Behind all this time and sand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Plot Thickens

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


My dreams can get pretty interesting in emotionally intense times.


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


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


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


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


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

Take care of the feet

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

--Habakkuk 3:17-19

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

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

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

From the end of the earth I call to You

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

--Psalm 61:2

More than three sizes

"I shall run in the way of Your commandments,

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

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

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

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

The God who commands is the God who equips.

Watch where you put your "but"

"Weeping may tarry for the night,

but joy comes with the morning."

-- Psalm 30:5b

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

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

"God is faithful, but life is difficult."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--John 16:33b

Psalm 97:11

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

-- Psalm 97:11

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

Learning from work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, help....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And packing. I'll need boxes for that.

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

And breathing.

Breathing would be good.

Things I Am Wondering This Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introducing Mr. Frods

This is Frodo, often known as Mr. Frods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dad used to say those things to him.

No way this bird ever leaves the family now.

Are There House Yentas?

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

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

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

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

Young people can't decide these things for themselves.

Recharging

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

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

Today was a nice long Saturday with nothing in it.

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

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

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

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

Endless is not pointless

It's been three months since my last post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I couldn't keep my own heart on track.

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

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

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

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

Sobering Reminders and Thrilling Promises

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

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

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

____________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________________________

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

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

"Me, too," I'll say.

To all of it.

What Will Be, Is Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Honest Mistake

Imagine you're the king of a region in the Middle East. You are married, but you've also got a bit of a harem going. You've heard rumors about a woman in a group of nomads who settled within your territory. Rumor has it she is beautiful, and better yet, beautiful and unmarried. Seems the leader of the nomads is her brother.

In addition to being somewhat of a connoisseur and collector of beautiful women, as a ruler you know the value of creating alliances. Taking this woman into your harem? Win-win.

Something starts feeling a little off, though. While the women of the harem are putting the new recruit through orientation on local culture and household expectations, which can take a while, there are no new pregnancies. This is against pattern in an unsettling sort of way, but you don't connect it to the woman's arrival.

That is, until you dream that God Himself is issuing you a warning. "Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman you have taken, for she is married."

This is a shock on two major levels. 1) You were repeatedly told she was not married. Even the leader of the nomads, her brother, reported that she was unmarried, and shouldn't he know? 2) You haven't even touched this woman. Which is also against pattern, now that you think about it, but for some reason it's been enough just to look at her as she walks around your house...somewhat mournfully....

Suddenly the final goodbye between that leader and his "sister" rises into your mind and you have never felt so duped.

"Lord, will You slay a nation, even though blameless? Did he not himself say to me, 'She is my sister'? And she herself said, 'He is my brother.' In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this."

In the dream God replies, "Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her."

And everything starts to work itself out from there.

Why is this story in the Bible? (Genesis 20, check it out.)

Yes, it shows Abraham's lack of faith in God's protection, and God's persistence in protecting Abraham and Sarah anyway. Yes, it shows that the child to come, Isaac, was definitely the son of Abraham and not some foreign ruler.

But it's also about the king, Abimelech. And it's mostly about God.

A God who lets us make mistakes, even grievous mistakes, but keeps us from sinning in them. A God who responds to honest cries of "I didn't know this would happen" and "I thought I was doing the right thing" with "Yes, I know; and I was protecting you the whole time."

Which makes it a story about us, too. Thankfully.

Breaking and Burning

This weekend my mom was in the hospital. She's out now, but it was a rough weekend. Yesterday when I got back in to work, I was exhausted and emotionally fragile.

The big thing that kept me breaking into tears at intervals throughout the morning was that people kept asking me how I was doing, and how my mom was doing, and meaning it. This afternoon, two coworker-friends who have been keeping tabs on me closely since Sunday came in and sat in my office, which they had never done before. A voice inside my head said, "You don't have to keep checking on me. I'm not broken." And then another voice said, "Yes. I am."

Laurie R. King writes of a woman who has been carrying a weight of grief and snaps, completely breaks down in front of someone she was trying to look good for. In looking back on the incident, the woman says that "[he] had seen me in that despicable state and burnt me with his compassion." That's how I feel when people keep coming, even when I have nothing to give them.

I hate being burnt. I hate being broken. Tonight at prayer meeting, I thought of this verse: "As for these things which you are looking at, the days will come in which there will not be left one stone upon another which will not be torn down" (Luke 21:6). I feel like that's me, like one stone after another is being knocked over. Part of me grieves that, but part of me is waiting to see what I will be afterwards (1 John 3:2).

When my dad was in the hospital, I felt like I was doing really well, really praying it out of the park and exercising faith like nobody's business. When my mom was in the hospital, my internal prayer went more like, "God, I have no idea what you're doing. I don't even know what to say to you right now. I'm a little afraid of you, and a little angry about this, and I just don't know." But that's a prayer the Spirit translates (Rom. 8:26).

I have nothing. But everything.

"For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us."~~2 Corinthians 4:6-7

The more chips there are in a jar of clay, the more worn out it is with use, the more what is inside of it is revealed. So I want to stop trying to seal the broken places, trying to distract everybody from seeing them, trying to pretend they aren't there. I want people to see that light.

"The Lord is near to the brokenhearted

And saves those who are crushed in spirit."

~~ Psalm 34:18

"How are you?"

Tonight our associate pastor preached on how Christians should pursue honesty, even in the answering of socially conventional questions like "How are you?"

I've always had trouble with that question. It's always been much too complicated to answer. And on Sundays, it's even harder. It's not that I'm trying to hide so much as that I feel too confused by the transition-between-weeks nature of Sundays to be able to answer "How are you?" with any clarity. Especially on Sunday nights, when my brain has started to process what I need to do in the week ahead, I am likely to stare at you blankly if you ask how I am.

Also, "missing my dad" will be a given for any answer to that question for the rest of my life. Even if the rest of the answer is "really excited/happy," I'll still be wishing Dad could be part of it, too. But who wants to hear that all the time? That's not new or fun. And although lately I've been missing him more, for several reasons, there have already been and there will be more times when missing him isn't something I'll be distraught about. It'll just be there, a reality to live with. (C.S. Lewis aptly compared the death of a close loved one to the amputation of a leg.)

There's some good stuff coming up this week. The completion of my giant work project that took up last week; visits with friends; my mom coming to town and in to work with me (I know one boy there who is looking forward to this about as much as I am); possibly bringing Apollo it to work for show-and-tell of sorts; seeing a play.... I'm looking forward to it. It should be a good week. I miss my dad.

(When I was with him in the hospital, I would tell him that even though he might be wishing I would stop talking for a minute, I was just going to keep talking to him until he was able to talk back to me. When I see him next, I should keep that promise. No matter how much I have stored up to tell him by then.)

Pressed, but not crushed. That's how I am.

Crying in the darkness

Words stick in my head even if they aren't set to music, looping over and over, especially when they seem relevant to my current situation. This afternoon on my way home, these were the words on repeat: "You have removed lover and friend far from me."

It is the penultimate line of Psalm 88, the bleakest song in the whole book of songs.

"You have removed lover and friend far from me." Not circumstance. Not fate. You. You, the God I have been serving all of these years. You, the One I love above all, deny me other loves. You have removed my dad far from me. You are slow, as some count slowness, to come to the aid of children I have grown to love. You confound me, in more than one sense of the word.

God doesn't sweep in at the end of the psalm to deny any of it. Not His agency, not the pain of the supplicant. In fact, elsewhere He confirms it: "When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?" (Amos 3:6); "The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these" (Isaiah 45:7).

And in case that should be mistaken for an Old Testament God-of-wrath thing, centuries later Jesus confirms that "In the world you have tribulation" (from John 16:33, NASB), which is translated in other versions as "you will have tribulation" (ESV) and "you will have trouble" (NIV). Will. For certain. And God is sovereign.

I love God for standing while the psalmist pours out the darkness of his heart at His feet, and I love Jesus for not saying, "In the world you have tribulation, but keep smiling."

Instead, He says, "In the world you have tribulation, but take courage ["take heart" (ESV); "take heart!" (NIV)]; I have overcome the world." He gives us a reason to keep going, while not discounting the pain. He tells us that this world is a place of tension: tribulation and the victory of Christ coexisting.

The psalmist of Psalm 88 isn't forgetting the victory. The psalm that ends "You have removed lover and friend far from me; my acquaintances are in darkness" begins "O Lord, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You."

And I am not forgetting the victory. It is because of the victory that I can be sure that when I cry in the darkness, there is somebody who hears.

O Lord, "my soul has had enough troubles" (Psalm 88:3a).