Fathers

When it first happened, I kept wanting to tell him things. Even at the funeral home, fresh from picking out his casket, I almost took out my phone to call him and tell him what we got for him.

I thought it was going away, that I was getting used to not picking up the phone, but in the past week or so it's been happening more again.

"Dad will love to hear about...."

"I need to ask Dad...."

"This'll be fun to see/do with...."

And every sentence trails off into the word "No."

There are things he told me that I didn't bother to remember because he'd tell me over and over again--about the solstice, or taxes, or how long to keep paperwork. Part of my brain left with part of my heart.

I don't just miss Dad. I miss Mom. I miss Jeremiah. I miss me. I don't know who we are anymore, the three of us who are left who knew him the most closely over the past thirty-four years. We're feeling our way forward in the darkness, and part of me expects another cliff soon, like the one we fell off in May, except can you fall again when you haven't hit bottom yet?

So much not knowing, in so many areas. (Should I just sit here, God, motionless? I'm afraid to move.)

What kind of God are you, anyway, who asks so much of us and yet accepts us in our confusion, our worthlessness, our fear? What kind of God are you, who sets your great faithfulness against our utter desolation (Lamentations 3)? What kind of God, who devastates us and keeps coming after us instead of leaving us alone to recover in peace? What kind of God could instantly turn stones and trees into children and worshippers, but settles instead for achingly slow sanctification that seems to stay just out of our grasp?

God, you know all things, you know I love you. And you know I can't, can't, can't love you alone. My hands and knees could use some strengthening, and my feet some smoother paths.

When I talked to Dad, he would answer me. This week, Father, I can't hear you.

"You have heard my voice--do not hide your ear from my prayer for relief, from my cry for help."--Lamentations 3:56

Highlights of my day

1. The vice-principal brought me a bag of chocolates somebody left at the front office for me because she knew it could be a stressful day due to the audit. When he arrived at my office he had to displace two middle school boys who had stopped in for a visit on their way to class.

2. Our school attendance audit went well. The auditors were very informative and helpful. Also, apparently when they arrived at the main building to meet up with the principal so she could walk them back to where the audit would be held, they started asking, "Is Suzanne here? Will we get to see Suzanne?"

3. Post-audit I had to cart all the attendance materials back to where they belong. As I struggled with my key in the lock, one of my high school boys was in the hallway on the other side of the door watching. When I entered, I said, "I do work here, I promise. I sometimes just have trouble with the keys." He responded, "Do you want me to get the other door for you?" (This from a boy who gets kicked out of class for disrespect on a regular basis.) "Yes, I really would, thank you," I said. (This from a woman who once resented any males holding doors for her as if she needed the help.)

4. Thinking "I will miss this place when I'm out for two weeks," and realizing I've never thought that about a job before. Have I mentioned that I love it there?

Encouragement and Discouragement

My friend Janessa wrote a blog post today about the reality of discouragement in the life of believers. I started to write a short comment and ended up writing a blog post, myself (see below).

Discouragement is part of the war we are fighting. When I am most spiritually awake, I pay attention to the voices in my head and hold them up against two possible camps.

"Suzanne, you should be better at this by now. I can't believe you're in this same situation again."

"Good Christians don't have struggles."

"A really strong Christian should be able to go it alone, without bothering people who probably have enough problems of their own."

Who's more likely to be telling me those things, God or Satan?

Some days, discouragement is even encouraging. Think about all of the trials of Job. What got Satan's attention? God was boasting about Job (Job 1:8).

Think about that again. Boasting about him. And Job was a regular human like any of us.

What if, when we're attacked with discouragement, it's because God's just been telling Satan about how much we're doing for Him? I don't mean that in a "look how great we are" sort of way, but in a "look how great the God who's got our back is" sort of way.

What if God is saying, "Have you considered my servant Suzanne?"

I don't know why God allows Satan to come at us, why He allows the trials of our lives. Job never knew why, either, but hearing about who God was quieted his desperate complaints. And we know a lot more about God than Job did. We know Jesus.

I love that when Paul is begging the Lord for the removal of his weakness, the response he gets back isn't "Absolutely, you can have a much greater impact that way" or "If you'd just buck up, you could do it yourself." That's where we want to go. Or I do, anyway.

Nope. Here's what Paul hears, and his response to it: "And He has said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.' Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong." — 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

Expect depression like you accept the reality of Satan. But claim the reality of the protection of Christ and fight with every ounce of strength He gives you to throw the devil's lies back in his face. The trials are real, and life can seem too long and too hard, but the fact is that this war has been WON. Christ empowers us to stand against the onslaughts of Hell itself.

And on the days when the only sacrifice we have to offer is a broken spirit (Psalm 51:17), even that sacrifice makes the demons cower and the angels dance and the Father proud of His children.

Amazing love, indeed!

God in the Details

1.

It's been a fairly low-interaction week at work. This morning as I got ready to leave I was feeling a bit pitiful about it, and it hit me that I was coming back off a rough holiday weekend expecting to find solace in the people there, and that instead I had found solace even without them. "Thank you, God," I prayed, "for not letting people come to me, so that I wouldn't think my comfort came from anyone but you."

Today at work, I had quality interaction with every single person on my list of those I had been especially relying on to cheer me up. And a new kid, too.

2.

This past Wednesday I had a doctor's appointment, because I've been unusually tired and some people urged me to get that checked. I felt weird when people said they were praying for me...I was just tired, it was nothing major. This morning when I got the blood work results back and everything was okay except for a dip in Vitamin D, I thought, "See, they didn't need to pray because that result was so benign," and then a quick whiplash thought of "what if that result was so benign because they prayed?"

3.

One of the staff members at the residential home that houses my most frequent student visitors gets irritated when they come see me. "Why do you have to go in there all the time?" he snapped at one of the boys today. I think he's under the impression that they're pestering me, whereas in reality their visits are usually the highlight of my day.

It made me think of the disciples, zealously guarding Jesus from annoyances like small children. It made me think, for the first time, about those children. The Pharisees, cream of Jerusalem society, probably wouldn't have let their kids follow Jesus around. And it made me look up the story. In none of the three tellings does it once specify that the children people were bringing were their own flesh and blood.

"Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it," Jesus said. I have often thought that meant that we had to trust like children, with as quick of a readiness to believe what someone they love tells them is true.

After today, I think there's more than that. Because maybe those children being brought to Jesus were not the most well-cared-for and well-educated children. Maybe some of them were the troublemakers of their neighborhoods, and knew it. Maybe some of them had trouble with trust.

But I think if you can tell someone loves you, you want to keep coming back even if you don't understand why.

To enter the kingdom of God is to enter the presence of God. One way we receive it like children is to just keep coming to Him.

4.

It was a good day.

Heaven and Resting

I've been reading Heaven, by Randy Alcorn. One of the things he has been talking about is that in Heaven we will be active, employed in the creative exercise of our gifts.

Right now that thought is depressing.

The book of Revelation states (twice) that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. I wonder if we have to cry them all out first. Because right now, my idea of Heaven is sitting in my Father's lap and sobbing and having Him hold me like He won't ever let go.

Not that He does, even down here. But I really miss the safety of my dad's hugs, and since God calls Himself our Father so often, that must mean something.

Whether or not we have to cry all our tears first, perhaps when God wipes them away He will say something like, "My child, your life was difficult, and it was full of affliction and sorrow, just as I promised it would be." Then He will turn us around and say, "Just as I promised, look what I have made out of it." And that is when we will begin to see the first things made new.

Until seeing Him, nothing in Heaven will be worth seeing. After seeing Him?

I think I will be ready to be active again.

"Lord, if you had been here"

They must have been discussing it, going over and over it in their minds and in their conversations, because although the first story presents Mary and Martha as women with different focus points, that day both sisters come to Jesus with the exact same statement: "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."

Jesus, knowing the hearts of all men and all women, hears the questions behind these words. "Why weren't you here? Where were you?"

It was a math problem they had likely gone over again and again: "A man must travel from Jerusalem to Bethany. It is a distance of two miles. Given that he has an entourage of people who travel with him, and the likelihood that word reached him as he was in the middle of speaking to a crowd or performing a work of mercy that should not go interrupted, how long will it take him to arrive in Bethany?"

Surely not two days. Although, as it turned out, it had taken the messenger too long to locate him in the busy capital city. Even had he come the very day he received the message, Lazarus would already have been dead.

"Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." They don't really believe that Jesus needed to hear the news of Lazarus' illness from a messenger. But he wasn't there. Why wasn't he there?

This time, it is so that Lazarus can be brought back from the grave. Yet there were others who died that year in Bethany, other believers, even, who were not miraculously restored to their families. Where was Jesus?

I wonder if the sisters remembered, afterward, perhaps as they stood at the grave of Lazarus for the second time, that one of the names of the promised Messiah was Immanuel.

"God with us."

Which would have answered their question.

Thinking About You

My Communication Arts & Sciences senior seminar class was notable largely for being the class to which I paid the least attention. I sat with two friends (they know who they are) and we passed a lot of notes. I have a very clear memory of the time before class began when one of my friends started a sentence, "So we were talking about you the other night...."

It kind of blew my mind. I talked about people a lot, often repeating fun conversations I had with friends throughout the day, but it threw me to think that other people might be talking about me when I wasn't around. It was like I thought I disappeared from their lives the instant they walked out of sight of me.

Sometimes I still think like that. It's hard, isn't it, imagining what other people's lives are like? They are so separate from you, so different. But you and I should both try to remember these things I've stumbled across since senior sem:

• A lot of times when you are afraid that someone doesn't want to talk to you, they are not talking to you because they are afraid you don't want to talk to them.
• 
  
• Many, many people see you through eyes of grace. You are not the only one who can see someone's faults and love them like crazy anyway. God didn't stop His grace with you, more praise to Him for that.
• 
  
• You are both more important and less important than you could ever imagine, and both in very good ways.
• 
  
• If other people are going to talk about you after you leave, set the tone for how they do it by the way you talk about other people when they are not around.

Today I heard a couple "we were talking about you" sorts of comments. Even almost ten years after senior sem, I still don't really know what to think about it. I think I feel humbled, and gratified, that people make space in their lives and thoughts for me. It makes me want to be worth it.

I aspire to be remembered in the Philippians 1:3 sense, the way I remember so many of you--how great God is to fill my life with such wonderful people, and how thankful I am for you!

Sparrow Musings

Outside my library, in front of the handicapped and fifteen-minute parking spaces, there is a grassy strip with a few bushes and some ornamental trees. When you come at about dusk, you are greeted with a cacophony of sparrow sound.

By the time I had reached the library from work, I was fairly miserable. It's been almost six months since my dad went into the hospital and on some days, like today, it's hard to imagine ever being really happy again. And on some days, like today, when there are other things on my mind, too, failings and weaknesses, it seems like too much, like that one giant event of late spring should give me a get-out-of-jail-free card for the next year, at least. That I should be able to hold on to the perspective I had at that time. But here I am, still struggling with the same old sins as before, and it's that more than the death of my father that seems unfair, somehow.

So after picking up my hold, I had to go stand by the trees and listen to the sparrows. It's amazing. They aren't really being any louder than they are on their own, but together they all seem louder. The trees shake as they jump around on the inner branches, and fly from tree to tree. They are not still, they are not silent.

I thought about what Jesus said, about how we are more valuable than many sparrows, about how our heavenly Father watches them all. I thought about how He called us His sheep. And I thought about how sheep and sparrows have this in common, that they aren't known as the brightest or bravest of God's creatures. They're pretty useless and defenseless individually, but together they can be oddly scary. "Two are better than one," says the Preacher (Ecc. 4:9), and how much better still are hundreds, thousands, millions, clouds of witnesses.

(If your power is truly made perfect in weakness, Father, You have an awful, awful lot to work with right here with me. Please don't leave me to disgrace You.)

Tomorrow from 6:45 until about 7:30 will be the first prayer meeting for the residential program I work with at my school. It will generally take place the first school day of every week. I don't really know if anybody else will come, but we need to pray because we are at war, and because the devil is roaring around these children and hissing in the ears of those who care for them, and because it's ludicrous to act as though these things aren't happening.

If you are awake around that time, and you think about us, we could use other sparrows to shake this tree.

“Because God loves us, He thwarts us.”—Pastor Dale

Single people don’t get to have interpersonal tension prayer requests.

If you are married and you say, “Listen, I’m having romantic feelings for somebody other than my spouse,” everybody’s radar goes off and everybody swoops in to pray for you and support you in faithfulness to your marriage vows. If you are single and you say, “Listen, I’m having romantic feelings for somebody and I don’t feel right about it,” the swooping will mostly be from people telling you you’re probably just afraid and offering to help you pick out a wedding venue.

Because the thing about being single, at church anyway, is that married people tend to assume that your biggest problem is a desperate, gnawing sense of profound loneliness. It isn’t. It’s not even what every single single person feels is their biggest problem.

I feel like my biggest problem as a single person is that I’m attracted to the Wrong Sort of man. This is largely based on internal categories that I won’t go into, because this isn’t a personal ad, but suffice it to say that I have often, often asked God to take away feelings for some man or other because they have thrown off my focus and my sense of perspective. And despite the testimony of a male friend who says that in those situations he always just prayed and the feelings departed, and despite my struggling with the whys of my prayers not being answered, it has not ever been that easy for me.

I always loved the Vulcans. (This will connect amazingly soon, I promise.) At first I loved them because they didn’t have to deal with emotion, and I thought that would be extremely convenient. Then I got really into Star Trek and learned that they did deal with emotion, exceptionally strong emotion—and they dealt with it through techniques and amazing self-control. I loved that even more.

My biggest problem as a single person is my biggest problem as a person—I would like to be in control of my own life. In pretty much every way. I want to keep my emotions in check; I want to hold back from blushing; I want to read people with the exactness of a telepath. Even in the times I want to give up control, it’s usually just wanting to give it up in specific ways that enhance my comfort.

What if this isn’t God toying with me, but simply reminding me, all too frequently for my liking, that I’m not Him? What if God likes to show me, misconceived attraction after misconceived attraction, that He loves me too much to give me everything I ask for in the instant I ask for it?

What if wrestling to surrender is more precious to Him than placid assuredness?

Openness to the Tangential

The first response to the latest chapter of a fanfiction I had last updated on May 2 read, "YOU ARE BACK! Looking forward to the upcoming season premiere?"

In the lifetime that skewed off from my old life on May 19 when my mom took my dad in to the hospital, I've wondered: What do you say about it to the casual observers, the tangential people in your life? How do you explain falling off the map for months, or being confused and tired so often? Do you explain at all? Do you just muddle through, letting them see the effects but not the cause?

As I drove to work for the first time after the worst-case scenario became reality, I was sobbing, thinking how bizarre it was that I was so miserable and everyone around me was just driving along as usual, and then it hit me that I had no idea if that were true. I could only speak for me. Who's to say the person in the car next to me wasn't at least as miserable as I was?

It is a paradox—how deep we are, yet how exposed. We carry our pain below the surface, but only barely. We can look like we're happy, like everything is fine, but brush against us and you will see that we are raw bundles of nerves, scars only half-healed. Scars not just from death, but from life, life here in this place where suffering got itself invited in disguised as knowledge. Life where we hide from each other and from God and then lament that nobody finds us.

I make a lot of excuses for myself, especially right now. I want to extend to others that quickness to overlook irritation and wrongs. When they snap at or ignore or disappoint me, I want to wonder first if everything is okay with them instead of feeling aggrieved. I want to assume that they are messed up and imperfect and in need of compassion, just like me. (And I will, God helping me.)

Death is a certain thing. It is coming. If you or I might easily die tomorrow, is it worth being angry with you today? Can't I put aside my issues with you, just for today? And then just for the next day? And the day after that? Not to pretend we have no differences, not to pretend that there aren't things that need confronting, things we need to work out. That's passivity, not love. Just that if death isn't quick, but leaves enough time for thinking, I would want you and I both to feel confident that everything was clear between us, that you knew who I was and what I believed and that I cared about you. Or that at least if you didn't, if we missed each other somewhere, it wasn't because I wasn't willing to go more than halfway to meet you.

I am not back. There is no "back." But I am looking forward, and to something far greater than the season premiere of any television show. "I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:14)

And I hope that along the way even the tangential people will know more about Him because of me.

Last Night's Dream

I was in my church (really NOT my church, and much more mega-church-sized, but it was my church in the dream) looking for my first grade Sunday School classroom, but when I found it, it was the 12th grade room, and there were a lot of adults in there, too, including my cousin who goes to my church and her sister and mom. My cousin who is a high school teacher jokingly volunteered to lead the class and I figured I'd let her do at least part of it. The children's singing time leader was there leading them in songs before the lesson. She asked me to lead in singing something, but I was totally unprepared and couldn't remember how the song started, anyway.

I kept trying to figure out a good way to tell them the story of an experience I had recently had. I had looked out the window of the house in Metamora (really NOT the house, but the house in the dream) and seen a few hawk feathers on the lawn. "A hawk was in a fight recently," I thought, and then the next day there were dozens of hawk feathers there and I pointed them out to my mom, and then I went outside and saw a hawk chasing a smaller bird, except as they got closer I saw it was a perspective issue and it was really a bald eagle chasing a hawk, which it snagged out of midair in a burst of feathers. The eagle had greyish feathers in with the white, so I assumed it was a younger bird. When it landed, it was as tall as the house, so mom and I went inside. (I had just been thinking "Wait, bald eagles aren't that big" when the dream shifted to the Sunday School scenario.)

Before I could tell this story, I figured out that there was a room mix-up, and went to find my real class. On the way I ran into somebody asking how to use the copier ("How do I size it? How many copies? Where do I put the soap?"--but when I turned around quickly to tell him NOWHERE, he was grinning, so he was just kidding about that last one).

When I reached the first grade room I found it was massive and had theatre-style seating. There were about a hundred first graders there, most of whom I didn't know, and although there were a lot of adults in this case, too, about half of the kids were jumping up and down the stairs unhindered. The teacher wasn't my usual helper, but the elementary school teacher from the school where I work.

I was just starting to chase a few of the kids and trying to figure out how to make them behave over long range and trying not to crush anybody as I fell backwards over a set of the chairs when I woke up.

The Gift of Dialogue

I've often been told that my fanfiction characters sound just like the characters do in the books/films/movies I've borrowed them from. (In my favorite example, a friend clearly remembered watching a LOST scene that I wrote.) As far as imagined dialogue goes, I have a gift...and a curse.

The curse part is that I've sometimes had whole arguments without even being in actual contact with my opponent at the time. Or I've imagined that they will say something nice that then they don't say and I'm upset at them for not saying it. So mostly I try not to have imaginary conversations with real people.

Sometimes, lately, I give myself a pass where my dad is concerned. Because sometimes I really do think I know how the conversation would have happened. Today, for instance, if I had been able to call him on my way home like I wanted to, we would have had a conversation like this one.

ME: "So today I learned that saving money on gas probably means investing it on better shoes."

DAD: "How's that?"

ME: "On the way out of work I had to drop something off at the main office, so I walked across campus in heels and had to walk all the way back to my car, which was much closer to my office, and I was wearing sandally shoes that try to be leather but really aren't, and they don't really have a lot of bend to them. So now my feet feel all pinched."

DAD: "Well, that was pretty stupid, huh?"

ME: "Yeah. I'll probably do it again. I'm too cheap to buy nice shoes considering the amount of time I spend sitting at my desk is so much greater than the amount of time I spend walking around."

DAD: "You have a rolling chair, right? You can ride it across campus."

ME: "That wouldn't look weird at all."

DAD: "Less weird than you'd look with your feet falling off from wearing cheap shoes."

And although imaginary conversations like this can make me sad, because I miss really talking to him, they make me happy, too. Because I'm so thankful I talked to him enough to have established a father/daughter conversational style that stuck in my head. I hope it stays stuck there until I get to use it with him again.

Quarters Not Accepted

Two months ago today, I woke up confident that my dad was going to recover. I heard about the white blood cell count dropping while I was still at work, but I didn't think it was too big of a deal. He'd made it through major brain surgery. He'd gotten the meningitis out of his system. He'd been expected to die several times before and hadn't.

Two months ago at about this time I was visiting him. He said "Happy birthday late" and he smiled at me and we watched an episode of the 1960s Batman together and I thought there would be more greetings and more smiles and more Batman viewings and I was happy, and it was the last time I'd ever be that kind of happy again.

Two months later, I am smaller. So much smaller.

Two months ago, I thought that my words to God's ears were something special. Not just that He heard and cared about them, but that He was swayed by their eloquence, their fervor, their sincerity. ("Doesn't Suzanne have a way with words?") I thought that the prayers of thousands would give us a statistical advantage. I thought I had seen signs of healing. I thought we all still needed him here, that I could figure out what God would do because I was so spiritually attuned.

I thought God was a vending machine.

I know what I thought then because of how I've been feeling since, how confused, especially about prayer. How hesitant to tell people I'm praying for them, because surely they must see how high my prayers rank based on what happened just a day over two months ago. How distressed to read of people rejoicing at answers to prayer that tumors would prove benign or such. (I truly am glad for them, but at the same time....)

At some point after my cousin Heidi told her three-year-old son Landunn that Uncle Bill was dead, he had a question for her: "Did Jesus make Uncle Bill all the way better, like we prayed?"

She started crying as she answered, "Yes. He's all the way better."

"That's awesome!" Landunn exclaimed, and his prayers for healing turned that night to prayers of thanksgiving to a God who made his great-uncle all the way better.

As limited creatures of an unlimited Creator, we have no grounds to consider prayer answered only when God provides us with the answer we imagined would suit us best. We have no grounds to imagine ourselves influential with God in the same way that a good salesperson is influential with a customer on the fence about making a decision. If Suzanne has anything, even a way with words, it has been given. And though we can give gifts back to God in love and gratitude, we cannot buy Him off with what He has given to us.

"Once more through the fire," I wrote of my family after my cousin Bridgette died, "might bring them out as diamonds."

Which are also bigger before the pressure begins.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

"In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith the salvation of your souls."

--I Peter 1:3-8

Advice

Sometimes, like Lois Lane in Smallville, I'm not comfortable with uncomfortable silences. I'm growing in that respect, but it still happens too often for my taste that I find myself halfway through a conversation before I realize that I barely know what I'm saying, let alone why. (No surprise that most of my worst miscommunications and arguments have come out of those moments.)

This quote that I just saw on Kevin DeYoung's blog is excellent advice:

"Above all things beware of letting your tongue outrun your brains. Guard against a feeble fluency, a garrulous prosiness, a facility of saying nothing...My brethren, it is a hideous gift to possess, to be able to say nothing at extreme length."

--Charles Spurgeon in Lectures to My Students

I was looking through my quote collection today

"Sometimes when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated."—Lamartine

“We don't measure the outrage of our suffering by how insignificant we think sin is; we measure the outrage of sin by the scope of suffering.” —John Piper

“If I don’t ask ‘Why me?’ after my victories, I cannot ask ‘Why me?’ after my setbacks and disasters.”—Arthur Ashe

“All my worries may come true, but God will never be untrue to me.”—Kevin DeYoung

“I have to remember that the core of God’s plan is to rescue me from sin, even up to my dying breath. My pain and discomfort are not His ultimate focus—He cares about these things, but they are merely symptoms of the real problem. God cares most not about making my life happy, healthy, and free of all trouble, but about teaching me to hate my transgressions and to keep growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus.”—Joni Erickson Tada

“What are we to make of a world where stars shine bright in the midst of so much darkness and gloom?”—The magician in The Magician’s Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo

"Among the daily chances of this life every man on earth is threatened in the same way by innumerable deaths, and it is uncertain which of them will come to him. And so the question is whether it is better to suffer one in dying or to fear them all in living."—St. Augustine

"If there's anything I'm sure of, it is that heaven is a coming home."—Sheldon VanAuken in A Severe Mercy

"We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him, throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."—C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

"I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, He's got mercy, only it's such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment."—Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

"I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep."—Charlotte Brontë, Villette

"In the desert all we have to cling to is the promise."—John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason

"The good of God, the joy of God, is going to infinitely outweigh all of the sufferings—and even the joys—of this world."—Peter John Kreeft

"'I mean that we are here on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else."—G.K. Chesterton

"As Isaac Watts reminds us in his famous carol, 'He comes to make His blessings flow--far as the curse is found!' If you don't know how bad things are, you can't possibly know either how good things are going to be."—Joel Belz

"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."—Jewel in The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis

People are far away

Nobody human can be here where I am now. Not my brother, not my mom, not my grandma, not my really good friends.

That's okay. Nobody can be where I am even when I'm doing something fairly trivial, like watching television. Nobody else is me. I'm past wishing that they were. People can empathize with me, can love me, without knowing what it's like to be me. (So you can stop saying you can't imagine, but know that when you slip and do say it I translate it to "I am so sad for you, friend," which I think is mostly what you mean.)

It's hard when people ask, "How's your summer going?" and they're light and cheerful and even when I say, "It's the worst summer of my life," they forget that I already told them why. (Some of us are farther apart than others, aren't we?) It's not malicious, forgetting, no matter how much it hurts. I've done it, too.

We're all so stuck here, wherever here is for each one of us.

God knows.

Firefly, Fireflies, Fireflies, and Fireflies

Tonight I watched the first episode of Firefly with a friend, and it had this exchange:

Mal: I had a good day.

Simon: You had the Alliance on you, criminals, and savages; half the people on the ship have been shot or wounded, including yourself; and you're harboring known fugitives.

Mal: We're still flying.

Simon: That's not much.

Mal: It's enough.

Struck down, but not destroyed. Still flying. It's enough.

After I drove home, I sat in my car and watched fireflies outside and listened to the first few tracks of the Sara Groves album Fireflies and Songs, and in the title song there is this verse:

We're looking for a firefly

Moving through the night

Staring at that one place

Swear it never lights

Three ways to watch fireflies: 1) staring at one place and finding the firefly has moved on; 2) following one firefly and catching the times it lights; 3) trying to see everything in front of you at once. The firefly moves, and goes dark, but is never alone.

Years ago I wrote a poem called "Fireflies" that goes like this:

Firefly glints in the night—

beauty and longing,

joy and urgency meet

and mingle and this

is and is not

where I most want to be,

most of all places.

I too live a firefly life

here in the night,

striving for greater brilliance,

greater intensity,

sustained in my dark times by

the lights of others,

knowing that after

the final flicker into obscurity comes

the consummation,

for which all beauties

are a preparation.

Someday—the day my dad knows now that he has passed beyond the grip of time into the eternal now of God—the lights won't keep going out. "Someday," as C.S. Lewis wrote, "God willing, we will get in."

Fireflies remind me.

I miss email exchanges like this. But I'm so glad to have had them.

From: Suzanne Winter
Sent: Wed 2/20/2008 5:15 PM
To: Winter, Bill
Subject: Poor sick Dad!


Mom told me you were sick. I'm thinking about you (etc.). Hope you feel better soon!

Love,
Suzanne

________________________________

From: Winter, Bill

Sent: Wed 2/20/2008 6:00 PM
To: Suzanne Winter
Subject: RE: Poor sick Dad!

thanks. i am a little weak and can't even do uppercase.

love,
dad

Old journal entry

Thursday, June 23, 1988

Went to Walden Books, then drove over to Sears. Went to B. Dalton's and Circus World, all just with Daddy. We bought nothing. Daddy says that's good to buy nothing.

[I'm still your little girl, Daddy.]

Woman of Words

My mom can write thank you notes already, to all the people who have done and been so much for us over the past few months. It helps her, putting words on paper and crossing things off her list.

I can't even catch up on my emails. I've tried. I sit down and begin to answer correspondence and I get through a few and run into...blankness. My writing is and always has been not just part of what I do, but part of who I am. And now those words have pulled down, deep down, and the times when they have surfaced they have sometimes felt like shrapnel pulling through me.

I don't know that I want them yet.

So many people have said, "I can't imagine what you must be feeling." In the past, some have told me that when they read what I write they feel themselves there.

I don't know that I want those two things to come together.

There is a lot about my life at this time that I want and don't want to put in writing, want and don't want to share with everyone.

I'm a woman of words and at this time words are often failing me.

(If you wrote to me and expected an answer and didn't get one, this is probably why.)

Prayer and Fasting

My dad died on June 12.

Those first three words....

This Wednesday is the monthly day of prayer and fasting for my church. Last month I observed the day from a distance, praying and fasting in Detroit and channeling much of the energy of my prayers into praying for the restoration of my father's health and the upholding of his spirit.

I will never again pray for my father.

This is the poison in my ears tonight: To what end did you pray and fast? To what end did you and thousands of others pour out your prayers over a period of weeks, asking God to heal your father? Haven't you experienced God as capricious and deaf to your pleas? Haven't you seen that He thwarts the desires of His people? Isn't it dangerous to ask God for what you want if He is going to give you the reverse?

Oh, God....

This is the antidote: Jesus Christ suffered throughout His life, and at the end of His life He suffered the crushing weight of alienation from God so that my dad could bear an eternal weight of glory instead (1 Peter 2:21-24; 2 Corinthians 4:17). Jesus wept (John 11:35). Jesus prayed to God asking for the worst suffering to be taken from Him, and God didn't do it (Matthew 26:39ff). Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty, Who has called His children to hear His voice and come to Him (Hebrews 12:2; Hebrews 4:7b).

Jesus told a parable about how God relates to us when we ask Him for things, how even an earthly father doesn't give his child a snake if asked for a fish or a stone if asked for bread. "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children," He says in Matthew 7:11, "how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him?"

I asked for my dad's life, and did not receive it.

But it's "children." Plural. Not just Suzanne.

If in withdrawing a good gift from one of His children He extends a lasting inheritance to others, it is good.

If my dad's death is used to spark or strengthen your faith, it is good.

On June 30, my dad lives. Just not here anymore. The next time I meet him, it will be as a brother, and we will see God our Father face-to-face, along with our brothers and sisters through the ages. What a family reunion that will be!

I fast and pray because life is short, because God exists and is active in this world, and because everything about the way I live--and the way you live--should be affected in light of those two things. Tomorrow I fast and pray because I want you to join us at the family reunion, and because when we're reconnecting there I want to hear that you lived a life of power and purpose.

I am not my own, but belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. Body and soul, in life in this place and in earthly death and in the life to come.

What about you?

"Therefore, let us fear if, while a promise remains of entering His rest, any one of you may seem to have come short of it."--Hebrews 4:1

Tired doesn't cover it

My father is still in the hospital. I think almost anybody who reads this blog knows that from Facebook or the Harvest prayer chain. I've posted the CarePage link to both of those places, and I'll mostly be blogging there for a while, I think. I’ve had a rough week. Feeling very spiritually vulnerable. Please pray for bolstering in the faith for all of us, Dad and Mom and us kids and everybody else close to Dad.

I read something today about how when the immediate fear of death is gone, it immediately becomes easier to complain. Small things are getting to me again, which I suppose might be a "good" sign. But you'd think that we'd learn, wouldn't you?

I'm glad God remembers for us.

(And you have no idea how helpful it is just to get a hello. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

Living this story

I can remember one time, last December, that my dad was sick for more than two days in a row. I cannot remember any other time. He eats healthy foods, he gets enough sleep, and he hasn't gone more than a few weeks without exercising since he was seventeen.

If I were going to get a "we're going to the hospital" call, I would've expected it to be because of Mom. All the weird stuff seems to happen to her.

But when his wildly vacillating fever wasn't responding well to the drugs he'd been given by the doctor who pronounced his ailment a bad sinus infection, it was Dad who was on the way to the hospital, and Mom who was driving, and Dad who would be diagnosed this afternoon with life-threatening bacterial meningitis.

Life is surreal, have you noticed?

At times like this, my mind goes into frantic re-write mode. We rewind, we do something differently, we avoid the situation, and it never happened, not really, that was a horrible thought but not a true one, everything is really just like it was.

Life is not really up to us at nearly the level our practiced denials tell us it is.

There you are, doing your own thing and making your own plans and carefully, carefully, carefully scheduling your time, and all of a sudden catching the finale of LOST is blasted from the top of your most-important-things list. I wish I could trade never seeing the finale of LOST ever, never even hearing somebody talk about it, never knowing what it's all about, for my father making it through this just as healthy and whole as he was before.

Because that's where you go, or where I do: denial and bargaining. God, tell me this never happened. God, what can I do to fix it?

Yesterday, before I could even get there, He headed me off. "I can't believe this," I was thinking. "Dad's immune system has always been so amazing." And then I thought, "The same God who gave him such an amazing immune system is in charge of his health right now."

We don't get to barter, which is good because we make really bad deals. Esau sold his birthright for a meal. Jacob sold his dignity for a beautiful woman. Judas sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver. And those are just the people I know from ages ago, not the people from within my lifetime who've sold their marriages for a redefined happiness, sold their freedom for notoriety, sold their long-term health for a life of instant gratification.

Foolish and slow of heart. That's what Jesus calls even His own disciples. And then He starts to explain, because He knows that until He explains we can never be more than foolish, more than slow of heart.

This is God's deal: you can't exchange your life to save anybody else's from anything, least of all from damnation in hell (infinitely more life-threatening than bacterial meningitis). That deal has been made. That life has been exchanged. He gave His only Son for that. You can't rewind. You can't re-write. It's been done. Don't try to live another story.

God's deal is the answer to how to react when bad illnesses happen to healthy people (why are there healthy people in the first place?). "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32)

The Father of Jesus Christ is the Father of my father, and loves him more than I do, and I can't wrap my mind around how much that is.

Life is in the hands of a loving Father. Have you noticed?

Too old for this

Within the past year, I've been getting tired of the will-they/won't-they long-drawn-out romantic tension stuff. I used to love it (I cut my adult fangirl teeth on The X-Files), but now I keep thinking, "Say what you want to say. Life is so short."

Maybe it's the accumulated life experience talking, but watching two people dance around each other for years without either having the courage to speak is more depressing than it used to be. And maybe there's the risk of rejection, or the scarier risk of acceptance, but for crying out loud. Just say something.

If I'm going to hyper-invest in fictional lives, they should probably be less angsty.

Scenes from School: Boys and Pictures

Today I took pictures of some of our kids who didn't have pictures on file yet.

I started out with the elementary school boys. At that age, even if they're in for anger management problems, they hear the teacher tell them to go stand in the hall and smile and they do. One boy smiled with such a surprising flash of brilliance I'm surprised my retinas are intact.

The teenage boys aren't so eager to have their smiles preserved for posterity. They're trying to save face, to be tough. "I don't smile for cameras" I hear, over and over again, and I heckle them about it and most of them give a little. Some break into laughter and hide their faces in their hands. "Wait, wait! Don't take it yet, don't take it yet!"

Maybe while they've been here they've knocked over chairs and started fistfights and threatened teachers, and maybe if they'd been a few years older when they did whatever landed them here they'd be in prison, and maybe they're still on the way there. Picture day reminds me of the hungry hearts beneath the bluster and bravado.

"The young lions do lack and suffer hunger;

But they who seek the LORD shall not be in want of any good thing."

-- Psalm 34:10

"Seek the LORD while He may be found;

Call upon Him while He is near."

--Isaiah 55:6

"The LORD is near to all who call upon Him,

To all who call upon Him in truth."

--Psalm 145:18

Pray for my boys, and pray for lionhearted men to walk beside them and teach them how and Whom to seek.

Positive Self-Talk

It's been a long time coming.

Living in the same house

we turned strangers,

me not knowing what was in his head,

him not caring what was in mine.

We moved from holding each other

to holding each other back,

and I didn't like who I saw

in the mirror every morning,

settling for a life more ordinary.

So I packed a pipe with

gunpowder and nails and

lobbed it into his car window as

he drove onto our street, which was

messy, of course, and who likes messy,

but free, too, so much more free.

It's for the best.

It's a shame the kids were riding with him

but there's a lot of socially well-adjusted people

who've grown up blind in one eye, and surely it's

better this way than living with tension so thick

you could cut it with a butcher knife, which

can't be good for anybody.

Most of the nails are out of the street already,

nice because I'd hate to pop a tire

on top of everything else,

like washing my carpet because for the fifteenth time

a visitor showed up with bloody feet and

I let people keep their shoes on now.

God will get me through this.

Scenes from School: Some of the Girls

1.

She came in one day all bright clothes and big eyes and chatter. A door down the hall was closed and she wanted somebody to talk to, somebody not one of the other girls waiting for the class transition. I barely had time for a word in, and when she left I felt as though I'd just had an encounter with a butterfly turned human.

In the few weeks remaining before she left she came by several times, after that. All she needed was an open door.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

2.

She comes by almost every day at least once, not to talk to me but to look in the mirror that hangs outside my office. It's one of those convex mirrors like the ones you see in drug stores, and I like it because I can glance out the door and see who's rustling around in the storage room. She uses it to check herself out.

I wonder what she sees, looking in that distorted reflection. What I see is someone who's always stylish, trendy yet classy at the same time (none of the plunging necklines or tight shirts designed to distract). There are looks of concentration, sometimes smiles as she turns back to her friends. When she moves on, I'll miss her visits to the mirror.

I wonder why I've never told her.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

3.

I'm in administration and I know their names even if I've never seen their faces. I know hers when I see it on the poem she submitted for the art contest. It begins in a deceptively simple style and grows in complexity, and it has a twist that grabs at me, and I read it again and decide I will ask her social worker to ask her if she'd give me a copy.

She doesn't know me. Or herself, judging from what she's written, but that's all right. She's only thirteen. I was twenty when I put the same sentiment to paper.

May the God whose purpose she invokes in her poem show her who she is, more and more, every day. As He is doing with me.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Pray for my girls.

Suzanne in the Auditor's Den

Today was another audit day. This morning I came in to find that the documents I requested far too late to be reasonably expected before the auditors arrived had come, after all. The teacher who called in sick today had corrected her attendance binder before she left last night. All was well.

After a phone call from up front warning me that everything was going horribly and that the auditors were picking on little tiny things that they hadn't ever told us about before, the serene feeling wasn't so strong. After the second phone call, it occurred to me that I hadn't really prayed much about this audit. I'd been feeling so much calmer and more confident and prepared and I'd not been praying. That was it. That was why the whole audit was failing. I hadn't prayed, I hadn't been asking other people to pray, and now I was taking the whole school down with me.

"Do you hear yourself?" another voice in my head spoke up. "What is this, an equation? 'God's favor = Perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ + Number of prayers Suzanne throws up / 2'? You do realize what part of that is unnecessary, right? Everything after Christ."

In long-ago Babylon, three men of God were called before an angry ruler and given a simple choice: worship him or burn to death. Their response, recorded in Daniel 3, is one of my favorite testimonies in all of Scripture, and the words in bold are my favorite part of it: "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or to worship the golden image that you have set up."

When the auditors came to my building office after nearly three hours with the community program, they were smiling and laughing. I was remembering what I've heard about them, about how they're out to get us and make our lives difficult, and remembering what I've heard about all of us, that we are all sinners in need of grace and that once God has granted it there is no audit, from a school district review of our paperwork to the devil's review of our daily lives, that can ever take that grace away.

The auditors found we'd changed a section of schedule in the middle of the year. For about twelve kids. Which is not allowed. I saw us losing the funding on all of these kids in a single swoop, but instead of pressing the point they gave us a chance to make up for it. And when they left, less than an hour after they arrived, they were thanking us for our help and congratulating us on being so well prepared.

I know I was well-organized, and I know that to the auditors (all either at or approaching retirement age) I likely have the granddaughter aura, and I know that when it comes down to it, neither of those are the primary reason why the audit went well. God delivered me from the wrath of the auditors.

But even if He had not, God would still have been God.

I went out with joy and was led forth in peace.

The Highest Calling

Quite recently I read of the struggle of a sister in Christ who has been wrestling with the idea that she has to work outside the home to be a fulfilled person. She has a young daughter and a new child on the way, her husband is gainfully employed so that from an economic perspective she doesn't have to work, and she thoroughly enjoys all the mothering tasks that are hers now and anticipates those to come, but there are people in her life who have been questioning her growing desire to stay home with her children instead of finishing her education and becoming an R.N. She wrote eloquently of the emerging realization that as long as she is following Christ with her whole heart, no one can stand in condemnation of her career choices.

Another sister in Christ wrote this in comment: "Motherhood is a woman's highest calling." While I appreciate this woman's supportiveness and her assertion that there is nothing wrong with staying home to raise the kids God gave you and that you shouldn't let the world tell you what to do about it...well.... Can we please retire that phrase?

I'm good with kids. Through nature and nurture and the gifts of God in each, I enjoy interacting with small people, especially one-on-one. And I thoroughly support mothers staying home with their children where it is possible. It's how I was raised, and I'm grateful to my mother for it. It's how many of my friends have raised or are raising their kids, with or without taking on additional jobs for the love of the work. So it's not that I think motherhood is a lesser calling than being a nurse or anything else.

But what about those of us who don't have children? What about those who not only don't have children because they are infertile or currently unable to adopt, but those who are unmarried and don't want to raise a child alone? What about those who have had miscarriages, or have lost a child after birth? Are we all missing out on the highest calling? Would God really create a highest calling for women and then bar some of us from it?

No. He wouldn't. He doesn't.

The highest calling is not to a position, but from a person. "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and my burden is light." (Matthew 11:28-29)

It's for women with children and without children. For women and for men. For everyone.

Walk towards the person of Jesus Christ and you can be certain that you are on the right path, wherever life takes you. Because it isn't really life that's taking you, bleak and impersonal. It's God. The God who says, "I, the Lord, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand." "I will lead the blind by ways they have not known, along unfamiliar paths I will guide them; I will turn the darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. These are the things I will do; I will not forsake them." (Isaiah 42:6a, 16)

May we follow You with willing and undivided hearts wherever you lead, O Lord.

Fads of Attraction vs. Imperishable Beauty

"Do not let your adorning be external--the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear--but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious."--I Peter 3:2-4

"Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised."--Proverbs 31:30

Something inside us wants to turn the descriptive into the prescriptive, the restrictive. What's wrong with braiding hair? What's wrong with gold jewelry and nice clothes?

But neither Peter nor King Lemuel actually says that women shouldn't wear jewelry or braid their hair. They don't say that women should hide themselves away or cover themselves from the top of their heads to the soles of their feet. They don't say that the way women dress forces men to sin, as if sin were as external as braided hair.

I thought of these two verses today when I was listening to Helen Kane on Grooveshark. Kane is a singer most commonly known now for providing the look and voice inspiration for the Betty Boop cartoon character, which first rose to popularity in the 1930's. Have you ever heard her sing? Go check it out. That was a top-level attractive voice back in the day.

Are looks a steadier indication of attraction? A hint of ankle in Iran. A lot of cleavage in the United States. Twiggy from the 1960's. Baroque models of the 1600's. There is no standard for physical beauty across cultures, let alone across the ages.

When you near the end of your life and look back on your photos, I will guarantee you that you will find a lot of goofy-looking images. Some of them will be of you sporting looks that were super popular at the time. My cousins, trendier during the 1980's than I was, already look back on their school pictures and roll their eyes over their hair.

You will never look back and roll your eyes because you were kind to someone, or didn't say the first thing that came into your head when it wasn't the best thing to say, or gave your time and money and energy to help someone besides just yourself. Not when you're doing it for God.

Because that's something else Peter and King Lemuel don't say. They don't say "Do these things because men don't care about how you look." They say "Do these things because God cares about your heart." Do men who are bending their hearts towards God prize godliness more than trendiness? Absolutely. Are we working to be beautiful for men? Absolutely not.

Put your hand into the fire and you will be burned. Wade in the ocean and your feet will get wet. Be beautiful for God and your beauty will never die.

It's just how it is.

The content of their what-now?

I got my census form today. As advance information for any of you who haven't seen yours yet, here are your choices for race:

• White
• Black, African Am., or Negro
• American Indian or Alaska Native--Print name of enrolled or principal tribe.
• Asian Indian
• Chinese
• Filipino
• Japanese
• Korean
• Vietnamese
• Other Asian--Print race, for example, Hmong, Laotian, Thai, Pakistani, Cambodian, and so on.
• Native Hawaiian
• Guamanian or Chamorro
• Samoan
• Other Pacific Islander--Print race, for example, Fijian, Tongan, and so on.
• Some other race--Print race.

Oh, and these all come after the Hispanic section, where you can choose Mexican, Mexican Am., Chicano; Puerto Rican; Cuban; or another Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin, such as Argentinean, Colombian, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Spaniard, and so on.

It seems we have too many Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders in the country and we're trying to figure out which group should get voted out first. (I'm guessing it won't be the Spaniards because they can hold grudges at least ten times as well as they can sword-fight ambidextrously, which, as I'm sure you're aware, is freakishly amazingly well.) I am as horrified by this as you are, but what other conclusion can we draw from such a detailed query?

White people like me are the safest. They don't ask anything about my origins. I could be anything from English to German to South African to Russian to Italian to French and nobody would know. As far as the excruciatingly detailed race section of the census is concerned, I'm in stealth mode. Flip the jackal switch.

I did think the census people could use a little help, though. They clearly care about what is important to us. So I checked the box next to "White" and then under "Some other race" I put down the race I really identify with most.

Human.

Who's with me?

The Nearness of You

"What exciting things happened while I was gone?" I asked this morning, back in my first grade class after two weeks away.

The children, garrulous with each other, began "um-ing" and looking at the ceiling, trying hard to think of something, but one hand flew up.

"You came back!" she said, and as if that wasn't enough, she added, "And you're coming to my house tomorrow."

The fact that she doesn't stay up when company is there, that she will spend most of the time I am at her house in bed, made this "exciting thing" hit me harder.

To be glad to share the same space, even if you don't get to speak to each other, even if you're not in the same room. It is what I was trying to convey to the friend I visited recently, the one who was half-jokingly afraid that maybe I didn't have enough fun during my visit to return, that maybe I was bored.

Acquaintances care about you when you are fun, when you are shiny and new, when you are amiable, when you are healthy. But that isn't really caring about someone else, is it? That's caring about self. "Anyone could be attracted by the beautiful and charming. But could such attraction be called love? True love was to accept humanity when wasted like rags and tatters. Theoretically the priest knew all this" (from Silence, by Shusaku Endo).

Love rejoices in nearness. No matter what. Thanks for the reminder, Chloe.

(Holy Spirit, come near and draw us past the theoretical.)

The Safer Road

To put it kindly, she is a leader from the moment she enters the classroom. ("She's a poison," one teacher says, and the others agree.) She sets the tone for the rest of the group, especially the girls. Even those who haven't been particularly disrespectful before follow her.

She singles out the assistant teacher for special torment, cussing him out and branding him with a name so ludicrous and yet oddly fitting that he bursts out laughing even as he sends her back to her unit. Neither he nor his co-workers will forget it, and some of them wonder if it's why he shaves his beard, because without it it's true he doesn't look as much like the name suits him.

The day she leaves she asks the unit staff to call Mr. Leprechaun so she can say goodbye. She hugs him and cries and he is surprised because all she's ever done since the first time she came to class was call him f-ing this and f-ing that.

Sometimes it feels safer to make someone hate you from the start than to wait for their inevitable disappointment in you.

We'll Always Have That

a slow ramp up and it's taking forever

click by click

is this track solid

will the chain hold

trepidation for the newbies

turned bittersweet clinging

for those who've ridden enough to know

the speed of descent

the rush of air and light and excitement

all too soon the car eases to a stop

the occupants scatter

but we had fun while we lasted

didn't we?

No Valentine's Day for me, thanks.

I don't like Valentine's Day.

This isn't a singleness manifesto like the many I've written before. I've come to terms with the fact that I like romance and pursuit and all of that (in theory). But I don't like Valentine's Day.

I don't like being like everybody else. Part of my resistance to admitting that even sometimes I want to be married was/is that so many other people want that. Good grief, am I a follower? (And just how many people have shared that, I wonder, the desire to be singular amongst the trillions of people who have ever lived?) While there are aspects of wanting to stand out that are prideful and a little shortsighted, there are some that are just part of being the sort of person you are.

Sharing a manufactured holiday with the whole country? Not the sort of person I am. If I'm ever in the kind of relationship where Valentine's Day observance might come up, it may be more in the breach than the observance. (For instance, it could be funny not to talk to each other at all for that day...clearly this wouldn't work if I were married, as anybody who has ever lived with me knows, but before then.)

So if there's somebody out there and we're working on our way to each other, I hope he's the sort of person who likes in-jokes and days that mean something just to us, because I'd rather celebrate the relationship I am in than the day the whole country is selling stuff for. I know, I know, not supporting the economy by throwing money away? How un-American.

We could celebrate "I'm married to the most wonderful woman in the galaxy day." I'm open to that.

Melancholy Dissected

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

~~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

If you pay attention to your life, you will notice a lot of patterns. A lot of things that seemed confusing and frustrating to unbearable levels as little as five years ago make a lot more sense to me now.

Case in point: random bouts of melancholy, such as the one I've been in since about 3:30 this morning. Five years ago, I would probably just angst a lot about it. Now, I can recognize some contributing factors. These include:

• Being tired. Not getting enough sleep makes me mopey and/or cranky, and then if I wake up mopey like I did quite early this morning I can't get back to sleep because I'm focusing on turning off the sad or, worse, letting it run off with my head as I remember all the things that are not going Suzanne-perfect in my life. And I know part of the mopeyness is connected to...
• 
  
• Feeling disorganized. My apartment is a mess right now. Not a horrible, horrible mess, but I need to take out the trash, and I need to vacuum, and I need to organize my kitchen cabinets so I can put dishes away properly again, and I need to organize my larger closet so things fit in there as they should, too, but I'm sooo busy. Which leads me to the next factor...
• 
  
• Feeling too busy. Okay, seriously, lots of people do way more than I do. Lots of people have jobs and household tasks and evening plans and food needs and more evening plans and working with youth group and teaching Sunday School and all that. I don't know why I feel so overwhelmed so quickly at my busy points, but often I do. Which can lead to...
• 
  
• Spending too much time surfing the internet or watching TV. In small doses, both of these things can feel productive (especially because there are a lot of things I can do while watching TV, like spreadsheets or ironing or folding laundry), but they can definitely slip over into rampant procrastination. Sometimes I get a late-night second wind, stop procrastinating, and launch into the tasks I should have completed hours ago. Sometimes I keep surfing mindlessly until really late in the desperate hope that morning will take longer to come if I am awake longer. But either of those options lead me back to...
• 
  
• Being tired. And then being scared of being tired. Which tends to wake me up in the night, which tends to make me tired. (Wow, it's obvious that physical and mental well-being are entwined.)

It's not an exhaustive list, but those are the major melancholy triggers I have the most direct influence over. Pay attention and you might catch yours out, too.

And now I need to sleep.

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is (It's Already Where Your Heart Is)

We had our annual church meeting tonight. As usual, we got hung up on the budget. "It's not personal," somebody said as he started his comment wondering why a line item was being increased, and of course that was just rubbish. Money is totally personal. Somehow money reaches its little tentacles down into our hearts and tries to pretend it's something important. Something like love, or happiness, or security. (It isn't, really. It's none of those things.)

I tend to feel dirty talking about money, or hearing people talk about money. I feel those tentacles tightening--"Why would they think that's a necessary expenditure? Why would they want to put my money out for that?" And when I hear other people make arguments on money, I start judging them like crazy, catching myself questioning their every motive--"Trying to keep more money in your own pocket, huh? Trying to make me fund your passion?" Which is just the flip side of the first question.

Maybe we keep our giving too personal, in a way. Not like we need to be flashy about giving, to flaunt how much we give and how many causes we support as if that makes us special somehow. But why can't we be extravagant in our excitement about it? Excitement is contagious, you know.

One of the things I like about writing a check to my church, or to another ministry, or to a charity, or even as a gift, is the sense of weight being lifted off of me. Every gift is a kick in the teeth to the slave-master called wealth. Watch this, bank account. You don't own me.

Why can't we in the church plan our giving not to meet a budget standard, but to exceed it? Not see things as how much we want to spend, but how much we want to give? Why can't we see a tithe of ten percent as a ridiculously minimalistic goal, and try for a new personal best every year as far as how much we give away? I'm not taking that money with me when I die, so what use is it here? If a few extra income percentage points a week make someone else's life richer, in whatever way, why begrudge them that?

Why not fund somebody else's passion?

Is it really money we lack?

Favorite Conversation of the Day

Dad: What would you want your last meal to be? Like if you were on death row.

Me: For all my crimes against humanity? I'm not sure. Depends on my mood. Maybe...I don't know...ice cream?

Dad: You have no imagination. "Dear Dad, I have no imagination."

Me: What? What would you say?

Dad: Porterhouse steak. From a woolly mammoth.

Me: What, is that on a show you're watching?

Dad: No, it's from me.

Me: You just came up with that yourself?

Dad: Yeah, I did. I'm creative. I'm not just an engineer.

Me: Why were you even thinking about that?

Dad: If it's from a woolly mammoth, they can't kill you, because they'll be looking all over and can never find your last meal. You, you're dead. You can get ice cream anywhere. You can get ice cream from a hardware store.

Me: A hardware store.

Dad: I was thinking it was either that or pterodactyl wings...maybe pterodactyl toenails, but then they can probably find the toenails. It'd have to be meat....

More Scenes from School

Several weeks ago

I'm carrying a large heavy box and hoping that someone will be there by the door, someone I could ask for help, when two people start heading in the same direction I am. The staffer has spoken to me before, so I would feel comfortable asking him, but his attention is currently engaged by the complaints of the teenager walking alongside him. I'm waiting for the student to pause long enough for me to ask if somebody could open the door for me, and then suddenly the boy turns, sees me, and the switch is thrown. Just like that, he goes from irritated to solicitous.

"Can I help you with that?"

"Yes," I say, "thank you."

He takes the box and I step ahead, keys ready for the door.

"It's hard to get into this door while I'm carrying a box," I say.

"Tell me about it," he agrees. "One time I had my suitcase and it was icy."

I hold the door for him and then walk around the corner to my office, where he puts the box down and I thank him by name.

"You know my name?" he asks, surprised, and I remind him that I took his ID photo back in September, which he remembers, and that his name reminds me of a friend's, which he finds interesting. "You work here?" he clarifies.

"Yes."

"I walk by here every day," he exclaims, and I almost laugh because he is so sincere and because it's so obvious that he thinks I didn't notice him, even though all the boys walk by my office several times a day on their way to and from class. "I'll say hi."

"I'll say hi back," I say.

And we do, and once he stops to see my tack board full of lighthouse pictures and is amazed that the colors of the sky could be real, not computer generated.

"You see a lot of strange things outside," I say.

"At the ocean?" he inquires, excitement on his face, and I get a little twinge when I think about anybody not knowing that the sky can look like that even here in West Michigan. I tell him about the lizard in Flagstaff that looked like it was from a science fiction movie, and his eyes sparkle with secondhand enthusiasm.

Today

"I'll be leaving tomorrow," he says. His eyes are full of trepidation and my mouth is full of trail mix. I have to stop putting handfuls of this stuff in my mouth when people are coming by.

I hold my hand in front of my mouth as I talk. "I'll miss seeing you around," I say, thinking about how tragicomical life is and how ridiculous I must look.

He acts like he doesn't notice anything, but he latches on to my words. "I'll miss you, too."

"Have a couple M&M's," I say inanely, putting two M&M's from the trail mix left on my napkin into his hand as he heads off to class. "Come by again before you go."

"I will," he says, so when he passes me--once, twice, three times--I wonder if he meant tomorrow when I meant today. But I stay anyway, waiting, and just as I'm reaching down my coat he's there in the doorway.

It's awkward, saying goodbye to someone you're fairly sure you'll never see or hear from again, someone you care about but are not exactly friends with. That sense hangs in the air between us as I ask how much packing he has left to do and tell him I'm a last-minute packer, myself. He doesn't know when he's leaving (it could be tomorrow morning or afternoon), he doesn't know if he'll be going to any classes. So much of their lives is uncertain like this, strange considering how much else is scripted for them.

Silence falls and we stare at each other. He holds out his left hand. "It was nice to meet you."

I take his hand and shake it. "Nice to meet you, too," I say. "Good luck out there," I add, not sure what it is you say to somebody leaving a locked residential program but knowing I hope he never lives here again.

"Thanks."

And he leaves. Even though I've only spoken to him a handful of times, my heart twists and some tears fall. Yet still, underneath that, a steady voice inside tells me I want to love children like this, this readily. To take the hard-luck cases under my wings as God took me under his, to nurture them for a lifetime or only a few months. Perhaps to have my heart torn to a thousand pieces, if each piece I give away makes one of them stronger. (Funny, in leaving myself open to break I find myself more ready to be broken.)

It is in these times I most want a partner to love with me.

Bring on the married people sermons

This morning the tentative title of the pastor's sermon was "Faith Finding a Wife." (It wasn't the title by the time he started, which is not unusual.) Tonight the title of the associate pastor's sermon was "Grace-Touched Husbands." A year or so ago, I would have had to invest serious prayer time into not being bitter just at reading those titles.

My favorite part about this "being more vulnerable before God" journey is discovering the freedom of honesty. (What? Honesty is a good thing? Confusing, right? No wonder it took me thirty years to figure out.)

Honestly? Sometimes I want to be married. And sometimes I don't. But the longer I lean into this vulnerability before God, the safer I feel, no matter how things end up. They feel increasingly old, increasingly laughable, these notions that I could derail any relationship of any kind that He wants me to be a part of, that any marriage I'd be in would be a slog of an effort and no fun at all, that I'm undesirable and hard to get along with in a much more difficult way than anybody else is.

I love that I can read those phrases and not believe them. They boiled up from deep, deep down, but then they were skimmed off and thrown away. (He is making all things new, remember?) What I believe now, right this moment, is that He's got it, all of it, under control, and that the direction of my life is not something I need to agonize over. Although I still have my anxious moments, they're feeling foreign more quickly than they ever did. On the whole, I'm living more now than I ever have before.

So now, instead of expending so much effort on a masking anger that's supposed to protect me, I can hear about husbands and wives in church and not feel excluded. The story is not about how Suzanne doesn't have and will never have a husband, insert her favorite conjecture as to why here. The story is about the God who does the work and ordains the instruments and puts us all into relationships of all kinds and whose commands for one are not so narrow as to exclude any. The God whose love shines so brightly in Christ-focused marriages that I want to be near them, want to hear about them, no matter if I'm never part of one myself. That God and His children (one of them a slow-learning but increasingly joyful writer from Michigan).

Day by day, more butterfly than caterpillar.

A Scene from School

"Are you always here?" he asks. It's 2:00 p.m. and school has been out for all of six minutes.

"I'm here a lot," I respond.

"It seems like you're here all the time," he says, his eyes flicking from the desk to the filing cabinet to the bulletin board, taking it all in with frank curiosity. "Are you the school secretary?"

"I am."

"For all the schools?"

I don't know what this question means, so I phrase my answer carefully, telling him I'm the secretary for three of the four buildings on campus.

"It just seems like you're a different secretary," he says, and I only have an instant to wonder what this means because he elaborates. "Most school secretaries are gone as soon as school is out and the kids are gone."

His range of experience with school secretaries may well be broad, but then he may never have been in the building after school let out himself. It could easily go either way as a teenager, his perception of school secretaries formed from knowledge or imagination.

I'm without a response, so I laugh, one of those appreciative gestures that doesn't mean "you're funny" as much as "you're making me happy."

"That's okay, though," he says, giving me permission to stay late if I want to do so. "You're a hard worker. That's a good thing."

Four months into school and this is the first conversation we've had, he and I, and it might be the last, but in two minutes on a Wednesday afternoon in January he connected himself to the name I type into my forms. I laugh again, and say "Thank you" (which is redundant), and am glad for those two minutes.

I love this job.