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.