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.