The Life That Was To Be and the God Who Led Me Elsewhere

The heart makes idols like that is its job (or used to be). In the church, we talk about idolizing self, idolizing other people, idolizing money and possessions and sex and relationships. I would venture a guess that most of those idols are serving a bigger one, the Life That Was To Be.

Because we talk about the sovereignty of God, too, but it’s a little grudging sometimes. God is sovereign, but I wish….

In this year of fighting fear, I have found that you can’t fight fear without embracing sacrifice. That’s what all fears boil down to, isn’t it? The fear of loss, in some form or another?

Cast your cares on God, we are told, because He cares for us, and if that’s true then we have to stop pretending we don’t have problems, stop pretending we aren’t bowed down under the weight of expectations that never came to fruition and dreams that have faded to shadows. And so yesterday, on the way home, I named names, traced out the sketch of the Life That Was To Be.

I was going to be married by now. My kids would be roughly the same age as my brother’s kids, and we’d all be living close by each other, and get to see each other a lot. My husband would have gotten along great with my dad (who would still be running and would have way more energy than most men in their early 60s have), and with my mom (who would be thrilled to have twice the grandkids), and with my whole family and all of my friends, and he would never have thought of me as a last resort he was driven to because the prettier girls were all taken.

Way down in the deep core places of my heart I believe that God has me by the hand, that He is leading me through valleys and by quiet streams and into green pastures, that He knows exactly where we are going and exactly what He is doing. But way down there, wrestling against the sovereignty of God, are the Balrog thoughts, the ones that speak in the language of the prince of this world: that single women are single because they are undesirable and unattractive and have something wrong with them; that people who are good Christians don’t ever snap at coworkers; that if nothing spectacular has been accomplished by the heady age of thirty-four, you might as well give up on anything spectacular ever happening, give up and just wait to be done.

But is God not better to me than ten sons? And isn’t a woman who fears the Lord to be praised? And weren’t Peter and John headstrong and too quick to speak? And doesn’t the Lord know all of the good works left for me to do? And should I put the Lord my God to the test?

So Sunday night (not for the last time!) I wrapped the Life That Was To Be in the shreds of my self-assurance and held them up to God as a grief offering, asking to love His plan and His purpose fiercely and fully, to find joy in them even on the days when it seems there is no fruit on the vine.

I was thinking of this tonight when I went for my church directory photo. I thought of it when practically the first thing out of the photographer’s mouth was a comment on how many young single people there were at this church. (Yes, I am alone for this picture.) I thought of it when he mistook the mole on my upper lip for a warty-pimply thing and then after being corrected that it was just part of my face still suggested that they could take care of that with photo editing. (No, I am not the most beautiful woman you will ever photograph.) I thought of it when the salesman tried to get me to buy another photo by asking if I have a boyfriend who might want it. (No, no boyfriend wants a picture of me.)

On the way home, I thought of how on Wednesday night I’d told a group of girls that I generally found that making big declarations to God one day led to confrontation on it the next, and it was like catching the smirk and the nudge and the lovingly sarcastic, “It’s all because you’re ugly and single, remember?” And I laughed, and I will take the Life That Is along with the Life That Will Be because God will never, ever let go of my hand or lose His way.

(And I haven’t looked that good in a photo in ages.)

I don't want to be that girl

This has been a good year for epiphanies.

Early this summer, I vacationed in Daytona Beach with my mom and some extended family. Our room overlooked the ocean and several pools. On the twelfth floor, we were high enough to see pelicans fly past our window at a regular basis, but not high enough to escape the constant noise from below.

Down on the beach and poolside, I marveled at how many different swimsuits the world produced. I have never seen so much skin in one locale. 

Now, most of my life has been spent negatively comparing myself to other women, and extrapolating from all those "men are visual" talks at church that I would only be a last resort candidate for any sort of romantic relationship. In the past, I might have seen some of these women on the beach as confirmation of this, and I would resent their existence and all the men who would doubtless pick them over me.

Perhaps it was the sheer over-saturation of skin that produced the epiphany: I don't want to be those women. Even if some of them have better-looking legs than I do.

And while I still don't believe I'm the fairest of them all, I did finally recognize that I do believe I am more interesting than most of them. There were a lot of women on the beach sunbathing, but I was one of the few out playing in the ocean waves. There were a lot of women around the pools, but I was the only one running around under the waterspouts at the kiddie pool with the kids accompanying her. I may not have been the only woman in the whole place who was irritated one afternoon when the music from the pool got loud enough to hear all of the lyrics from the twelfth floor, but I may well have been the only one irritated because it disturbed the reading of a book about North Korea.

The second epiphany came quickly on the heels of the first: I like being with me. I like being with people who like being with me. I wouldn't ever want to be with a man who was looking around him for the next best thing, I would want somebody who fell into that category of people who like being with me. And I don't want to waste any more of my life pining over men whose grass is greener on the other side of our conversations.

In the past, when I have been interested in guys, I have compared myself to other women and discounted all of my chances because I didn't measure up to them in one way or another. In Daytona, thinking of any future romantic interests, my attitude had shifted from "some poor guy could get saddled with me and my issues" to "some guy should be so lucky...and if none of them ever think so, I should be so lucky as to avoid entanglements with men with poor taste."

Underneath all that self-deprecation has been hiding a woman who believes she's pretty amazing, and that God is working on the parts that aren't amazing yet.

I write it down in case I forget.

A Dream Trilogy and Its Aftermath

Recently, I had a kill-or-be-killed dream which presented an epiphany when I woke, about my recurring dreams in this mold and my false “need” to take care of things on my own. 

Not long after, I had a similar dream that was slightly different than the usual model—instead of being alone, this time I had friends with me, and we made a plan to handle things together. 

Then, last night….

I don’t remember the dream. I remember a sense of panic, and a sense that I would be awake for a while, afraid of going back to sleep. And then I remember rebuking the dream, or something in the dream, or the fear itself, in the name of Jesus, reciting Scripture at it. The emotional response is vivid, but the details are a little fuzzy, and I don’t remember now if that last bit was part of the dream or something that happened in waking, because, if I was awake, I fell back to sleep almost immediately.

Several years in a row were “theme years”—years when I would think that “this year’s personal/spiritual growth will be focused on [insert quality].” It was never something I planned, it was something that just came to me, and then I would be thinking consciously about it for the next several months. I haven’t had that feeling for a while, not since I thought “this year will be about taking things as they come.” That was the year my dad died.

This week, I have been thinking that this year’s theme is going to be living in the moment, not waiting for people to leave me or bad things to happen. This morning, I realized that means that this year will be about fighting fear.

Oh Lord Jesus, may I invoke your name with increasing frequency, in sleeping or waking, and to the same effect in both.

A Matter of Love and Death

Melodic threads are meant to be followed, and Les Miserables weaves them together skillfully. If I were in college, I would listen to all of the available soundtracks repeatedly until I could tease out every thread and write a longer paper about them. As it is, I am no longer in college, and am still new to this musical, so I will just follow one and write a quasi-academic blog post on it.

The melody that reaches its apex in “On My Own,” Eponine’s ballad of unrequited love, is the same melody used in two major death scenes: Fantine’s (“Come to Me”) and Valjean’s (“Epilogue”). What does unrequited love have to do with death?

(First of all, I hope you can all acknowledge that that is a great essay question. To all of my theatre professor friends—you’re welcome. Secondly, I really miss essay questions, so let me jump right in.)

At the start of “Come to Me,” Fantine is a woman who has lost nearly everything and is at the point of losing the last thing remaining to her besides life itself: her hope of seeing her daughter again. When Valjean enters the room, he brings a different melody, but swiftly matches her mood, swearing to her that he will care for Cosette. Comforted, Fantine asks him to tell Cosette she loves her and will see her when she wakes—with the strong implication that she does realize she is dying, but that she does not believe that death is to be the end of her.

It is easy to see the parallel to “Epilogue,” the death scene of Cosette’s other parent. When Cosette appears in his room, Valjean slips into the melody Fantine used when speaking to her daughter in her final delirium, and Cosette replies in the melody Valjean first used in speaking to Fantine. He soon moves into not just a parallel melody, but a parallel lyric—whereas Fantine sang “Take my child, I give her to your keeping” and “For God's sake, please stay till I am sleeping,” Valjean sings:

On this page, I write my last confession

Read it well, when I at last am sleeping

It's a story of those who always loved you

Your mother gave her life for you

Then gave you to my keeping

In the movie, the scene continues with Fantine welcoming Valjean to follow her to heaven (“take my hand, I’ll lead you to salvation”), but the Broadway version has Fantine joined by Eponine, and then by Valjean himself, in a request that seems aimed higher than the dying man:

Take my hand, and lead me to salvation [emphasis mine]

Take my love, for love is everlasting

And remember the truth that once was spoken

To love another person is to see the face of God!

Considering that the same melody was used in parallel death scenes pointing to a life beyond suffering, one might expect that it would serve the same purpose for Eponine, who after all does have a death scene of her own. But while she has a death song with a similarly positive underlying theme (“rain will make the flowers grow”), it is not the same musical theme. Instead, the musical theme used in the scenes previously discussed reaches its apex in “On My Own,” Eponine’s ballad of unrequited love.

The song is prefaced by an acknowledgment that Eponine is living in her own head when she thinks of Marius caring for her as she cares for him. Then the theme we recognize from Fantine and Valjean’s songs begins. It is, in fact, most closely associated with Eponine, despite not being first sung by her. She sings of talking to herself, of being alone, of pretending. Pretending, in fact, is twice mentioned, and it is here that the themes of all three songs come together lyrically, because in acknowledging the pretense she is dying to a dream.

In a way, “On My Own” is Eponine’s death scene. In it, she consciously dies to the dream of Marius and her “forever and forever,” yet chooses not to turn away from him. She loves him only on her own, but she holds that love as precious in its own way. It is not her dream vision of love, but it is a real love, a love that will bring her to the barricades in an attempt to save Marius’ life by giving him a reason to continue. (Because she must know that while she is the type to sing “Without him / The world around me changes / The trees are bare and everywhere / The streets are full of strangers,” Marius is the type to sing “Black! the color of despair!” Which is taking it up a notch.)

The epilogue to the Broadway version of the musical has the advantage over the movie because Eponine and Fantine stand together. They are two women who each loved someone they could not be with in this life, but who attest that unlike this life, love is everlasting. Valjean joins in the assertion that “to love another person is to see the face of God.” Together, the three point to a purpose greater than mere survival, and to a love that is both behind and beyond any love this world has to offer.

Behind all this time and sand

When I read through Numbers this year, the ways in which the people complained hit me hard. They had been rescued from slavery and they were complaining about things like not having the right kind of food, or that maybe God was just leading them into the wilderness to kill them all more dramatically.

For over a year now, that has been me. I pay lip service to the sovereignty of God, but I have a hard time pushing that down to contentment. Instead, I still deeply mourn the loss of my father, and the deaths of dreams that followed his death. I mourn my life as I thought it was going to happen. I mourn the personal failures in the things I have said and done. I look around me and I see wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see.

(I have needed corrective eyewear since I was six. I can't see all that far.)

I haven't wanted to blog much. I don't want to spiral into self-pity, and I have been in more or less of a mental fog since mid-May of 2010, so writing has been more difficult. But maybe it is useful to shine a light on the demons that plague you, and then to turn that light onto the map to remind yourself that on the other side of the wilderness is the Promised Land.

Lately, my clearest dreams have been nightmares, violent, kill-or-be-killed. In trying to go back to sleep after one of those a few weeks ago, I looked it in the face first. It boiled down to Suzanne Vs. The World--I have always tended to feel like I have to have my own back, and the feeling has only increased with my dad gone. And I realized that such dreams presented a false dichotomy, two options when there was at least one more: 1) kill, 2) be killed, 3) let somebody else take care of the pursuing villain. I'm not good at killing the villain, anyway; the villain never actually dies at my hand. (Oh, my Lord and God, you are the one who has to do the slaying.)

And maybe the villains will be shaken off, or maybe they will be thorns in the flesh for the rest of my life. Even so, one way or another, one day I will be clear of them.

Someday, I will look back on my early 30's and think, "Oh, that wasn't so bad after all" or at least "Look, there were good things that came out of that time." Even if it isn't until Heaven. The challenge now is to embrace a White Queen sort of memory, or rather a New Testament sort of memory, and remember things that happen years from now better than this very moment itself.

Unimaginably great things have not yet--but already--happened.

The Plot Thickens

On Saturday my out-of-town family left after over a week of time spent together. Today some things sort of exploded at work. Tomorrow it will be two years since my father died. Next Sunday (Father's Day) marks two years since his funeral.


My dreams can get pretty interesting in emotionally intense times.


Last night I dreamed that I was playing Marian, from the BBC Robin Hood, and my role was to be imprisoned in the stocks, be mercifully set free by sympathetic bystanders, then be ambushed and killed on the way out. My comrades kept telling me things were going to be okay, and I was mournfully insisting that I did die at the end. 


I posted that dream summary on Facebook this afternoon, and got this response from my friend Lisa: "Good characters are always willing to die for the sake of the plot." She said, "I think writers have to love their characters, but they have to love their story more."


Which reminded me of 2 Corinthians 4, the "jars of clay" passage that talks about suffering being used by God so that Jesus Christ shines through all our broken places. (A clay jar doesn't show what is inside of it if the vessel is intact.)


It is a good thing to recall, as you are dying (2 Cor. 4:11); a good thing to speak into the darkness against the crouching enemies: 


I am willing to die for the sake of the plot.

Take care of the feet

Though the fig tree should not blossom
And there be no fruit on the vines,
Though the yield of the olive should fail
And the fields produce no food,
Though the flock should be cut off from the fold
And there be no cattle in the stalls,
Yet I will exult in the LORD,
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.
The Lord GOD is my strength,
And He has made my feet like hinds’ feet,
And makes me walk on my high places.

--Habakkuk 3:17-19

These verses fell to me tonight in my church Bible study. I needed them, needed to say them out loud like that.

The last verse especially settled in and stuck out. "Hind" is a pretty old synonym for "deer," but when I read this verse I don't think of deer in Israel, I think of mountain goats out west, jumping around and climbing nearly sheer surfaces as though falling isn't even a possibility.

The thing is, God doesn't always level our paths for us (although sometimes He does, or calls others to do it, e.g. Hebrews 12:13). Sometimes the places He has for us to walk through are rocky and steep and dangerous, and instead of smoothing out the paths, He gives us the right kind of feet.

From the end of the earth I call to You

when my heart is faint;
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

--Psalm 61:2

More than three sizes

"I shall run in the way of Your commandments,

For You will enlarge my heart."
--Psalm 119:32

This is not how we think of commandments, on our own. Hear "commandments" and you might be prone to think of chains and drudgery. "Did God actually say...?" the serpent in the Garden asks, incredulously, inviting Eve to draw her own conclusions about the sort of God who would command anything.

Yet this morning I stumbled across this verse in Psalm 119, the Bible's greatest love song to the Law (the one that challenges you to believe love and Law are by no means opposites), and I didn't think "chains." You can't run in chains. Running is for wide open spaces and for lungs fit to take in oxygen and for a heart large enough to handle it. For dedicated runners, running is a joyful thing, something to persevere in even through pain because they just don't want to give up a day of running. Running is freedom.

God enlarges our hearts, making it possible to run with excitement in the way of His commands, to know them as the purest form of freedom. And it doesn't say that He will ever stop growing the hearts, growing us.

The God who commands is the God who equips.

Watch where you put your "but"

"Weeping may tarry for the night,

but joy comes with the morning."

-- Psalm 30:5b

I've noticed lately that I have a tendency to reverse this.

"I like my house, but it's not organized yet."

"God is faithful, but life is difficult."

"Christians know the end of the story works out great, but the middle is kind of a mess."

These are all true statements. Worded as they are, though, the emphasis falls in the wrong place. Even if both parts of a statement are true, we usually place more emphasis on what comes after the "but."

Words matter. The way I use them matters. I want to watch where I put my "but" because it matters, and because after a "but" there is usually an "and," and I want the part of the statement that keeps going to be the one that's going in the right direction.

My house isn't organized yet, but I like it and I'm making progress.

Life is difficult, but God is faithful and He is with me in more ways than I can understand now.

The middle is kind of a mess, but Christians know the end of the story works out great, and we can put up with dramatic conflict while anticipating a beautiful resolution.

"In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world."

--John 16:33b

Psalm 97:11

"Light is sown for the righteous,
and joy for the upright in heart."

-- Psalm 97:11

I'm not much of a gardener, much less a farmer, but I know that when you sow seeds you don't expect to see them sprout immediately. But there is joy in anticipating the harvest (especially if you know that, unlike you, the Gardener doesn't ever kill what He has planted).

Learning from work

It has been very intense at work since July. And most of the kids who would stop by to talk to me are gone now. And I work in a cinderblock room with no windows (or as I call it, the Batcave). So it has been very intense without much human interaction.

It is not good for the woman to be alone. I am a highly individualistic person. I have often thought this office setup is perfect because then I don't have to deal with people much, but without dealing with people much at all, it is very easy to forget that anybody besides me is working. Doubly so on days when it seems like nobody is answering my emails or voicemails. It is good for me to get out and talk to people and remember I'm not the only person left on earth. (Especially after I found myself thinking about what is possibly the most classic episode of The Twilight Zone, "Time Enough at Last," and thinking that in a post-apocalyptic world you would surely be able to find another pair of reading glasses without too much trouble.)

This job, with all its busyness, is also bringing out the messiah complex. In a pre-apocalyptic world, there are a lot of things that need to be done and a lot of people who have different perceived needs than I do about what those things are. Frustrating though it has been, there have been moments of realization and growth in this, too. Here are a few that stuck out.

1) I have been doing a lot of seething over the fact that people haven't been listening to me, not doing what I told them to do even though I've repeated it over and over and tried to impart the urgency of the situation, the negative consequences of NOT doing what I tell them, and the sense that I am only telling them because it is so important. And it's not like I just stood up in meetings and told them what needed to be done (I have), I've told them in writing, so they have that to reference. But sometimes even when they want to reference it, they can't seem to perform a search of their emails.

On some of these days I get angrier and angrier, less and less friendly towards even the people who are following my directions. And I am so glad that God is not like that. I think part of the problem people have with believing that a loving God would ever send people to Hell might be that we often think that we are loving people. When push comes to shove, though, how many people have been saved from our wrath?

Give me a few days of people forgetting or ignoring what I say and I have to be praying really hard not to blow up at them. But God is not like that. God is patient. God does not give up on me when I don't follow through on what He asked me to do. God does not throw lightning bolts at people who ignore Him ("not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance"--2 Peter 3:9). He not just okay with telling all of us, again and again, what we need to be saved from the negative consequences of ignoring His words, He is passionate about it. The lightning we need is the lightning of God's face (Daniel 10:6)--it strikes and it saves, and the ones who look to it are blinded only to see more clearly, like Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9).

2) What has been frustrating me the most this year is that a lot of people who have no idea what they are doing are rarely asking me about how to do it, or if I could help them. Sometimes they have been asking other people for answers, people who don't know or who have requested that questions come through me. The ones who do ask are apologetic about it.

"For everyone who asks receives," Jesus says in Matthew 7:8, and because He is patient He doesn't add what I would have added, "so for crying out loud, stop trying to figure it out yourselves and do it all yourselves when I want you to ask, when I love it when you ask!" He does want us to ask. And He does love it.

We will never, ever bother God by asking unabashedly for His help, and by doing it through Jesus, the appointed mediator for all our questions and requests.

3) I'm no Jesus. If I don't have a pristine office and a clear inbox and a fully checked off to-do list, do you know what happens? I come back tomorrow. You know what would happen if I couldn't come back tomorrow? Somebody else would pick up where I left off and figure out how to do it.

There is already a Savior for the world, and it isn't me. I don't have to rush around like crazy trying to make everything perfect. I can't even when I try.

4) I need Jesus as much as I ever have, and more than I will ever know.

Oh, help....

Today, 12 hours at work. Tomorrow, a stack of confusing paperwork and a glut of emails to tackle before my 5:00 PM departure deadline, in the hopes that when I leave I will be more prepared for the Wednesday due date of the Giant Count Day Project.

I am feeling completely overwhelmed and like an idiot for many reasons, not least of which is that I put an offer on a house now, of all times.

I'm torn between thinking that I rushed into this whole thing, and thinking that God just isn't on my schedule. On the one hand, I may be making a terrible mistake in taking action. On the other, the mistake could be in not trusting God enough to be involved enough to thwart ill-conceived plans.

Or maybe I think that God is a lion and I am a mouse, instead of a lion cub.

(Maybe you should just sit and stop thinking so much.)

I put an offer on the house last Tuesday, the owner countered on Wednesday, and I sat on it over the weekend. My mom and I spent Saturday packing, just to get a start on things. We packed for five hours and there is a ton more to pack. Then we looked at paint tip cards to get ideas for what I might paint a future house, and there are a lot of decisions there.

I counter-countered today, and he accepted the counter-counter. Next steps: signing it, then inspection.

And packing. I'll need boxes for that.

And cleaning and painting and figuring out furniture placement and breaking my lease and still working and having two major holidays coming up and snow coming soon and....

And breathing.

Breathing would be good.

Things I Am Wondering This Morning

1) Proper capitalization of small words in titles (not that I care enough to check...this is one of my few grammar blind spots).

2) Why my allergies seem to have gotten worse after the frost.

3) How much effort it will take to dismantle and thoroughly clean a bird cage of approximately 5'x6'x6', and where the inhabitant of the cage would stay until that was done and the cage reassembled.

4) How much it would cost to have Squeaker's old cage shipped from Pennsylvania, and if it would just be easier to do that than to deal with Frodo's current cage.

5) If my insurance would be at all helpful for a tonsillectomy.

6) If constant dull tonsil irritation outweighs the inconvenience and cost of tonsil surgery (the laser kind, not the cutting kind).

7) How much I should counter the owner's counter on the house I put an offer on last Tuesday. (Or his three counters, each lower than the last, that have come as I have been thinking about it.)

8) If anybody else besides me is planning to do laundry on a Saturday morning. (And now I should go so I can get there before other people. Something I won't have to do when I have a house.)

Introducing Mr. Frods

This is Frodo, often known as Mr. Frods.

He was my dad's bird. Technically, of course, he belonged to both parents, but pretty much ever since his cagemate died over ten years ago, he bonded with my dad.

Dad would get him out and sit with him while watching TV, or take a walk around the property with him, or play tug-of-war with him with a pair of old socks. Frodo bit through more than one button on Dad's casual shirts, and bit through skin a few times, too.

Mom doesn't get along with Frods so well. She was talking for a while about getting rid of him, finding him a nice place with somebody who would pay more attention to him.

Every time she did, it felt like she was talking about giving away a piece of my dad. And I feel I've lost more than enough of him. So once this plan to buy a house became more solid in my mind, I decided I would take his bird with me when I moved.

I started spending more time with Frodo, talking to him while he was in his cage and sitting with him after tricking him off Mom's hand. Once I took him over to the refrigerator to show him the picture of him with Dad, and he started moving up and down excitedly. Even after a year, he still got hyper seeing his old friend.

There was one thing I was curious about. Would I be able to get him up off the floor in the middle of his playtime? To test this, we let him down on the ground for the first time in months. He went running straight to my parents' room, where he usually played, and stopped in front of the closet, out of which Dad had sometimes come to surprise him. He waited for a bit, but nothing happened.

He walked down to the bathroom, stopping to say, "Hi, Frods!" to his reflection in the hall mirror a few times. He turned the corner into the darkened bathroom, and Mom and I heard him start talking to himself under his breath.

Frodo has done this for years, this muttering that seemed ALMOST like words. We've never been able to figure it out.

We heard the click of nails against tile as he climbed onto the step of the shower.

"Hi, Frodo," he said quietly. "Hi, Frods." And he started his mumbling, which echoed in the enclosed space.

As I sat there listening, I thought I must be hearing things. But when I made eye contact with my mom, she looked startled, too, and she said what I'd been thinking: "He sounds like your dad!"

All this time, he has been trying to copy the voice of his favorite person. (We should have known earlier. My dad was always mumbly.) It was still indistinct, still like hearing Dad from across the house...but it was like hearing him.

This past visit, we let him go talk into the shower again, because the sound is enhanced in there, and we tried to pick out phrases. This time, I caught a few.

"Frodo. We're gonna go outside, Frodo. We're gonna go outside."

"What's in here? What's in here, Frods? What's in there?"

My dad used to say those things to him.

No way this bird ever leaves the family now.

Are There House Yentas?

After ten years of renting and mounting frustration with the apartment complex staff, who increasingly remind me of Dolores Umbridge, I am in the market to purchase a house. I've done a little looking around on GRAR.com, but am overwhelmed by options. And nothing jumps out at me. No house has been love at first sight (except maybe the one that turned out to be on the corner of a busy street...alas).

I want a real estate search site like eHarmony. I can't stand the thought of the latter in general, but I could go for the real estate version.

"Crazy bird lady seeking home for future years/decades. Nice neighborhood, off main roads, within 15 minute radius of both work and church, and with adequate driveway and street parking. As much brick and/or character as possible. House cannot smell like mildew, mold, smoke, or cats. Need good plumbing, insulation, and HVAC, basement should be dry as possible, if not dry AND finished. Prefer attached garage, neutral decor, few needed repairs, limited use of tile in bathrooms, no sliding doors or deck (may be willing to consider houses outside these preferences). May consider condominium if the price is right and the parking/neighborhood/insulation criteria are met (house will be home to two crazy birds as well as the crazy bird lady). Please send pictures with your response, as well as compelling arguments for why she should choose you."

Failing eHousemony (which doesn't even make sense), I would accept any recommendations from local house yentas.

Young people can't decide these things for themselves.

Recharging

I once read that the main difference between an extrovert and an introvert wasn't in how they related to people, but in how they recharge: extroverts feel energized by company, introverts by solitude. I enjoy people, and have a lot of great friends I want to see, but every once in a while it is nice to have an evening or a whole day completely to myself.

It is also nice to have time to myself because when I am at work or church or out socializing there is nobody cleaning my apartment or doing my ironing or dishes or reading the books I want to read or writing or anything. And physical disorder eventually catches up with me and adds to mental disorder.

Today was a nice long Saturday with nothing in it.

I woke up at 8:00, thought "I can sleep a bit more," and woke up again at 9:30. I finished reading a book and by 10:30 had started moving. There were three straight hours of accomplishment, followed by a few hours of more reading, and then a few more hours of accomplishment, and no computer until after 6:00. (Much more relaxing that way...why don't I leave the computer off for longer periods of time?)

So it was a good day, but it's been a sad day, too. I really wanted to call my dad and tell him how much I'd gotten done in those first three hours, hear him say something like, "Well, don't just keep yammering to me, you have 8 more hours to accomplish things before you have to go to bed." And then I went to take some trash out, and it was a nice day so I walked to a dumpster one building over from the one I usually go to, and I had been thinking about also taking a walk out to the recycling, but just the extra walking-for-the-sake-of-walking made me miss him so much that I didn't do it. (Walking often makes me sad now because I think about how great it used to be to go walking with him. He probably wouldn't like that.)

And now I'm going to turn off my computer again and get back to...whatever else I feel like doing around here. Lovely.

Even with the sad parts, I wish I had more days like this.

Endless is not pointless

It's been three months since my last post.

Writing is difficult. It seems both momentously weighty and vastly less important, somehow, since last June. My heart is full, and the field is crowded. Everybody with anything to say, or nothing to say, has a forum in which to say it. Other people write better than I do, and more frequently (or at least as well as and as often), and what is the point of adding my words to the towering stack when there is so much to be done in life and so little time to do it?

That's how I feel about a lot of things, lately. So much to be done...so little time...what's the point in doing them? Which things are important? If I die as suddenly as my father died, or my cousin, or countless others, what will be the things I should have done?

Realistically, I know I can't figure that out. But maybe a desire to do something factors in there, and when I'm not writing something, I don't feel right. No matter if it's been said before, no matter if nobody reads it except for me, I miss it when I'm not writing.

("The writing of many books is endless," the Preacher pointed out in Ecclesiastes 12:12. But he wrote it anyway.)

"I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep."--Charlotte Bronte

You know That Person who always has drama going in her life, who always has a set of stories that are irritating because they make you feel like she doesn't care about whatever you want to complain about, or because it seems like she's just trying to pull sympathy out of everybody around her? I'm kind of afraid I'm in danger of turning into That Person.

My dad died a little over 11 months ago, and although nobody's told me that I should be over it by now, I feel like there must be something a little boring about somebody whose honest answer to "How are you" hasn't been "everything is going great" for a while. Maybe there isn't. Maybe I just miss being able to say it.

I don't know if I haven't read enough grief books to come across this, or if this is actually a weird thing, but I'm tired of it. Grieving. Let's be done. I feel like the way it should work is that on the anniversary of my dad going into the hospital and our lives changing forever...he comes back. That's how it should work. Way to stick it out for a year, everybody! Back to normal!

Or if that doesn't work, at least grieving should be uncomplicated. One thing at a time. No dragging up memories of past losses. No adding losses or adding complications. I wanted a year off from everything, and what I got was a year of "Suzanne, you are not in control." Of anything, on the most basic level, and especially not of hearts.

I couldn't keep my dad's heart beating.

I couldn't change the hearts of the young kids in my school.

I couldn't keep my own heart on track.

In fact, right about now my heart feels like it's been turned upside down and shaken for a year. I feel empty. I have nothing to give anybody.

And I know that if I'm empty it is a great opportunity to be filled with the fullness of God. I know it will be good. I am not excited about it now, but I know it will be exciting and beautiful, and I strain against my present feelings into the overarching reality of that knowing. (Hope is a thing with battle scars.)

I don't believe in Christ because He makes my life fluffy and simple. "How hard could it be?" Pastor Dale asked of following Christ, and answered his own question: "It's as hard as dying--and if you think that can't be true, you haven't tried it."

I believe that His dying, and this dying of ours that follows, is the only way to what it really means to live. (I want to be that Person.)

Sobering Reminders and Thrilling Promises

I was thinking about Ezekiel 33:11 today, after I read of so many people excited about the death of Osama Bin Laden. (This is not really going to be a post about the pros and cons of a standing army, or the war on terror, or whether or not it is ever okay to be glad about a military victory. This is a post inspired by the verse that popped into my head after reading the news.) Since I didn't know it was Ezekiel 33:11, and just remembered part of it, I looked up the passage this evening.

I saw that it contained more than a statement of truth about the heart of God--there are some sobering reminders to people who claim to follow Him, and some thrilling promises to those who turn to Him, no matter what they've done.

I was going to post the verse, but found I couldn't post anything less than Ezekiel 33:10-20. (I've bolded some of my favorite bits, but I love it all.) The speaker in this passage is God, addressing the prophet for whom the book is named.

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Now as for you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, 'Thus you have spoken, saying, "Surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we are rotting away in them; how then can we survive?"

Say to them, 'As I live!' declares the Lord GOD, 'I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways! Why then will you die, O house of Israel?'

And you, son of man, say to your fellow citizens, 'The righteousness of a righteous man will not deliver him in the day of his transgression, and as for the wickedness of the wicked, he will not stumble because of it in the day when he turns from his wickedness; whereas a righteous man will not be able to live by his righteousness on the day when he commits sin.'

When I say to the righteous he will surely live, and he so trusts in his righteousness that he commits iniquity, none of his righteous deeds will be remembered; but in that same iniquity of his which he has committed he will die. But when I say to the wicked, 'You will surely die,' and he turns from his sin and practices justice and righteousness, if a wicked man restores a pledge, pays back what he has taken by robbery, walks by the statutes which ensure life without committing iniquity, he shall surely live; he shall not die. None of his sins that he has committed will be remembered against him. He has practiced justice and righteousness; he shall surely live.

Yet your fellow citizens say, 'The way of the Lord is not right,' when it is their own way that is not right.

When the righteous turns from his righteousness and commits iniquity, then he shall die in it. But when the wicked turns from his wickedness and practices justice and righteousness, he will live by them.

Yet you say, 'The way of the Lord is not right.' O house of Israel, I will judge each of you according to his ways.

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I want to meet people in heaven who used to be like Osama Bin Laden--people who hated Jesus Christ passionately, and perhaps persecuted His people just as passionately, but who turned from enemies into family. (Besides the one I know is there, whose name is Paul.)

"We were wretched excuses for human beings," they will say. "We squandered so many opportunities to do good. We are utterly amazed at the undeserved grace and power of our amazing God."

"Me, too," I'll say.

To all of it.

What Will Be, Is Now

Nobody called it Good Friday that day, of course. That day was the worst day ever. Many of them had spent three years as this man's constant companions. At least one had known him his whole life. That day they watched him, their friend and son and teacher, the man who they were hoping was going to be the redeemer of Israel...die. Horribly. They listened to his enemies mock him, heard his cries of anguish, saw the pain on his face and were not able to do anything. Anything but stay there with him. (They probably didn't think until later about how much had already changed since Gethsemane.)

The holy week calendar just calls the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday "Holy Saturday." To them, it must have been Blank Saturday. Or maybe "What now?" Saturday. It was the Sabbath, so they gathered together, and they rested, but the excitement and promise and life were gone. God only knew where they would go from here.

He did know. He had even told them this was coming. When Jesus appeared on the road to Emmaus, he laid the whole story out for them, and they must have felt like the fools he called them when they realized they'd just spent three days mourning when they should have been waiting with bated breath in expectation of the great things to come.

The fact that Good Friday once felt like the most soul-crushing, dream-dashing day ever bodes well for all of our bad days from here on out. The fact that Holy Saturday was a confusing blank frees us from having to know exactly how God is going to act, because the main thing is that he's going to act.

Offer your pain and your frustration and your confusion as a sacrifice to God, and rejoice even when it feels like you're being burned with the sacrifice. Because Easter Sunday is a fact, too.

Christ the Son of God rose from the grave in triumph over death, to lead those held captive to the fear of death out of that prison (don't cling to the prison instead of the person). He fulfilled the promises entrusted to the prophets, proving that God is trustworthy. The promises entrusted to the apostles built on those of the prophets, and all point to the fact that God is active in this world, and that horrible things precede things so glorious that they transform the ugliest past into something beautiful. Do you believe this?

Faith is looking at the world that is now through the filter of the world that is promised.

"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us."--Romans 8:18