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.

A Scene from School

"Are you always here?" he asks. It's 2:00 p.m. and school has been out for all of six minutes.

"I'm here a lot," I respond.

"It seems like you're here all the time," he says, his eyes flicking from the desk to the filing cabinet to the bulletin board, taking it all in with frank curiosity. "Are you the school secretary?"

"I am."

"For all the schools?"

I don't know what this question means, so I phrase my answer carefully, telling him I'm the secretary for three of the four buildings on campus.

"It just seems like you're a different secretary," he says, and I only have an instant to wonder what this means because he elaborates. "Most school secretaries are gone as soon as school is out and the kids are gone."

His range of experience with school secretaries may well be broad, but then he may never have been in the building after school let out himself. It could easily go either way as a teenager, his perception of school secretaries formed from knowledge or imagination.

I'm without a response, so I laugh, one of those appreciative gestures that doesn't mean "you're funny" as much as "you're making me happy."

"That's okay, though," he says, giving me permission to stay late if I want to do so. "You're a hard worker. That's a good thing."

Four months into school and this is the first conversation we've had, he and I, and it might be the last, but in two minutes on a Wednesday afternoon in January he connected himself to the name I type into my forms. I laugh again, and say "Thank you" (which is redundant), and am glad for those two minutes.

I love this job.

I Dreamed a Dream

Last night I had to step away from a teacher from where I work because Ben Linus needed me to do a favor for him. He had a cardboard box that he wanted me to return to a shelf in a warehouse. I kept watching my co-worker to make sure she wasn't paying attention because I didn't think she would understand why I was talking to him. She would probably take it the wrong way and think I was a traitor or something.

I was torn, because he was looking incredibly sincere and when Ben does that he's usually lying to you, but then again I'm about the biggest Ben fan ever and you never know when he's actually asking you to do something for a really good reason. Just because he's cried wolf a hundred times doesn't mean that the box wasn't perfectly innocuous and just needed to be reshelved, right? But then, why wouldn't he do it himself?

He could sense my hesitation and was becoming even more urgent and sincere in his arguments, which was making me more sure that I did not want to go along with this plan, and I was trying to figure out a way to say, "I don't think I trust you at this moment" without hurting his feelings too much.

And then my alarm went off. So I'm not sure how it ends. Awwww, man....

And...and...and....

I will put My laws into their minds,
And I will write them on their hearts.
And I will be their God,
And they shall be My people.
And they shall not teach everyone his fellow citizen,
And everyone his brother, saying, "Know the Lord,"
For all will know Me,
From the least to the greatest of them.
For I will be merciful to their iniquities,
And I will remember their sins no more.
~~ Hebrews 8:10b-12 ~~


I'm sure there's an official term for it, the repetitive "and" device, but I don't know what that official term is. As far as literary devices go, it's one of my favorites. I love the sense of build, of heightening emotion. I love how it moves you, spiraling and avalanching towards a climactic finish. In the above words from Hebrews, I love the way it resonates with the unshakable promises of God.

The passage came to mind tonight as I read yet another story about how tax dollars may soon be used to finance the killing of unwanted children. I have been wondering about how tax revenues have been put to use over the ages, doubting that the Christians in the Roman Empire (or in most modern-day countries in the world, for that matter) approved of how "their tax dollars" were distributed. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the government out of charity and healthcare and see private citizens neighboring up and opening their wallets to their churches and their acquaintances and to all those in need to the point that organizations have to ask people to stop bringing money.

What I'd love to see more is that level of neighboring up even under a government that is bound to continue raising taxes due to an ever-increasing, ever-more-bi-partisan poor sense of fiscal responsibility in general. To see a call for more federal funding of abortions disappear because the desire to obtain them disappears; to see orphanages and other childcare institutions shut down because people have opened their homes; to see mothers and fathers of children they can't handle cared for and mentored; to see God's people shining as stars out of a darkness that cannot overpower them.

And we have His laws in our hearts,
And He is ours,
And we are His,
And He has been merciful,
And He remembers our sins no more,
And nothing can separate us from His love,
And no trials or earthly treasures can endure eternally,
And no person is too far gone for His healing touch.

Campaign all you want, politicians. Rail all you want, demagogues. Tax us and fine us and even imprison us, if you want. The position of King of the Universe has been filled since before the beginning of time and will be filled beyond its end.

And there is nothing, nothing, nothing impossible with God.

Early New Year Reflections

I know, I know. It isn't even Christmas. But as I worked my last day until January (the day after an auditor told me I should get a raise, the audit went so well...we actually have "good audit" in writing from them), I found myself reflecting on how much has happened over the past year.

A year ago, I had already mostly worked my way out of a job. I was going into the office and searching for things to keep myself busy, waiting to be laid off because obviously there wasn't enough for me to do anymore. Friday I had the first calm day I had in ages, and I worked an 11-hour day this week that was followed by a day when I arrived at about 6:15 (less than 12 hours after I'd left work). And you know what? It's so much better than not having enough to do.

Right now I have the best job I've ever had, and it came after I gave up. After I'd asked God to give me an attitude of service, a love of serving Him that surpassed any drudgery of the task. After I'd found myself in the middle of an interview that was going nowhere and so I just slipped into behaving naturally. After all of this, the people from the "going nowhere" interview hired me for a job that uses my skills at an organization that works to make a difference in the lives of troubled kids. It's been quite a ride.

There were five months of unemployment between those extremes in the middle of the year, months of uncertainty and of relaxation at the same time. Months in which I spent lots of time visiting with my parents (including a trip to Flagstaff), and lots of time with my friends who stayed home during the day. The latter was time that became increasingly precious retroactively, when on my first day back at work I learned that some dear friends would be moving to Missouri.

It's been a year of relational change. Aside from having friends move, I've grown lots closer to my sister-in-law; I've had a friend stop talking to me; I've reconnected with a friend from the past; I've formed maternal-sort-bonding attachments with a new set of first graders and with a teenage boy who says "Hi" every time he sees me since the day he carried a box into my office for me.

For the past few years I've found myself asking God to hone me in particular ways. Somehow this year became dedicated to increasing vulnerability, a time to stop hiding and let God be the one to protect me. And as this has happened I've realized that it is less painful to hurt while trusting God than to hurt while relying heavily on yourself. It is less painful to admit to missing people and leaving that out there even if the sentiment goes unreturned than it is to pretend you don't care at all and letting that pent-up emotion build to volcanic levels. It is freeing and calming to be honest with yourself about what you want and don't want. (Funny thing about telling the truth, to myself and others...it doesn't make me angry.)

It is marvelous to rest in the knowledge that God is shaping you more and more into the person He wants you to be, to be comfortable in your own skin because you know He is at work in all of you.

I feel stronger than I ever did with my guard up. I am quicker to give people another chance. I believe that His ways are right no matter what happens, and that not even the slightest twinge of discomfort is wasted. "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own."--Philippians 3:12

I look forward to seeing what is coming next year.

Perspective on an Audit

This week Thursday is the first audit I'll be part of at the school where I work. Two people from the local district office will be coming to make sure our records are in order. I've been sort of panicking about this off and on since September.

The worst part is not knowing what to expect. The rule book is labyrinthine and can be changed at the whim of any given district auditor. The school situation has changed since last year, so the rules that applied to the women who went through it then may not exactly apply in the same way to me.

Towards the end of his first epistle, the apostle John makes the startling and confusing declaration that God's commandments are not burdensome. I've often wondered how you could say that commands like "love your enemy" aren't burdensome, and it hasn't seemed like enough of an answer to say that it's because Jesus frees us and the Holy Spirit equips us to live in accordance with the will of God. (Though those are certainly amazingly large parts of the answer.)

This week, thinking about the audit, thinking about the rules that keep changing and the subjectivity of the auditor, it hit me that for an unchanging being to lay out commands in writing, with no secrets or loopholes, is a tremendous act of love. God is never going to change the rules. God is never going to show up cranky to work. God is constant, and it is His constancy that makes Him so knowable.

And then today in Sunday School we did a review of the book of Genesis. This morning we pointed out that Genesis isn't a collection of unconnected stories any more than the Bible is a collection of unconnected books. "The Bible is a lot of books, but it's also one book," as one of the girls succinctly put it.

God's promise threads all the way through Scripture. The best part? The book has been finished, but the story isn't over. God's promise threads through countless characters who have come before us and will reach to countless characters after us as our threads overlap and dance and become something increasingly beautiful in a world where the devil's sharpest swords cannot sever these threads that tie us to the Christ who came and is coming.

When we read of epic quests or fairy tales, there are things we know. We know that the evil emperor has to die, that his followers will be scattered. We know the prince will always come for his bride-to-be, that there will be rejoicing and celebration when it happens. We know because they are shadows of the larger tale, whose author has given us the biggest, most magnificent, most welcome spoilers ever.

And in this larger-than-you-and-me story, an audit is coming this Thursday to a small school in Grand Rapids.

It is well with my soul.

When I am afraid,

I will put my trust in You.

In God, whose word I praise,

In God I have put my trust;

I shall not be afraid

What can mere man do to me?

~~ Psalm 56:3-4

Walls

Last night I went to a presentation on a friend's recent trip to Berlin. He and his wife had lived there for over a year while he was stationed in Germany, and he returned as part of an almost-all-expense-paid trip honoring the U.S. servicemen whose presence helped to protect West Berlin from being overrun by the Communists on the other side of the Wall that divided the city in half.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is probably my earliest memory as far as global news is concerned. I remember hearing about people who had tried to come over the Wall from East Berlin and had been killed for their troubles. I had believed, with what I've sometimes seen as a 10-year-old's naivete but now recognize as the general shortsightedness of humanity, that the horrible fact of the wall was inevitable, almost eternal. The evil that had been would always be, or else might become worse. And then suddenly one day it was gone. (The long-boiling things always seem so sudden, so remarkable, when they happen.)

What strikes me after last night's presentation is the same thought that haunted me after seeing The Pianist, a film featuring a man who was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, an area of the city bricked off from the rest that could be entered or exited under only strict military supervision.

People on the other side of those walls watched them go up. Watched as strands of barbed wire tore their city in half and as that barbed wire was replaced by concrete barriers. Watched as a whole group of people were bricked away. Walked by those walls every day, walls behind which their former neighbors were sealed.

People being shut off from the free world watched, too. Watched by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions. In The Pianist, a Jew waiting to board a German train muses, far too late, over the number of Jews in Poland and the question of why they couldn't fight.

It's chilling. And I wonder what people will say about us, fifty or sixty years from now. I wonder if there are any walls going up, right before our eyes, while we keep to ourselves and mind our own business and maybe toss up a few prayers and stay comfortable and safe.

Dear God, keep us awake and unafraid.

Because why?

"The Bible makes this clear. Be as loving as you can, as often as you can, for as many people as you can, for as long as you live. Why should we do this? Because."--Kate Braestrup

Tell any six-year-old child that she should do something "because" and odds are you'll get a response of "Because why?" Hey, tell this thirty-year-old woman, and odds are that even though I've learned to hold it back a little better, my brain still flashes to that question, too.

Why should I bother loving people? They betray me. They ignore me. Sometimes they just irritate me. "As loving as I can" could easily mean "as much as I can be reasonably expected to put up with somebody like this," right?

As often as I can? That makes it better. Because there are days I don't get a lot of sleep, or I have piles of stuff on my desk, or I'm running late, and it's hard to love people on those days, hard to love people who don't answer my emails or who are not driving with any sense of urgency. But if I only love people as often as I can, that excludes days like that.

For as many people as I can...now that takes care of the part where sometimes I run across people I don't like. Sweet. So now the Bible has made it clear that I should love the people I'm naturally inclined to as much as I feel up to whenever I feel like it. I can handle that.

Uncomfortably, the Bible makes it clearer than Braestrup says on...

...who we should love:

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might." (Deuteronomy 6:5)

"Love your neighbor as yourself." (Leviticus 19:18b)

"If someone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen." (I John 4:20a)

"Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:19)

"But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you." (Luke 6:26-28)

...when we should love:

"A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." (Proverbs 17:17)

...how we should love:

"Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." (I Corinthians 13:4-7)

And those passages are just from the highlight reel.

God asks a lot more from us than our best effort. He asks for perfection. (Loving at all times? Bearing all things? Enduring all things?) He also sent perfection, in the person of Jesus Christ: "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (I John 4:10)

And He sent a promise: "Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world." (I John 4:15-17)

And He sent a because: "We love, because He first loved us." (I John 4:19)

Queen of Geeks, Nerds, and Dorks (or at least their co-regent)

As a proud card-carrying geeky/nerdy/dorky type (I use all three terms semi-interchangeably), I find myself getting huffy over the presentation of geeks/nerds/dorks in the media. Here's a classic case in point.

I watched 17 Again this week. This is one of those movies that I sense violates my image in some way, and I once told myself I'd never watch anything with Zac Efron in it, but it turns out I really liked the movie despite everything, and was quite impressed with Efron's channeling of Matthew Perry, and that's the end of my apologetic.

In the movie, there are a few characters who are really into The Lord of the Rings, and they have a scene in which they are speaking the language of the elves, and the subtitle for one of the lines came up as, "So where did you learn to speak Elf?" and my immediate reaction was "Elvish!" Then later the man says he wants the woman by his side when he storms the elvish castle of [insert unintelligible name here] and my reaction was, "That doesn't sound familiar at all! That's not in Tolkien! Good grief, do your research, or make it more obvious you're going trans-genre! Or, wait, is this in reference to something in The Simarillon?"

Sometimes I think "awwww, you're such a dork" at myself. That's how serious the state of things is.

Carry me

Somewhere along the line I embraced the idea that it's weak to need anything, especially anything you can't get on your own. People who need people aren't trying hard enough. Nobody wants to do you any favors, so nobody wants you to ask. You die alone, so you should live alone, stand alone except for God who sort of doesn't exactly count because you can't see Him, don't have to look into His eyes to say you need Him.

Maybe this is one of the many reasons God made more than one person, because maybe it takes more courage to ask for help than it does to forge ahead by yourself, more self-awareness to admit confusion and fear and loneliness than it does to sit in the dark alone, more humility to say I need you to another person than it takes, sometimes, to say it to God.

Maybe telling people how you're feeling, asking them to help you, reminds you that God is outside of you, too, not just your personal internal cheerleader but something better, because we want something more than feeling loved by the internal, we want a sacrificial love from outside even when we're too afraid to ask for it.

I have been having a rough couple of months. Good months, overall, but there are ways in which they've been hard, and I crashed hard this past week into illness and exhaustion, which is good for reminding me the world stays up even when my shoulders slump. As I'm rising through the physical exhaustion I'm swimming through a layer of emotional exhaustion, which is good for reminding me I'm not as self-sufficient as I try to be. (I need so many reminders of this.)

I know what I want you to say, and it's this: That God is faithful, and so are you, and that neither of you need me to be perfect and that the world goes along just fine even on the days when I need someone to hold me instead of the other way around.

If you could pray for wisdom and courage in the weeks ahead, I'd appreciate that, too.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows." -- Matthew 10:29-31

"It is vain for you to rise up early,

To retire late,

To eat the bread of painful labors;

For He gives to His beloved even in his sleep."

-- Psalm 127:2

New Assignments

Our mistake, I've heard, is thinking life is meant to be a cruise ship. We set our deck chairs up and try to enjoy the view, but our casual chatting with friends about what we're having for dinner later keeps getting interrupted by loud rumblings and the sound of running feet. It's going to get more and more annoying, sitting there, but there is another option. We can stand up, turn around, and deal with the reality that the cruiser we're on is a battle cruiser; that we're crew members, not tourists; that we have bigger missions than relaxation.

Today I waved goodbye to a vehicle carrying a large chunk of my heart off towards Missouri. Last December my friend Eric was laid off from his job, and he finally got a new job out of state in August. For a few weeks now he's been coming up to Michigan every other weekend to visit his family--Jen and their two kids, Lucas and Katie. They haven't lived like a family in too long, and now they get to do that again. Just further away than before.

Jen is one of my sister-friends. We've shared a lot of life together, especially over this past year, when I was unemployed and would go visit several times a week. (It was a great time to be laid off. I can't think of a better year for that.) I know that this separation is harder because of the amount of time we spent together, but that makes it a good thing. As those of us left on the sidewalk when the car pulled away said, it would be worse if none of us were sad. What a waste of a couple of years it would have been, hanging out with people we wouldn't miss when they were gone.

I'm selfish about these things. I will miss being one of the favorite people in my little friend Lucas' life. I will miss not getting to see some of his sister Katie's first steps (or the very first ones). I will miss hours sitting on right-angled couches talking to Jen. I will miss watching Eric and Lucas throw grapes at each other in the back yard. All that stuff and more.

But the thing is, we're not tourists, they and I. We have a mission that extends beyond what we know, and the commanding officer reassigns as he sees fit. There will be people they need to meet in Missouri, and people who need to meet them. There are lives that haven't crossed yet that will become important to each other in ways we can't foresee. We'll still cross paths ourselves, and then someday our missions will all be completed and we'll be able to compare notes on how our little campaigns affected the broader field.

Part of my heart is with them, but it's only part of my heart, and the rest of me is still here. But all of God is with them, just like all of God is with me, just like all of God is with all of His people. And He loves them more than I do, which means an awful, awful lot.

Take care of my family for me, God. May we fulfill our duties honorably. Here, there, and wherever we go, may it be for and with you.

"I am with you always, even to the end of the age."

~~ Matthew 28:20b

Things I Say to You

Last week in Sunday School prayer request time a boy asked for prayer for his grandfather. "That's always your prayer request," another boy said, and I told him that sometimes we have prayers that we pray for a long time and it's okay, that God doesn't get sick of us.

Lots of times I find that when I'm explaining something about life to kids, I'm talking to myself, too. This is something I've been thinking about lately, this idea that my prayers are repetitive and God is maybe looking for something fresh and different from me.

Doesn't God get tired of it, I thought, me coming and asking Him for things, and so often the same things? "God, please give me patience. God, please redirect my heart. God, I'm sad today, I need comforting." Give, give, give, please, please, please, God.

And then I thought about my little buddy Lucas. He's three, and his vocabulary is expanding but still small. I hear a lot of the same things from him: "Zanne, watch racecars! Zanne, play with me! Zanne, come on!"

Do you know what I hear in that? "I want you to be with me, because I love you." That never gets old. I never get sick of it. I never want anything fresher than and different from it. Do you know why he asks me in the first place? Because I have made myself available for the asking, because I've welcomed it.

I'm going to keep coming, God, and I'm going to ask You a lot of the same things and tell you a lot of the same things, because You have made Yourself available and welcomed my words.

I want You to be with me, because I love You, because You loved me first.

Sarah & I

Sarah had at least heard the promises secondhand: a son, a future. Even secondhand promises were confusing, and she found herself second-guessing, coming up with a good plan that was a little bit self-sacrificial, foregoing her most cherished dream because that couldn't have really been what God wanted for her.

Do you know how long it took Sarah to panic and start working her own plans? At least ten years. Ten. Years.

It took me about three months to start panicking about my job.

Sure, you could say I haven't heard any divine promises, secondhand or otherwise, that the school attendance auditors won't come crashing down on us with the force of a mythological Fury; that all my preparations will bring us into complete compliance; that everything I love about this job won't be taken away because we don't get funding; that I won't be laid off before Thanksgiving.

But it's been three months. At most. Really, it's only been about a month and a half that I've known I'd be good at this, really good at it, and that I'd enjoy the job more than any job I've ever had. And look at me now, paying attention to the little voice whispering in my ear, "You knew it was too good to be true" and "You've got to start looking out for yourself."

Three months. That's ridiculous. I refuse to collapse in terror over this at three months, refuse to lash out at others for not doing their part to keep me employed, refuse to hate the auditors even if they reportedly hate me before we've even met, refuse to let go until I'm blessed. Again. And again.

I want to break the ten year mark on busting out my plans to save myself.

"Though I walk in the midst of trouble, You will revive me;
You will stretch forth Your hand against the wrath of my enemies,
And Your right hand will save me.
The Lord will accomplish what concerns me;
Your lovingkindness, O Lord, is everlasting;
Do not forsake the works of Your hands."
~~ Psalm 138:7-8

Conversations about husbands

The conversation often turns to husbands, being a subject of daily living for many and a point of curiosity for the rest of us. Stories are told and re-told of hesitant forays into interest and first dates, of engagements and weddings. We talk about in-laws and other tricky ground; of the having of children and the yearning for children; of the multiplication and division of problems. Some say their husbands were their first ever experience of mutual attraction; some that in certain ways their husbands surprised them, upsetting what they thought they wanted (“He just kept coming, and coming….” “He said ‘no’ to me and it was so attractive.”).

They are still fairly new to this, these wives, still nowhere near my mother’s thirty-three years, but they are fully committed to the vows they made to God and their husbands, and they are learning, and they are growing (so is their love). It draws me, pulls me to want to be part of that conversation in another way, and I leave feeling joyful because I have seen the Spirit’s blessing on these friends.

I know now what I resisted for years, fearing as I so often do the idea of being like everyone else: I’m a romantic at heart—hopeful, not hopeless, because the best love stories here point to the best love story of all, the one I’m part of no matter what.

After a season in which I struggled with the notion that God probably wanted me to have a series of miserable jobs ended with a job I enjoy, I can’t hold on to the even more ludicrous idea that He is after sending me a man who bores me, who can’t keep up with me, who finds me ridiculous (in the negative sense), who doesn’t want me as much as I want him, who makes the whole endeavor feel like a duty to slog through. It’s a notion that reminds me of my brother, once as relationally ascetic as I have been, pleasantly surprised and amazed to discover even the silly little side things he could have seen himself foregoing in a wife were present in the woman who is now my sister.

I’ve found, after an honest appraisal of self and God, I’m not angry anymore when the topic of singleness comes up. Marriage would be an awfully big adventure. Then again, I’m in an awfully big adventure already. (In all circumstances, to be content.)

What Not to Read

I've read a lot of fanfiction since I first started posting it online way back in 2002. I actually have written it for many years longer than that. For instance, some of my fondest childhood memories involve writing X-Files fanfiction with my brother, except we just called it "writing X-Files stories" because this was so long ago that shipping was known by its original term, relationshipping, and you can see why that got shortened, can't you? Anyway, ask to read one of those stories sometime when you want to be mind-numbingly bored (but don't ask for the Christmas one for boredom, because that one turned out hilarious).

The point is, I've been around. I can save you from a lot of atrocious fics (we fanfic types don't always have time for full words) by a handy reference guide to the most common warning signs.

Many of these warning signs can be found right in the summary:

• AU: Let's establish right now...in general, I don't do Alternate Universe. There are very rare exceptions, such as the time after Star Trek: Generations came out that I wrote a story (pre-fanfiction days then, too) about how Picard, having an infinite range of choices available to him, made the wrong one by coming out of the Nexus five minutes before things blow up. Unless I can see that it's a parody or a version of what should have happened when the writers of the actual book or show just completely dropped the ball (*cough*seasonfinaleofSmallville*cough*), I won't mess with AU.
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• OC: This stands for Original Character but often means Mary Sue, a fanfic term for a character who is the author's stand-in. She is usually shockingly beautiful and/or talented, has a strange name, and is irresistible to the male character the author thinks is the biggest hottie. (The male version is called the Gary Stu, but the ratio of Mary Sues to Gary Stus is approximately 100:1, which from what I've heard may be due to the fact that most men don't fantasize in writing.) Avoid the OC, especially if the summary says something like, "My OC Izabell and Remy LeBeau have their first date. Fluff!"
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• Bizarre pairing: Even those who don't write themselves into the story as an OC might have bizarre notions about who on the show or in the book is attracted to whom. In the Harry Potter fandom, for instance, just about every possible combination has been explored, not excepting animals. One of the most squicky (that's "icky," but in a nerdy fanfic way of saying it) pairings: Snape and Hermione. *shudder* Pairings are often represented with a slash mark (Van/Hitomi) or a combination name (Clois). Knowing your combination names can save you from reading fics you don't want to read, and be careful...despite the difference of only one letter in the summary, there is a big difference between Clex and Chlex.
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• Too many exclamation marks: If I read your summary and it looks like you OD'd ("overdosed," but you already knew that one) on caffeine before starting to write it, I will skip you so fast and nimbly that if you were a flat pebble you could cross the ocean.
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• Grammar and punctuation errors galore: See above, substitute "not caring" for "caffeine."
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• "My first ever": Why would you mention this unless you're hedging yourself for failure? And speaking of failure....
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• "I suck at summaries": Really? Now you've made me afraid that you suck at writing in general. You might as well just come out and say....
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• "Not very good": Dude, or more probably little 14-year-old girl, you have just flunked Salesmanship 101. I'm moving on.

Now, there are times the summary is deceptively interesting, or you are feeling charitable and think that maybe that author sucks at summaries on the outside but is Tolstoy on the inside (did Tolstoy write the copy for his book jackets? I submit that he did not).

Here, then, are the most common interior signs of a fic you can drop before finishing:

• Bolded words (yes, I see the irony, but this is a semi-comedic essay, not a fic): Italics are okay. Bolded words are over the top. And even italics should be used sparingly. If you don't wince a little when making the italics choice, you're probably taking it too lightly.
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• Excessive attention to detail: We're not talking descriptions of mountain ranges and ocean views, we're talking what the heroine is wearing and how cute she looks in it, or (worse) what color her eyes are as compared to a food. For instance, if "Suzanne's chocolate brown eyes darkened as she wondered whatever happened to that pair of pink jellies, not the first pair that she wore out because she loved them so much but the second pair, because they went really well with her pink dress with the puffed sleeves and the white polka dots, the dress that sort of made her feel like a princess" looks sparse in the sartorial description arena, you're pretty safe in leaving the fic. (Also, I've said it before and will repeat it again and again, comparing eyes to food is gross and unromantic.)
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• Out-of-place four-letter words: If you're cruising along through a fic of The Office and Pam starts dropping F-bombs, it takes you out of the moment.
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• Cut-and-paste descriptions of kissing: Seriously, do you want to go there? Because it'll involve phrases like "tongues tangling" and words like "moaning" and it just gets creepier from that point. Ah, little 14-year-old girl, you have not yet learned of the romance of mystery and half-spoken-of things. And I really have seen so many of these descriptions that look like they've been lifted straight from some other poorly-written scene where physicality is a substitute for connection instead of a means towards it. See it in a fic, skip the rest of the fic.

Those are most of my cues as to What Not to Read when it comes to fanfiction. Ignore them at your own risk.

Rewrite This Tragedy

Peter is with the other disciples after Jesus' resurrection, in the group that follows Him, but he must not really feel like one of them. How could he? Three times he had denied that he even knew Jesus.

Then one day, Jesus asks Peter if he loves Him. Peter responds that he does.

Jesus asks again. Peter responds in the same way, and you have to wonder if he thinks that maybe Jesus just wasn't paying attention the first time, but by the third time Peter catches on, that it's three times, and he remembers another instance he's affirmed something about Jesus three times, and he's grieved by the memory, but then there's this: Jesus has just rewritten Peter's life. Three times the denial, yes, but now three times the affirmation, three times the commission to care for God's people.

"Follow me," Jesus says, for the second time, and Peter takes up this second call with an energy that flows from the magnitude of his forgiveness.

We catch it easily because it happens so quickly, less than a month between the denial and the forgiveness, but this is God's pattern on broader scales, too.

The first woman meets the serpent. She's new to this world, so maybe it doesn't surprise her that he starts talking to her, questioning her, and she can't quite remember just what God said, can't quite convince herself it was worth following through on, and the man beside her is no help at all and the world changes. She is the first to see sin.

And you could blame the woman for this, and you could persecute her and her daughters for being more wicked than men, more prone to error, but there was a promise, a promise quick to follow the disobedience, a promise that one born of a woman would crush the power of the serpent.

Years later, when the angel of God speaks His words to a young woman, they are strange and wildly different from anything she would have expected and instead of questioning whether God really said it or meant it she says "I am the Lord's servant." She is the first to know the Messiah's long-awaited coming will be soon.

Years after that, when the tomb is sealed and the disciples are in hiding, another woman will risk her life to be identified with the man executed as an insurrectionist. She is the first to see Jesus after His resurrection.

In a breath-taking display of the sweeping arc of God's storyline, she thinks He is the gardener.

And the band plays on....

I have always been fascinated by the story of the Titanic. As a young girl I devoured books and documentaries on the subject. Now, years later, the part of the story that still stands out most starkly to me is the choice to course-correct. Had the iceberg been hit full on, the ship might have stayed floating. Instead, several of the many watertight compartments were breached at the same time, and the ship couldn't hold together.

Our brains work a bit like that. Pain will come, but maybe we're meant to face things head-on, to be breached one part at a time, to seal off one compartment so the others can keep us floating. It doesn't help to turn aside as though the iceberg you can see is all the iceberg there is.

We all of us, no matter how shiny on the top deck, hide hull breaches beneath the surface. Eventually, we need to go below decks and deal with them. But sometimes, we need to be sure we've cleared the iceberg first.

Character Growth

once Juliet

loathe to find you for fear of losing you

Penelope now

constancy second only to God's

if you're out there, I promise you this:

after you've found me, nothing you do or fail to do

will ever lose me

"Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking."

Some things I need to hear....

The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.--Deuteronomy 31:8

Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.--Psalm 90:1

I lift up my eyes to the hills--

From where does my help come?

My help comes from the Lord,

who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved;

he who keeps you will not slumber.

Behold, he who keeps Israel

will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;

the Lord is your shade on your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day,

nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil;

he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in

from this time forth and forevermore.

--Psalm 121

You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth,

and called from its remotest parts

and said to you, 'You are my servant,

I have chosen you and not rejected you.

Do not fear, for I am with you;

do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you, surely I will help you;

surely I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.'

--Isaiah 41:9-10

I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.--Jeremiah 31:3

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.--Matthew 28:20b

Me again, God.

I've asked you for a lot. Wisdom, and patience, and courage in new things. I've asked you most recently to take my armor and give me yours, and it's left me raw and closer to the surface and safer than I expected.

It's sinking in deeper and deeper, this knowing that to ask is to receive, and I come more boldly than I used to come. So today I come again, and I'm not ashamed of coming with my hands open, not ashamed of needing something from you, not ashamed that "need" isn't a strong enough word.

Give me peace over your timing, to sit and wait until I know it is time to act, and then to act, not out of grasping, selfish ambition but out of a quiet sense of the rightness of it, that this is the time to speak and these are the words I need to say.

Grant that I not wound you or others, and that any wounds I have already inflicted may heal and not fester.

Send me the broken, neglected, abused, hopeless children. Send me the ignored, the written-off, the "problem" children. Give me a heart to hold them, a double portion of your spirit that it may overflow over their lives, cascading and cleansing and freeing, because I was an outcast and you called me yours.

The kingdom is not noise, but power. God mighty to save, God who hears and answers, God who works out all the details...I leave these requests in your hands.

I look forward to seeing what you will do with them.

I like my job.

There will be tricky bits. There will be awkward training points. There will be lunch and shoe confusion (not confusing them with each other, just that lunch and shoes are my biggest office woes just now). There will be (dare I say it) the odd mistake.

But there will be steady work (STEADY WORK...as in not enough time to sigh over what I could be doing someplace else). There will be new challenges, and new systems to organize and refine, and new people, and my own office space (door and all) to decorate, and a sense that I'm working to further something I believe in (making a place for kids others have given up on) instead of just something that brings me money. Oh, and summers off. And snow days.

I think we're going to be good together.

Now I'm going to sleep. (Turns out being back to full-time work after five months off takes quite a toll.)

Pondering Point for the Day

Why does India, edged by unpleasant neighbors and still prone to some pretty intense squalor and discrimination, produce so much music that makes a person want to dance?

Why does America, wealthy and free as it is, produce so much music about not feeling complete, or about only being complete with another person (please don't ever leave ever no pressure but you're all I have that keeps me living no pressure)?

Is it just that I don't speak Hindi? Are they maybe cheerful sounds about suicide?

*phew*

Today was difficult and exhausting on many levels. (Blessed be the name of the Lord.)

On to the next day.

Now Entering Phase Four

Phase One: I enter this phase crying. I spend most of the next 18 years at home with my family.

Phase Two: I enter this phase crying. I spend most of the next 4 years at college with people who teach or attend there.

Phase Three: I enter this phase without crying. I spend most of the next 8 years at work with my co-workers.

Phase Four: I enter this phase crying. I spend most of the next ?? year(s) at work with co-workers and students (and maybe ???).

Must have been that the only reason I didn't cry for Phase Three was that at the time I didn't realize the momentousness of it.

I've been half-joking with my young friends who are heading off for their freshman year of college, telling them that even though there will be people here they'll miss, there are people ahead who have had a Heather/Andrew/Janessa-shaped hole in their lives and not even known it. Now I realize that it's true for me, too...in the weeks ahead I'll be meeting some people I've been destined to know. Pretty amazing, really. Our whole lives have led to the moment when we meet. (They'll lead on from it, too, but it's the convergence that amazes me most.)

I should maybe check on my outfit for tomorrow and make sure I have all my stuff together, but my brain just Blue Screened and I have to shut it down for the night.

Timmy from Shaun the Sheep

I can't believe I didn't find out about the Shaun the Sheep series until this year.

Pulling Away from Planet "Look at Me, Look at Me!"

Almost every summer a lot of people from my church go out to OPC Family Camp, which is a camping experience for members of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church...and probably their friends...and, um....

Okay, seriously, I don't know the Family Camp rules. I've never gone. It seems to me that it would be a week full of things that make me uncomfortable: bugs, sunscreen, dirt, camping, sleeping on hard surfaces and/or with lots of noise around, barely sanitary bathrooms, and large groups of people who've known each other for all their lives.

It's hard to feel fully at home in a group of people who are talking about all their shared history. Not that I want people to pretend their lives didn't start until they met me, but there are two main ways to tell a nostalgic story. One way brings the "newbie" listeners into the experience ("One time when we went to the beach, she and I were so tired we kept taking turns knocking each other down to give ourselves an excuse to stop walking"), and one way excludes them ("It's like that time at the beach." "With the dunes?" "Yeah." "Oh, my word, that was so funny....").

It's hard not to practice exclusionary bonding with people you've known for a while. It's hard to open up your circle to newcomers. I know this. It's also hard to be the person who feels, after years of knowing you, that she'll never quite make it into your inner circle because of the sheer fact that she hasn't known you since you were eight years old, or worked with you, or gone to college with you, or whatever the secret criteria is.

I don't always feel like this, but I do sometimes. And I know it's not very mature, and I've made progress so I don't go into meltdown over it as often as I used to, but I haven't arrived yet. Sometimes I still expect the world to revolve around me, and when people slip out of my orbit it can still frustrate me.

I'm glad the world doesn't really revolve around me. I'm glad my friends have more friends than just me, that I am not the one thing that gives their lives meaning. I'm glad that God has brought so many people into my life and that I can't sabotage any relationship He wants me to have, no matter on what level it is.

The dying part of me wants to be everybody's favorite, no matter when I came on the scene of their lives. The part that is coming increasingly alive knows that real love is bigger and wider and more mysteriously amazing than favorites or timelines. (The more I love, the larger my capacity for love grows.)

Someday I won't avoid anybody because I don't like being second or third or fourth tier. Maybe someday soon.

"For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure."--Philippians 2:13

Time Lessons from a Time of Unemployment

• Life moves quickly. I was laid off in March, and now I'm thinking "Good grief, I'll be at work in less than two weeks!" Five months gone just like that.
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• No matter how much time you have, you find a way to fill it.
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• I am not more productive with more time. I am actually less productive.
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• Deadlines and schedules motivate me. (I am going to be working for a charter school. Helllooooo, structured school time! I've missed you so....)
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• The discomfort of procrastination lies largely in the denial of the voice in your head reminding you you had better plans for the day than surfing the internet or watching TV.
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• Even though I feel excellent about myself when I'm productive, I often choose to procrastinate instead.
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• You don't really avoid doing things because you don't have time. You avoid doing things because on some level you don't want to do them. Dig down and find your real reasons (if you want), but don't blame lack of time.
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• I have been blessed with a lot of high-quality people in my life. I'm glad to have gotten the chance to see so many of them during the days over the past few months. The ability to call someone at random and ask "can I come over this afternoon?" is what I will miss most when I'm back to work. That and being able to visit with my family for long periods.
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• All times and seasons eventually end. "It always seems soon...afterward."
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