet Chariot, coming forth to carry me from what has never been my home to what will be familiar forever at first sight.

The treetops open into a blue sky overhead. Leaves are lemon, lime, and mustard ochre, with shadows in burnt sienna. The trunks run straight here, type-A students in perfect posture, long and lean. And yet, everything the sun touches in the heights looks like a child drew it with a crayon. Bright, primary colors, moving with a wind I cannot feel down here in the cool forest floor, folded between two forty-foot rock walls. 

Tracing the water up, I see a spray at the top. Pretty little balls of liquid light, popping and levitating, then off to the right, long, thin, white tendrils of water, soft and gentle like the hair of a poor, pretty little blonde girl. 

Down still more, the water crashes upon a plateau. At the resistance, the spray has spread over rocks where moss grows. Dead things are stuck here. It is a purgatory. A desperate middle ground. A broken stick caught halfway down, beaten every second, and yet the ends are jammed between two rocks. The only way it can finish its journey is to break, and something about that catches in my throat, because I have been there, too.

Leaves are caught in webs the spiders have thrown across the rock expanses, waiting to fall. They turn like dancers on a toe. Rhododendrons are trying to grow in cracks on the stone face, and I grieve for them, too, because I have also tried to take up residence in places where the earth was too thin, and I know how long it takes to admit that it will never work. The parable which tells us about good soil is true, but it's hard to know what that means when you are only a seed with no eyes, and with no legs to choose your landing place. People talk about election and free will with such confidence, but here these little glories grow, and I feel pity no matter what is true in the transcendent realms.

And like those leaves, I have hung between heaven and earth, dizzying myself in what would hold me. Remind me that I have died. Remind me that I have been made new. And yet, these awful webs.

The weight of the water collects to a magnificent crash at the bottom, beating away at the rocks. How many thousands of years has this been here? Stone worn away by softness, for the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. That I want to do, I do not do. That I do not want to do, I do. And the force of gravity wears me down. It wears me down until I know I have to have some help.

It is cold today, cold that smells of pine and deciduous leaves decomposing. Branches reach out to make intermediate ceilings. A courtesy, an offer to hide me from the heavens. 

A fallen trunk is coming to graham cracker crumbles amid all colors of rocks. Water black stones, rose pink, speckled, veined, covered in green growth, rubbed with rust, and all manner of things come together like an altar unhewn, like a hymn that has listened to the seasons, with the theme of the last stanza beginning the theme of the next. 

Creation resounds. Praise him praise him, all ye blue little ferns, your eyelashes batting like a child coming out of an afternoon dream. Praise him, praise him all ye crayfish thrusting backwards into retreat, for this mountain holds the presence of the Almighty. Praise him, praise him all you terminal patients of this long, human disease, though the cold months are coming, and these are our last days. 

The over-confident walk about the halls of earth in their open-backed hospital gowns, both cheeks showing, dragging their IV's, mocking John Darby, and I don't know what's coming for sure, but good simple souls tend to know when a thing is dying because they listen to their bones, and they read the Farmer's Almanac. 

Praise him, praise him, you glory-flecked with age spots. Praise him, praise him, you with your rotten quadriceps tendon, busted it wrestling with the Angel of the Lord, you did.  Praise him, praise him, every October soul. Winter comes. And spring soon after.

"The Rebel"

(Dedicated to Rich Mullins, who loved rebels and understood them. I'm sorry you're not with us to celebrate your 60th, Rich. I sure am grateful for the time we had with you.)

I put my toes right up to the line.
I look over the edge,
and standing there I feel that sweet line of rebel fire
running through my belly.

"Aha! I say," I’m not so old
"Not so worn out,
I could throw myself off this thing and fly, and fly,
and then fall with style."
Boom!

I flirt with disaster.
I wink at apocalypses.
I stand on the street corner of law and grace
and lift up the hem of my skirt to call a taxi.

I yank two hairs out of a horse’s tail.
I throw rocks at bulls.
I eat seafood from the Asian market.
I talk to strangers.
I jaywalk.

I say terrible things just to try them on for size,
then I try on sizely things just to say I’ve been terrible.

I medicate with danger.

I develop entire worlds
in which I am some kind of protagonist,
some sort of villain,
Don Quixote in full charge
or Casanova.

But mostly I’m scared.
Afraid of not being enough in the end,
afraid of being someone’s biggest disappointment,
of scrolling through that too-long, damning letter that says,
“I thought you were okay,
But you’re not.
I had hoped you were better then you are.”

Afraid of being seen.

Adam and Eve looked down and behold, they were funny looking.

I don’t know if they laughed or not,
but when they stared into the mirror that was nailed on the backside
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
they saw lumps and bumps in unfortunate places.

Eve had saddle bags and saggy
neckline
and Adam, well, he had one of those fold-over-the belt beer bellies old men get,
and lo, Spanx wasn’t around yet,
So they jimmy rigged a couple flannel shirts from the Goodwill
and then they said, “Honey, how does this look?”
“Fine, fine,” they said.

Or maybe that’s not how it went,
I get things all mixed up.

But ever since then people been looking to hide and medicate, medicate and hide,
by thrill, by will, by lies, by excuses,
by the sweat of a righteous brow hacking up dry sod,
by casting a thin line into the purple shade bank and letting the bait drop slow,
and then tickling and teasing it in,
by building idols,
by spilling blood,
instead of just running back into the cool of the day
where the Good Lord tends to walk after his supper every night
and just laying on our honest faces in the grass
and sobbing,
"I messed this all up, all up, all up.
And I'm so sorry.
I ran away, and what I found out was that I miss you.
Because apart from you, the earth is formless and void,
and there is no light, no light at all."

By Rebecca Reynolds 2015

The Song of a Sad Heart (Part One)

“ Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.” (ESV)

Psalm 43:5

I. The Downward Spiral: What Despair Feels Like

A few weeks ago I saw a Facebook cartoon making fun of Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief. If you've read her 1969 book _On Death and Dying_, you know how she suggests that people in mourning go through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, before coming to acceptance. But in this image, instead of a tidy progression of predicable emotions, wild, scribbling lines were drawn all over the diagram. I looked it over and I thought, "Yeah. That's exactly how it feels. Grieving feels like chaos, and you can give the process all the names you want, but in the end, it's still going to be messy, and it's still going to be brutal."

 "The Lonely Ones" - Edvard Munch (1935) 

After C.S. Lewis lost his wife, he wrote an anonymous book about the grieving process. It's hard stuff to read, because all his walls are down as a writer. This is Lewis the human learning to sleep alone again, and perhaps the thought that he could write without being known for himself gave him freedom to speak as a trembling peer instead of as an iron sage. He tells his story from the middle of devastation, so honest, so articulate, naming how sorrow feels inch by inch.

“[I]n grief nothing 'stays put.'" he writes. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? 

"But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? 

"How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time.” 

If you have lost something or someone vital, you know that feeling of dismemberment. You're not just missing part of your body, you are trying to do life while being vivisected.

You do your daily routines in middle of guerrilla warfare. Triggers are everywhere. You take a shortcut through the diaper aisle after a miscarriage and sit in the floor and weep halfway through. Or a couple of months into your divorce you see a picture in the feed, an older couple holding hands, and for five whole minutes you are paralyzed, wondering how you lost everything. You're riding to chemo and you see another woman walking down the street wearing a tank top, with all her hair, with all of her body, and you lean your head up against the car window, begging the road vibrations to scramble your brain. You are in a restaurant and hear a laugh that sounds just like the laugh of the father you lost two months ago, and your chest threatens to collapse inside itself.

The world is primed with arrows pointed at the grieving, and healing takes four steps back for every three it moves forward because you never know when something is going to tear your wound back open again.

II. This Fallen House of Cards: What is God Doing With Me?

I was driving to the church a few days after my husband was dismissed from ten years of a difficult leadership position.

Our house is only a few miles away, but there is a point in grieving where motion of any sort is dangerous. I was there, volatile as a wounded animal.

In Act I Scene I of grief's trauma it's better not to speak with anyone connected to the injustice that has been done to you. I knew that from experience. I knew I didn't need to verbalize the toxic explosions churning inside me, and I knew I didn't need to be driving a vehicle 60 MPH down a highway.

In what I felt was a noble attempt to protect the flock, I lied. I wrote a letter supporting the men who had hurt my husband, asked that it be read to prevent dissension, and then I went home, lay on the floor, and cried until I threw up.

I wish I hadn't written that letter now, even if I had good motives. But I was terrified by the magnitude of my grief, and breaking up with an elder board is like a divorce. You feel an obligation to say good things about the other parent, even if you don't really believe them. You do it for the kids. I was scared of the power of what I felt, afraid that if I let the door of real truth crack open even an inch, that all the beasts of Pandora's box would come flying out, biting and stinging the children.

So I drove to the church alone, when I knew nobody was there. I wanted to see the building one last time. I wasn't strong enough to hurt a building. I wanted to put my hands on those bricks, and let my soul accuse them of what they had done, even though I couldn't ever go back inside the walls.

Wild surges of shame, fury, and fear were taking turns pulsing through my heart. The faces of people I had once trusted, lost friends that I now saw as traitors flashed before me. Their smiles distorted like images from a haunted house.

“God, what are you doing to me? I trusted them! They asked to hear how we were doing, and I trusted them! If I can't trust them, I can't ever trust anyone. I will never feel safe again. I will never let anyone know me again!"

My fists slammed the steering wheel and tears filled my eyes. I could barely find the road.

When despair comes to us, it doesn't just make statements about what has hurt us in the past, it makes damning declarations about our future. It  shoves its hand down our throats, reaches around to our hearts, and rips out our hope.

I think that what happened to our family that summer was wrong, and yet, this terrible circumstance orchestrated by flawed human beings ended up being the very machine God commandeered to reveal infections that I didn’t know were inside me.

The first of those infections was that I didn't trust God. I didn't believe he had my best interest in mind. As people let me down over and over again over again during those ten years, I began to push questions about Divine love down inside me along with those human wounds. I started wondering if I was just the sort of person God didn't like protecting. Wondering if my mistakes were too gross, and if I was repulsive to him. Wondering if I was just one of the disposable ones, a jar of clay to be used and tossed away after a bigger story was written for other people.

Like Eve, I didn't believe God loved me enough to give me what I needed. What He withheld felt like a lethal loss. What He gave felt insufficient.

When all of life's pressure landed on the weak link of my doubt, despair blew me open. My invisible cracks widened. What I had never believed, not really, rose to the surface. There it was, in light and color, twenty feet tall, broadcast onto the sky. The whimper of doubt that I had once been able to smother broke free and became a scream.

God loved me enough to use a terrible circumstance. What was done to destroy me, he used to instruct me instead. The unfaithfulness of humanity was bent. He broke it like a wild horse, turned it around to show me a lie I was believing.

Lewis writes: “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”  (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed)

(to be continued in part two)

The Pilgrimage

There are places where I choose to praise God; but walking at the ocean is walking in on the middle of the worship service. 

At the seaside I am a Methodist stumbling through the doors of an apostolic revival, the salt wind does up my hair, beats my shirt against my stomach, threatens to pick me up off my bare feet and toss me like a baby into the arms of the angels. 

Blown sand stings my legs and sticks to them, because I am made of earth, and the ocean seems to remember my humble origin, teasing me, sucking at my toes with her foam, and whispering (in case I have forgotten) that my beginning and my ending roll in and out like the tide, for a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.

But God has hidden his glory in  pot-bellied, knobby-kneed pieces of clay, and every day the ocean sees the cycle of our kind. We are at our most human with her. She receives our little chunky butt toddlers with flutter skirts while they carry yellow buckets of her water to the castles she will wash away in a few hours. She pulls at the old bones of old souls tottering against the breeze and threatening to capsize.

We trust her too much, I think. We trust her like that friend who says exactly what she thinks, for the ocean is no saint, this minister of tsunamis, haven of hermaphrodites and two-headed mutant things. She births deep sea vent worms, and coal black nightmare fish with sunken eye spots, and cannibals who eat their own young. 

We pretend to preside over her with 103 lb teenagers sitting on lifeguard chairs. Their little, muscular, roasting bodies are poised, watching fat guys on floaties trying to get wi-fi, dangling white soft legs into the wild. 

Yet deep calls to deep, angling the soul to find 5G somewhere in heaven or earth. Waves touch my shins, and I consider the life energy of all bodies standing in this water through all time. 

Have we always come to the ocean needing to reinvent ourselves? To escape ourselves? To be baptized into something new?

When I come to the ocean, I can never relax until the third day. Maybe it's the curse of the firstborn, but I am shaking off work for seventy or eighty hours. I can't sleep. I can't laugh. The ocean has to teach me again to be wild, to be dangerous, to breathe, to resign, to absorb those surges that smack me in the back, knock me down, give me tactile proof that I am not fleshly whole nor holy flesh.

This is why I and my fellow pilgrims collect, and traveling to Canterbury, we weave through one another, smelling our coconut sunscreens, hearing bits of our interchanges, the crescendo and decrescendo of ten-second intimacies. 

Today it was a gay guy and his girl friend, and he was telling her about the last fight he got into at his dad's place with his boyfriend. He said he threw the other guy across the room. Literally threw him. Broke some stuff. His dad got mad. Said they couldn't come back. And everything was f-this and f-that, before I moved on.

And yesterday that guy in the baseball hat looked around when I was talking on my phone and broke down into tears, saying that I was just scared and disappointed with the way The Lord had done some things.

At the ocean we notice about one another what we wish we didn't, Noah in his drunkenness, and spiritual desperation, and relational failure, and jello bottoms swinging dimpled out of tired bikinis.

The locals are rotisserie-brown beach folk, caramelized and crunchy. And there are sturdy peasant bodies with short, strong hands that I can't help but visualize squeezing Jersey cow udders. If they weren't wearing Ohio State shirts, they would have names like Peggoty and would play milkmaids on the BBC.

A willowy romantic carries her hard-bound book into the waves. Long dark hair twisted into a knot.

There is a woman tall and angular, spray-tanned, too skinny and dyed blonde. Her arm is cooly woven through a man's. She doesn't love him. He is an accessory. Implanted breasts are the only softness protruding from an expensive red bikini. I don't like her. Her head is too high; it floats on her neck. This has cost too much for her, I think.

Beautiful, deep chocolate bosom larger than my legs. It makes me feel less female than I am. I envy her exotic beauty, high, African cheekbones and satin skin that looks as if it wouldn’t wither in a hundred years.

Eighty-something white woman walks the coast in a two piece. Skin hangs like a paper fan folded. She has the spiked white hair of an athlete.

Someone's mom wears a grey cotton sports bra with an ipod tucked against her sweaty boob. Her stomach pours forth beneath it, then tucks itself into a bikini bottom at some indeterminate point. She dares the world to comment. I envy her abandon.

Mullet man sitting beneath a tent. Skynard blasting. Surrounded by made-in-China flags, one dug into sand for every branch of the military and the POW’s. He leans back in a folding aluminum lawn chair, owning something defiant by the way he holds beer in a cozy.

There are perfect twenty somethings. They are confident in the parenthesis of being exactly the right age for the beach.

Peach-fresh thirteen-year-olds, watching the twenty-somethings. Is he looking? Giggle. Is he looking?

Couple in love. Intertwined. They are the only two people in the world.

Family speaking Spanish, casting lines. They are catching good things. Happy children help bring in the food. They are adored, and it's little wonder. Such huge, deep eyes.

Forty-something and fighting it. Running shorts. Tight legs stretched into fibers. Determined.

Two sisters. The lesser beauty multiplied with a tossed smile. The greater negated by self-absorption.

Old man. Plaid shirt tucked into pressed khakis. Calisthenics. Arms up. Two steps. Arms out. Two steps. Fingers curled. Wrists in a circle. Two steps. Smiling and nodding, left then right. Left then right.

Asian couple. She wears a huge straw hat and shirt buttoned up to the neck to shelter porcelain skin.

Drunk frat guy dancing with abandon. His friends are laughing. He’s got some good moves. I want to dance, too.

Slathered redheads sizzling like a plate full of fajitas.

Little girl crying. Pink blow-up floaties on her arms. She has sand on her hands, and it bothers her. She needs a nap.

Women on their stomachs. Bikini straps undone. 

Guys strutting in threes. Looking at girls.

Bocce families. Frisbie throwers. Kite flyers.

Introverts with Kindles and terrific hats.

Pack mule dads looking tired, shoulders burned, carrying four chairs, two floaties, and a toddler.

And me. Walking too white. Forty-three. I don't like my feet, and I'm wearing sunglasses to cover the flaws around my eyes.

All this flesh of ours. Comedic and syncopated. Nice people aren't supposed to notice any of these things, let alone write them down, but I do notice, because we are all so wonderful except for that proud woman who bought her confidence on a surgery table. 

God, forgive me for my indifference toward her, because I think maybe You would love her most dearly because she has sought love most desperately.

Today I was reading about the Boltzmann brain theory, a spontaneously generated consciousness that has a one in a bluebajillion chance of kerplowing into existence if the world hangs around dying long enough. 

And I laughed at first to read it, because it's the the story of the Emperor's new clothes, isn't it?Physicists toss dice about the simplest of possible things while Einstein rides through town, down along the coast in a Speedo, a living, breathing wonder.

We are all near-naked kings and queens at the ocean, fool, parading pilgrims. And you can claim agnosticism if you like, but if you had seen my daughter hit the hole-in-one on that lucky shot playing pirate putt putt, you would have laughed at the novelty of it instead of doubting in the existence of golf balls.

Still, he loved us before we loved him. He always has. And He loves us still. 

So he gave us the ocean to tickle our arms with the salt wind, whipping up the coast to a froth against our ankles. He spins the moon on the tip of his finger to send the she-tide sighing like a prophetess to Nineveh.

And we resist, and we yield, and we resist, and we yield, pushing our hair out of our eyes, and letting the salt water wash into our hearts. 

Come, Living Water. Come show us what it all means. For the sea is only a glimmer, like light caught on a point of a wave.

A Love Song for the Less Desirable Woman

You burst yourself upon

a man who drank you down

then threw you aside.

I won't flatter you.

You weren't pretty enough.

It wasn't in your DNA to keep him.

There weren't enough camels in your genetic dowry;

you were Leah with the weak eyes,

scraping together mandrakes

and desperate opportunities

for leverage enough

just to get him in bed

where you could take his

broken heart in both of your hands

and hold it for a few hours like a wounded bird,

sing over his pain

kiss every torn place,

and believe the nurture you gave fully in darkness 

might somehow

overcome the mediocrity of your plain face in the daylight.

You revolved around him like a moon

healed him, made his waves rise and fall by your gravity,

realigned his confidence.

But then the sun rose,

and the spell was broken,

and behold, you were not Rachel.

Men are men are men, see?

And what now? What now?

What has been joined cannot be torn apart.

So you hobble along looking for the Jesus who stirs together hope for the woman caught in adultery, 

the Jesus who heals a flow of blood,

the Jesus who resurrects new life out of the same old lessons women have been learning from men like him for centuries.

It's no help now, 

but for what it's worth,

I never thought his Rachel 

was more beautiful than you.

I still don't.

I think she is the sort who will tire of him in time,

who will leave him like he left you, 

and I don't know if he will see then at last what he has done to you,

or if he will just move on to another pretty face,

looking for another high.

God, save his soul.

But I do see what you gave.

I see what you tried to take.

Sister, have we progressed so much from those primitive days

when women were traded like property?

Now we trade our own selves

like slaves

at a lower exchange rate.

There has to be dignity in us somewhere, Sister, 

no matter what we have been shown.

Even in this mechanized, corporate Christianity 

where pretty faces rise to the top of radio charts,

to winning book deals, 

to speaking gigs for Jesus,

to ring shops and weekend visits,

the regular folks like you and I,

we have to mean something.

Charm is deceitful but successful,

and yet God promises that

beauty fades

while the fear of The Lord

allows the rejected to

stumble somehow 

into the line of the Messiah.

Why Women Scare Me

I'm not scared of all women, just some of them. And I know I'm not alone in this fear, because I've had the "Why We Don't Trust Women" conversation with some of my best female friends.

"Women are too..." we say, then we throw out possibilities trying to identify exactly what it is we mean. "Competitive. Shallow. Catty."

The gender divide isn't that cut and dry, and we know it. Generalizations are unfair, and we know that, too. But still, we stumble around trying to name whatever this rub is, and we always seem to fail, because it's just too hard to nail down.

This morning, however, I had some time to pray and work back through old conflict, and I think I realized what's at the root of this fear for me. Women frighten me because they can look inside me and see me. They frighten me because I can look inside them and see, too. It's all just so raw. So vulnerable.

Women tend to be perceptive, which means we can identify one another's worst faults quickly. (At least we think we can.) And sometimes when we let a woman inside us to take a look at who we are, she can turn on us. Sometimes we aren't given grace for the messes that are found, and that hurts, and it makes us feel ashamed.

This weekend I let some friends crash at my house while I was out of town. Our place was an absolute wreck, but I didn't want them having to pay for a hotel, so I just let them in with the attitude of, "Here's the key. Please don't look at anything. Just shut your eyes and go directly to bed."

They were safe enough friends that I could do this. But imagine if they had taken pictures of my rooms in disarray and posted them online. Imagine if I had let them into my space and they had mocked it, then mocked me for being so irresponsible. 

I've felt that way with some women. I've let them into my trust, and they've been cruel about the parts of me that are all messed up.

You've probably had that happen, too. Or maybe you've looked in someone and been rude about their messes. (I have.) This dynamic has made me nervous about seeing. It's made me nervous about being seen.

Maybe it's scientific at the core... you know that whole thing about female brains transferring information faster between hemispheres. I'm not sure. I do know that many women I know seem to read nuance, inflection, and innuendo faster than many men. We connect the dots like lightning, and we can read body language beneath words. 

Some people call it women's intuition. I think it's more about processing, a synthetic way of taking in the world. 

I remember being a chaperone for a field trip once, four little 5th grade girls in my van. One child was sitting behind me, and I noticed she was constantly looking at her reflection in the window glass. 

She was by far the prettiest girl in the group, perfect bone structure and huge blue eyes. Still her flagrant vanity surprised me. "That man back there said I was the cutest girl he had ever seen," she said eventually. "Am I cute?" 

She knew the answer; she was just reveling in it. The other girls squirmed, knowing she was prettiest, but letting it soak in what power that beauty had. 

They had seen loveliness for years in the Beauty, but now that they were growing into pre-teens, the disparity between them was widening. The pang of being less glorious was sharper.

Finally a few of the other students broke the silence and affirmed the Beauty, and while everyone was trying to be polite, the posture of every little girl inside the van shifted. Beauty was now the queen, a stranger had confirmed it, and all the rest were bumped down a bit below her.  She tossed her head when she got out of the van. She couldn't help it. The other girls didn't say much, but they made a space from her for the rest of the trip like blue collar workers move to one side of the sidewalk for a man in a business suit.

The regular girls (as if any heart were regular) had looked inside Beauty's heart and they had seen her vanity. Beauty had looked inside those regular girls' hearts and had seen intimidation. 

I had worked with young girls long enough to know what would come next. This sort of thing lodges inside a community of women. The quiet murmurings about Beauty would begin. The resentment. The accusations born of jealousy. The divide. The harshness. Eventually, "She is THAT type," would be assumed, and cliques would solidify.

It's easy to criticize children for this kind of thing, but I have seen grown women run on a similar psychology. A 37-year-old beauty posts pictures of herself, asking that same question, and when it is clear that she is lovely, other women squirm. 

They don't tell her she is vain. They compliment and praise her. But over the next few weeks they they find ways to work out their aggression. They post links to "Ten Things Nobody Wants to See on Facebook," knowing Beauty does seven of them and hoping others will notice the similarities and mistrust or shun her. 

They write status updates like, "Cleavage in a selfie is never accidental." They make little digs privately to one another, "She knows exactly what she is doing wearing those short, tight knit dresses around my husband." We see insecurity turned to greed in the other woman, and we let our claws fly. 

Shame on her. Shame on her for being like that.

And before we more mature, academic women get all high and mighty about ourselves, we tend to do the same thing -- even if we read books, or go light on makeup, or forget to brush our hair. In fact, from what I've seen, the problem can be even uglier among the intellectual types.

After years of building our identity on rebellion against the fickle, surface, sexualized womanhood of our culture, when we encounter other strong females who have made similar life choices, the competition can be brutal. 

When the superficials are stripped away, we don't just criticize matchy outfits and decorating tastes-- we work out feminine hostility over principles. We mock philosophical beliefs. Artistic beliefs. Academic pursuits. Worship. Work. Favorite writers. Politicians.

Shame on her. Shame on her for being like that.

The most brutal, personal attacks I have ever received (or given) have been from (or aimed at) sober, academic women. It hasn't happened very many times in my life, but when it has happened, beneath those attacks the same issue was present, "I see how you work. I don't like it." 

Why are we so hostile when we see one another's faults? I'm not sure. Maybe it's because we are lonely and we want a safe place so badly, then we are just so disappointed when someone ends up not being what we want her to be.

Or maybe when we look into one another and see what makes someone else tick, we see reflections of what we hate most about our own selves. Maybe in not having patience or grace for our own flaws, we are quicker to damn others for having them, too.

You know the old cliche Spiderman quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." I think it should apply here. Many women do tend to have an ability to super see, so what now? What is the responsibility that goes with that gift?

I wonder what would happen if women started looking into one another, noticing flaws because we can't help but notice them, but then we stopped feeding off the hostility that surfaces so easily?

What would happen if we saw pride, greed, manipulation, vanity, and instead of letting mistrust, hate, and dismissal bubble up, we applied the love of Jesus to those needs? 

What if instead of "Shame on her," we started saying, "What a burden she is carrying, wrestling with all that fear and need so that it leaks out in such ugly ways."

Because seeing another person's flaws is a tremendous opportunity. How we act in the presence of another person's vulnerability says as much about who we really are as anything I know. 

Seeing flaws forces us to make a choice between hopelessness or hope. It forces us to choose between grace and law.

A year or two ago, I received a long, condemning email from another woman. It was clear that she had been observing me from a distance for a while, deciding what sort of person I was. I don't know how many pages she spent outlining my sins, but by the time she was finished, I could barely breathe.    

I spent at least a day writing a long message in return. I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to explain. I wanted to show her that she was also doing some of the exact same things she was accusing me of.

Then I decided not to go there. She wasn't asking for my thoughts, she was telling me hers. There was no suppleness to her, only judgment. I just took her critique, prayed over it, asked God to show me what was true in it, and wrote her a brief, polite response back. "Thanks for letting me know. I'm sorry to have disappointed you.  I wish you the best." What else can you say in a situation like that? 

But what I learned most from the whole ordeal is how dark, how condemning, how hell-like and hopeless women can act in disposing of one another.  It's not how I want to be treated. It's not how I want to treat other people, either.

Jesus loved us before we were lovable, while we were yet sinners. He saw our most embarrassing traits, and He decided to chase us anyway. He walked into our messy homes and instead of turning his nose up and picking dried noodles off the counter, He was safe and gentle with our vulnerability. He saw us in our pride, deception, manipulation, impatience, vanity and then offered His welcome instead of His condemnation. His love made us lovable. How beautiful that is. How beautiful it is when we love one another with His brand of love.

You're Nobody Very Special

The Horse and His Boy used to be my least favorite book in the Narnia series, but now it is the one I love most dearly.

 I have been reading this book aloud to one of my classes, and today we hit the chapter where Bree, the proud, talking war horse, is too ashamed to continue his journey to Narnia because he has proven himself a perfect coward in a time of dire need.

A good hermit finds Bree as he is confessing his insufficiency and confronts him,

 "My good Horse," said the Hermit, who had approached them unnoticed because his bare feet made so little noise on that sweet, dewy grass. "My good Horse, you've lost nothing but your self-conceit. No, no, cousin. Don't put back your ears and shake your mane at me. If you are really so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense. You're not quite the great Horse you had come to think, from living among poor dumb horses. Of course you were braver and cleverer than them. You could hardly help being that. It doesn't follow that you'll be anyone very special in Narnia. But as long as you know you're nobody very special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.”

Ouch.

As much as I want to do great things in the kingdom of God, I tend to be more quixotic than heroic. Sometimes fear of exposing myself is so great, I just want to hide and not risk failure. I don’t like seeing the cracks in my character that come to light when I try to believe in myself and then fall on my face.

Besides, there are just so many critics out there in the world standing ready to mock other people’s faults. I have seen friends trying to do their best and then getting ripped apart, even by believers. Sometimes I’ve been one of the ones doing the ripping.

So I get a big lump in my throat watching Bree being brought down to earth. His humiliation is seen as a good and healthy thing. Am I ready to grow like that?

A proud person can handle neither compliments nor criticisms well, because he receives both as a judgment on his core identity. When we are proud, we do not see ourselves as a vessel of Divine power, but as an end in ourselves. This allows us to take on too much credit in success and a paralytic shame in failure. This is also why a proud person will tend to either run away or attack when challenged. I have done both this week. It's been frustrating to see how fragile I can be.

But the truth is, I’m nobody very special, and that’s okay -- because when even a sparrow falls, God is aware.  We don't have to be remarkable, brave, brilliant, or powerful to merit His devotion. He is the hero. Our identity is not earned; we have nothing to prove and nothing to merit. He loves us freely, just because He loves us, and He is used to breathing life into the dust of the earth.

While we were yet broken, Jesus died for us. Maybe understanding this sort of dependence is an essential first step in following Him.

The Mantis Shrimp

I saw the men constructing heaven upon the earth

with cedar beams hewn from God’s great forests.

The hope of grandeur, architrave and shaft

stood stripped and aromatic,

red muscle and white sinew caught mid flex

from earth’s intermotion.

I saw blueprints lined even and steady

with a calm, white pencil.

There were squared spaces made for rooms,

and I imagined myself reclined therein

beneath electric lights.

I saw women, too, constructing heaven upon the earth

stitching glory up in thick bright blankets for the winter.

Crimson and azure, veridian and gold,

They sang an old love song while their pretty hands fluttered,

piecing up the Fatherland

from flannel bits.

I saw the scientists constructing heaven upon the earth.

Ho! Science is a great and glorious revelry, mostly honest.

It glimmers like colored glass, crackled in the light.

In their company I let the fingers of my open hand

spread against the freckled expanse

and measure the nebulae which

ring with holy sound and space

like da Vittoria.

The stalked, stuttering eyes of the mantis shrimp

divide and compound.

What do you see, my Love?

I saw the children of God constructing gods upon the earth,

by reason and by ruler, licking the graphite tips,

scrawling out theorems and dull liturgies.

They are angry, truth be told.

Or perhaps they are only lonely.

There is a temple rising in the East,

a great shrine spun where Seraphim,

full of ardor, gasp to behold grace.

It calls to the weary and the bright.

It quickens hunger’s roar.

And we desire.

We desire, we desire,

pressing our palms into our stomachs,

when we should only hold out

our hands.

A Letter to my Children in the Wake of Tragedy

In light of recent violence in our world, I thought it might be a good idea to dust off and revise this old post, written after the Connecticut shootings in 2012. Published originally at www.storywarren.com.

- - -

My Children,

It’s been five days since that terrible thing happened in America.

You and I have talked about it some, though I never know how thoroughly to explain a tragedy. As a parent, it is difficult to know when to act as your shield and when to give you glimpses into the world you must one day face full force.

The truth is, even if I tried to explain everything that happened, I’m not sure I could. There are some things that just don’t make sense, and this is one of them.

I remember being a little girl and learning about evil for the first time. I remember the cold, creeping fear that washed through me when I realized that there were bombs big enough to destroy whole cities. I remember the shock of hearing that certain diseases couldn’t be cured. I remember seeing pictures of beautiful, black-eyed children who were starving in Africa, and hearing  descriptions of cruelty so terrible that I could barely get my mind around it. I got a deep, sick feeling in my stomach, and even though I was young like you, I knew that just knowing about those thing would change me forever.

I ran to my dad with every new horror, because there is no comfort like a father when the world is scary. I poured out my heart to him, expecting him .... wanting him to tell me that they weren't true. Monsters under the bed, that's all, just pretend. But he didn't say that. Instead, he nodded and said, “Yes, Becca. They are true.”

He told me what was true, and we took a minute to be sad together. Then he got back to work.

That he got back to work was astonishing to me. If such terrible things happened in the world, it seemed that everything should stop altogether. It seemed that humanity should fall on its face, and cry, and be done with regular living. Instead, I watched my father grieve, then I watched him finish cleaning the garage.

As I have grown older, I have encountered more terrible things in this world than I hope you will ever see. However, when I survey our surroundings honestly, I think it’s far more likely that you will face worse things yet. This place will probably break your heart as it has broken mine. Because of this, I want to leave you with some thoughts:

First, it’s OK to cry. It’s OK to grieve. It’s OK to hate living in a world with disease, and murder, and abuse. You feel like you don't fit in a world where such things happen because you don’t. There's not something weak or wrong with you that these things break your heart. They should break your heart, and you need time to hurt over them. I hope you will never be so hardened by the world that you lose your ability to feel sad over what is sad. Jesus wept with the hurting, and that is what we all should do.

Secondly, it’s OK to look away. You aren’t required to explore every single detail  of every single disaster. The media uses tragedy for its own purposes. It milks each last ounce out of horror.  News stations hungry for ratings will tease you, play with your emotions, make you feel like you need to know every nuance of every wicked thing, but rehashing evil is rarely helpful. Therefore, think about what sort of limits are best. That's not easy. But there is a way to be informed, while being wise. Guard your hearts.

Thirdly, remember gratitude. This may sound like some trite platitude, but it is not. Gratitude is a powerful force that can put strength back in your arms and fire back in your heart. It can help you continue to be a giver when hard times come instead of just quitting and running away in despair.

So when tragedy strikes, look around the world and find a single gift, then give thanks for it. Are there responders jumping in to serve? Thank God for them. Are there principles to be learned? Thank God for that wisdom. Do you have a bed? Do you have someone in the world who loves you? Do you have food in your stomach? Do you have good books that you have read? If you have none of these things, do you have memories of better times? Is there a living God who brings beauty from ashes? I have seen my mother (your grandmother) do this over and over again in difficulty. I have watched her fight for some tiny nugget to be thankful for until it has become my default, too. So be thankful, be thankful, be thankful, even in this.

Fourthly, remember art. Music. Paint. Story. Gardening. These are mighty weapons, and there are many different ways they can be of use to you. Use them to express your grief. Use them to heal others. Use them to escape into a Sabbath where your broken soul can begin to catch its breath in God's company. Use art to make the little world around you beautiful; even if the night grows dark and cold. Pick three violets from among the rubble. Study how precisely they are painted. Hum over the words of a song. Make up a grand tale. Construct within the deconstruction around you.

Fifthly, do keep working. Finish cleaning the garage. Make the dinner. Fold the clothes. Wash the baby. Change the sheets on the bed. Stay in those sweet human rhythms, because these are liturgies of a sort. They express faith that God has chosen you to live in this particular time, with the particular people surrounding you, with particular tasks before you. Often you will find that as you step back into your daily doing, your mind will start to clear, and the whirl of black thoughts so congested within you will begin to align. There is unspeakable healing in a homemade dinner around the table with people you love. Sometimes I wonder how often the enemy (whose attacks are meant to suck the hope from your hearts) has been defeated by a loaf of warm bread and a hearty stew.

Finally, worship. Sink your sore need into the One who will make all things new. Delight in what is true of His character. Revel in His constant love. Lean back on the arms of His power. Remember that He sees every nuance of every pain, and that He grieves with us. Even your present sadness reveals longings that will soon be met forever and ever: love, safety, abundance, fellowship. Rejoice that earth days are short, and that land of light will never end. Burrow down into Aslan's mane.

How I love you. How I wish that I could make your lives turn like a story with only slight adventures and silly, blubbering villains.

Since I cannot, I will walk into this sadness with you. We will feel the sorrow together. Then, we will set the plates, and light the candles, and hold hands, and tell stories that are funny or sad. We will thank God around our little table, and we will love Him and one another.  In that sweet, safe company of the close of us, we will do our work, we will worship our Lord, and we will eat our soup.