Swing Lessons

At swing dancing a few weeks ago, the following thoughts chased each other in circles:

1) Everybody here is a better dancer than I am, on account of which nobody should pick me to dance with.

2) Almost everybody here is younger and prettier than I am, on account of which nobody should pick me to dance with.

"Do you want to dance?" someone asked.

"I do, but it's my first time here and I know nothing, so you should probably pick somebody else."

He graciously persisted and walked me through the basics, but my response has been rattling around in my head since then: "You should probably pick somebody else." It isn't the only time I have used it, it's just the only time I have used it out loud.

Other job candidates besides me? You should probably pick somebody else.

Other women interested in you? You should probably pick somebody else.

Other options open besides the one I had to offer? You should probably pick one from somebody else.

I'm not going to know the steps. I'm going to trip up. I'm not going to be able to read your mind, or to follow your lead. I'm not going to avoid disappointing you unless I avoid it up front by cutting off your opportunity to be disappointed. You should probably pick somebody else.

"At least I am more interesting than the pretty girls," I realized I was consoling myself, which was grossly unfair to women who might well be kindred spirits beneath all of their good looks. I know a lot of beautiful women who are thoughtful and kind and nerdy.

I can't help my age or my basic level of attractiveness. But I can learn to let myself be caught when I trip up, to laugh my mistakes off, to believe people mean it when they ask me to join them, to value the strengths of others without devaluing my own, to put my heart and soul into the mess of the dance that is life.

(Maybe I'll take those lessons back to the swing dance floor, too.)

Singing for Christmas

Last Christmas, I had been excited about my brother and his family visiting my church, and introducing these special people to a lot of special people at Harvest. Then there was a lot of illness in the family; and *then* my power went out that Sunday and we had to pack up four adults, two kids under the age of two, and three tropical birds to go to a hotel with heat. 

That night, I went to church alone and sat in the back row, wrestling with the disappointment and fighting to drop frustration that God would let me get that excited about something that wasn't going to happen. That year, I stood in the back, singing the Hallelujah Chorus without joining everyone in the front, praising through the ruin of my own plans.

Tonight I sang in the choir for the first half of the service, and when we sang the Hallelujah Chorus at the end my sister-in-law and my niece joined me up front, and we sung together (my niece just clinging to her mom, but present), and I missed a few notes in the confusion and the joy. In thinking of the imperfections, I thought also of my niece's words when I came to join them the first time the choir sat down. 

"Thank you for singing," she said.

In the end, the love of your audience covers the feebleness of your efforts. I am thankful, this Christmas, to have been forgiven much, and loved even beyond that.

Past, Present, Future

As someone who has always moved into the future with a deep ache over the loss of the past (and I do mean always--I distinctly recall being eight years old and crying over a book at which a character had to move from one country to another), I am extremely comforted that God constantly introduces Himself in reference to past events, that His covenant name is "I AM," that He repeats over and over that He is a God who remembers.

God is not only already in the future, God is still in the past, just as sure as He is here now, constant from age to age, holding all of my days in His hands. And nothing He holds can be lost forever.

Small Things

I don't know if this is common for lots of people, but many times, Sundays are my days to get attacked by anxiety about the week ahead. This Sunday was also the very first day of Sunday School for the new year, and since teachers don't always get completely over the "Will they like me? Will they listen to me? Will I be useful to them?" fears, it was especially good to have these three things today:

1) A teacher commissioning service in which the pastor reminded us that the power behind our teaching is not us, and asked people to remember to pray for us throughout the year.

2) A student from last year who said, "I wish you were still my teacher." 

3) A group this year that included three boys who chose to sit in the front row (5th grade boys in the front is a big deal, guys), and two from the back who stayed to put away chairs without even being asked.

Small kindnesses can be turned as arrows into the beast of someone else's anxiety. (On this spiritual battleground we live on, tell your kids they are warriors, even now.)

Counseling

Sometimes I wonder what I would have wanted to be when I grew up if I hadn't wasted imagination on a hypothetical marriage. (At this stage of my life, I do not regret the marriage-that-might-have-been, but I do regret putting myself in a holding pattern waiting for what a Calvin professor once called "the prince in pink tights.")

Lately, I've been thinking about counseling, about how I have family in the field and how many people are hurting and how many counselors in my area are men and.... Well, I am sure there are many, many wise men who do not say things like I was told in my one and only counseling appointment I went to, back when I was in the middle of a depression--something along the lines of "I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you're a beautiful woman, and you might try wearing a little make-up because that makes a big difference to a woman." (Actually, I DO mind, I'm just not saying anything because I'm in shock that you as a counselor have never had any training on how thin the line is between compliments and sexual harassment when you're talking to an emotionally vulnerable person behind closed doors.)

Today the Harvest secretary sent out a link to a counseling certification program that opens in mid-September, and it takes a full year and it would be another evening out of my already crazy busy schedule and the year has been So Full and what would I do with a certification, anyway, really, and by no means do I have it all together myself, and....

I still find myself intrigued.

Acronym Epiphany

It has been a bit of a rough year. This week, I was talking to somebody about fear and anxiety, and what "I am" statements I could use to counteract them. I realized that "God is" statements were effective only if I applied them, owned them for myself, and so I came up with these:

1) I am safe.

2) I am useful.

3) I am protected.

4) I am loved.

That night, I had a highly detailed anxiety dream, mostly centered around me having to give a presentation shortly and realizing that I was still wearing my pajamas and was too far from home to go change. My mom and I rushed to a store to find something, and found several things in my color range. But then, when I went to try them on, I looked in the mirror and what I was wearing already looked more professional. I was already more prepared than I had realized.

Which made five:

5) I am prepared.

Being the word nerd that I am, I quickly realized that I could remember all of these with an anagram:

SUPPLe

Now, that is a word that I haven't used much (or at all) due to finding it vaguely creepifying, so I looked it up to see what exactly it meant. 

As an adjective, the first set of definitions (courtesy of merriam-webster.com) were:

A. Compliant, often to the point of obsequiousness
B. Readily adaptable or responsive to new situations

Riiiight. 

Then I read further. "Supple" is also a verb that can mean to make peaceful, to calm and heal, to make flexible.

Behind all of my "I am" statements is the I AM, and He keeps me safe, useful, protected, prepared, and loved.

Eternally.

Call and Response

Jesus tells a parable about a man checking in on his property by sending representatives, all of whom the tenants abuse in various ways (some are even killed). When the owner sends his son to them, the tenants kill him, too. 

I have read this parable a lot, but I have not really noticed this part before (Luke 20:15-16): "What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” When they heard this, they said, “Surely not!”"

That cry of "surely not" is chilling, because it shows that the people who heard the parable knew what it meant. They knew it was telling them not to trust their ethnic heritage to keep them in the land of promise and in favor with God. Paul would write later that "not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel" (Rom. 9:6).

"Surely not" implies that the owner does not have the right to administer his land as he sees fit, that everything is just fine, that rumors of the need for repentance have been greatly exaggerated.

"Surely not" is the cry of someone who has already decided that the owner's wishes are not of primary importance.

Let those of us who claim the Name keep a close eye on our gut reactions to his words.

To Lose with Grace

The Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, as I got out of bed, a word came to me: loss. Loss, I thought, is the theme for this new year (my theme years do not follow calendar restraints). It was a disconcerting word, but there it was, and it did seem to follow naturally from last year's theme of fighting fear, which turned out to involve accepting, if not straight out embracing, sacrifice in various forms (the theme is not mastered before it changes). I extrapolated from the single word "loss" to land on the theme as the processing of loss, beyond merely the actual experience of it.

Through the course of the day, lyrics and lines on loss popcorned into my head:

And you will see before the end
That every broken piece
Is gathered in the heart of Jesus
And what's lost will be found again
--from the song "Nothing Is Wasted," by Jason Gray 

Many things can be misplaced
Your very memories be erased
No matter what the time or space
You cannot lose my love
--from the song "You Cannot Lose My Love," by Sara Groves 

"Even these may forget, but I will not forget you."
--Isaiah 49:15a

I remembered a scene from a record we used to listen to as kids, called Nathaniel the Grublet, in which Nathaniel has found himself in the dark forest of Direwood and is beginning to turn "see-throughish." A voice speaks out of the darkness and tells him that he has to lose himself in order to find himself.

And then that night was the Thanksgiving service at Harvest. People spoke of the increase in the love of God that comes with a conviction of sin in a specific sense; of the C.S. Lewis contention that friendship is enriched when friends are not hoarded to ourselves; of the truth that God meets us in places we didn't expect to be, and blesses us there in ways we would not have imagined. Pastor Dale preached on "Greed Vs. Gratitude," that a spirit of thankfulness pushes out greed.

I needed to hear those things, all of them, and in hearing them on the same day as the word "loss," I felt armed against the coming year.

But "life comes in waves and makes its demands" (another Sara Groves line), and I have never been good at holding loosely. I have counted days like beads on a strand leading to inevitable ends, and I have grown harsh and bitter as each bead passes under my fingers. I feel it as probably my greatest thorn in the flesh, one I have often prayed to be taken away. If God's power is perfected in weakness, I don't understand why it seems like I am allowed to cycle through the same angrily self-protective patterns over and over again. (That doesn't seem like my idea of power perfected. Can grace really be sufficient when you don't see it accomplishing anything?) And then when people leave, for whatever reason, I am often sure it is because I didn't learn the right lesson first.

I don't believe this will change. I want to. I try to. But really I don't, really I see myself over and over and over both mourning and getting angry at being left out and left behind. I see myself thrown on that crazy idea of the sufficiency of grace.

"It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not" (Lamentations 3:22).

No matter how much loss there is ahead, no matter if I still respond all too frequently to real or potential loss by lashing out with protective and/or preemptive strikes, no matter if it feels like my heart is blazing destructively. In the midst of the burning, He is walking with me.

This morning, in looking up the reference for a God who doesn't abandon us, I saw that the author of Hebrews grounds contentment in this promise: "be content with what you have, for He has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you'" (Hebrews 13:5b). It is, in fact, the same reason Moses gives for the Israelites not to be afraid: "Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6). 

Not "never until you give Him a reason," or "never until He finds someone more interesting/attractive/worthy," or "never until..." anything. Just...never.

This is my manifesto, written that Thanksgiving week so that I could recall it:

I will not brace myself against all forms of loss. 

I will not hold tightly to people in expectation that they will leave me or be taken from me at any second and with the false notion that it is only up to me if they stay. 

As people leave or are taken (because it happens), I will remember that this is not the story of my life only, and that it is not for the character to rail against the story the author is writing. 

I will remember that paths may cross more than once. 

I will consider that while the future holds many losses, there is also much to be gained, and that some gains would not be possible had there not been losses first. 

I will not negatively anticipate my future, assuming the worst and living as though it has already happened. 

I will be grateful for the time I have been given, and make the most of it. 

I will count all things as loss compared to the surpassing gain of Christ. 

I will not be surprised by trials, nor will I be surprised when the plan of God includes gifts along with trials.

Help me to remember.

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.