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.

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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.

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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.

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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.