Pouring Out

Sit with me, Lord, this night . . .
if You can bide
the stale scent of old hurts aired
in a midnight wind.

I'm ashamed to think You hear
the half-said complaints,
the boxed harmonica melodies,
the same blues tune, lamenting,
in variations, over and over . . .

There is a taint about it--
no noble sadness this--only
the rusty-hinge grating
of a door warped from its frame
and no longer able to close,
flawed beyond reclaiming.

You know all the summer swellings
and winter shrinkings,
all the relentless hoping of spring
and the fall wind that blows
these weary, pulled-about things
back and forth through nights
when sleep won't come.

In the house next door, a child fusses
over yesterday's skinned knee
gone gooey from his bath.
Ritual whispers through an open window:
clean sheets pulled back,
pillows and animals gathered in,
a mother's voice. "It's okay, honey.
It needs to breathe."

Here, Hoping

I'm sitting at Mom's place, relaxed in the flowered chair, light from the round room east window glowing through the potted plant's leaves. A sparrow chirps outside, wind ruffles the tree branches, and a distant lawnmower shades the air with its hum. My heart feels a little sad and lost. I love it here. After the city's constant ruckus--the space and quietness, the layers of bird song, the big tranquil sky--seem almost alien in their wonderment and beauty.

Yesterday I pulled weeds from the back flowerbed. Beyond me, miles of fields spread to the dusty blue horizon anchored here and there by clumps of trees, blue green against the yellow green carpet of corn seedlings. Barn swallows and other birds zipped and flitted over the field. Three brown thrashers landed in the grass near the house. A wren investigated a birdhouse my brother made to hang in the ash tree. I love it here, and I cannot stay, and I no longer belong.

Even since despair began to dog me, I've remained convinced--deep down in the same place where I know that God exists and is personal and good--that there is true beauty and goodness sprinkled throughout God's creation. It can be found in stories, in music and landscapes, in wrinkle lines of a kindness and humor, in children's belly laughter, in the red of apples at the grocery store, in a pleasant greeting. It's all over, and sometimes we see it. I am convinced of this, but I struggle to accept my place in it.

In Psalm 139, David tells God, "I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well" (v. 14, ESV). Such a clear example of counting oneself a part of God's wonderful works, and yet it is so difficult to embrace that truth, to relax my soul into it and trust it will hold the weight. That's the thing about hope. Though necessary and wonderful, it is bitter indeed when it seems to betray. The fear of failed hope turns the act of hoping into almost a physical pain.

"The Lord is gracious and merciful," David says, "slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all he has made" (Psalm 145:8-9, ESV). I sense God beckoning me forward, coaxing me to relax my clenched grip and embrace the sweep of change, to follow with Him far, come what may. And from my dark corner, my small voice replies, "I can't. I've tried before, and see where I am? The same hole. I always fall into this pit again. Always. And I am so tired, I would just rather be done, please."

And so, I seem to come again to the choice--the choice to believe what I cannot see, to trust God rather than the messages of my distorted perception. But perhaps that is not quite right. Perhaps my alternative is less a cold blooded, iron-willed choice, and more a cry for help. After all, "The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them" (Psalm 145:18-19, ESV). Someday, I hope, I shall see the beauty here, too.

After Salvation

 My heart's no palace.
 It's odd that You are here
amongst manure and chaff
in my particular stable.
All my life (it seems)
I've been afraid of blocking You,
"hindering fellowship,"
not being good enough to know
that You are happy here.
Begun by the Spirit,
now I think it's up to me
to finish the good work.
Somehow, in all my trying I forget
that April, also, is Christmas.

Rethinking Thinking Badly Of Myself

After another round with negative self-talk, I find my attention drawn to Ephesians 2:10: "For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." The lies I feel (I do more harm than good, I can't amount to anything, I am pitiful or contemptible) become difficult to defend when confronted by God's words. The truth takes me aback. How I view myself is more than a personal matter. When I choose to view myself as irredeemably flawed, judging myself and my future through a lens of hopelessness and disgust, I devalue something of worth to God. For if I am really God's workmanship, my life is (and is becoming) an expression of His beautiful grace. I think of my own cherished handiwork: poems, drawings, music--creative expressions which bring me delight and communicate something meaningful to others. In their own small way, these creations are important, and I would not have them dismissed or ridiculed. So how can I discount my own life? Surely the work of the Master in each one of His children merits celebration, anticipation, and wonder.

Note to Self: Don't Worry

If fear could fill an ocean,
if shame could drown a sea,
if darkness were a garment
and sleep, reality,
if tears could bring no solace,
and words could not relieve,
if hope had run off laughing,
had snickered in her sleeve,
if  (after all) the earth were flat,
and I fell off the brink--
then after all the all of that,
it wouldn't make Him blink.
It wouldn't faze Him, wouldn't change
the elemental tug;
Not chaos nor a dread routine
can stultify God's love.

In the Battle

It's like a hot, hot day--the kind that sucks into your lungs and seeps inside your head. Your heart clenches and unclenches, running too hot and too fast inside your muggy self. You will yourself forward, step after step (or fall back for a time), and it is hard to see for the sweat in your eyes. You feel angry. You feel ashamed. You feel afraid. You do not look your best, and neither does anybody else.

Sometimes a cool wind blows and your soul perks up to the wide blue sky and recognizes that children's laughter is sweet, that the world brims with wonder, and that peace can be real as a soft snowfall. When the wind dies and the heat comes back and settles thick, changing movement to the bare necessity demanded by the day's script, you slip the breeze into your prayers, like ice into a glass, and blow the cold up against your sweaty face, remembering.

[Untitled]

Alone,
adrift in

nothing--

nothing to touch,
nothing to push oneself

anywhere.

In darkness,
only breath--
          in,

                  out,
        
                           alone,
            
            cast out

            in                          

                                          nothing.





Everything!
All around, everything! Steeped, suspended, enveloped by, swimming in

God's Love!

All the while, child: there was no nothing--
only a great space brimming
                                             and
                                                  spilling over

Love.

Growing Toward Hope

I love stories--other people's stories--pretend or real-life. Many excellent minds have expressed the power of stories to win hearts, to enrich life, and to embody truths. Today, however, I sense that sometimes I misuse others' stories as a retreat from my own. Ideally, stories give us courage and wisdom to carry back into our daily experience. I've wrongly used them--particularly mediocre TV dramas--to get away from my story. Hiding from fears and shame over my flounderings, I watch pretend people do significant things. Even when they encounter difficulties, the plot and purposefulness of their stories creates a comforting world for me, the viewer. It is as if I trust the screen writers to create a good story more than I trust God to create something intrinsically worthwhile through the unfolding of my life.

Despite being of an age where I should be relatively established financially and socially, I lack a well-defined career path and am underemployed. The sad thing about this is that I haven't seriously pursued what I am trained for and love. I've been timid and afraid and procrastinated over and over again.  I am ashamed of these facts. Socially, I am not in much better condition. As a little girl, I thought the advantage of growing up was the chance to nurture one's own family. Now, not only am I not in a fair way to getting married, I begin to doubt I even want to be! I appear to have become a type of person of which I am ashamed: an "adultescent"--one who just won't quite exert herself into full-fledged adulthood.

If it is true that we have "besetting sins" or personally tenacious temptations, mine may be despair. I suppose few who know me are much aware of this. Then, again, they may have guessed. I fight the thing fairly often, not in one long and terrible battle, but through a lot of little skirmishes. You can't face this. You're doomed. You can't change. Remember how hard you tried before? Remember how you can't even seem to try hard anymore? it whispers. Give up. Come on. Just give up. 

The prelude to such reflections often involves a nagging panic, a great fear that my life will end up as one pitiful failure. The answer to this alarm may include less worrying about what I think and feel, and more doing what I have to do. But there's more to it than that. For one thing, action has become strangely hard for me. And for another, this time in my life is a chance to embrace faith in every step. Nothing comes easily right now, and the effort of my steps slows me down and offers me the choice to trust and to keep going.

Earlier this week, feeling unable to view my future accurately through a discoloration  of fears and shames and sadnesses, I decided to embark on a mini pilgrimage. I wished I could sob for a whole night and somehow wash the sadness out. Unfortunately, I can't cry on demand or for long durations. So, instead, I drove to Lake Michigan and stood knee deep in the water, throwing stones. I pictured in all that vast water the greatness of God's love surrounding me and stretching out of sight in front of me. Holding a pile of smooth rocks in one hand, I named each stone for one of my cares and flung it into the lake. The waves were so mild that day that I could see the circles from the disappeared stones spread over the bobbing water.

In the past few days since my visit to the lake, I have realized something. I have to throw those stones every day. The cares come back, and I can choose to hoard them or to throw them and myself back on the resources of God's love. I think it would be easier if only I could understand and resolve everything. I wish my feeble vocational attempts would turn up a bit of concrete encouragement. I wish things would go right when I try. But God holds the pen, and I pray that I (with His help) will embrace His story line--not just in trust for the future, but in trust for this moment.

In Romans 5, Paul says,

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (v. 1-5, ESV)

Because of Christ, I am standing in grace--I am growing toward hope.






 

Despair, Conscience, and Christ

One wakeful night in the wild land of Self-Talk, two ideas resumed their interpretation of their person's life:

 One said, "You always were a bit strange. Makes sense you're in this mess. You never did work quite right. Just give up. You're pretty helpless, but you can do something. You can give up."

The other replied, "You know 'giving up,' as you call it, would be sin. You're not even supposed to be thinking like that. Sure, you're going to have consequences when you've done wrong--but you ought to trust God to bring good even out of that. And maybe if you work really hard, you can minimize those consequences. Or maybe working hard to ward off disaster is your consequence. Hmm?"

The first idea resumed, "Yeah, well, where are you going to get the oomph for that, sluggard? But you could worry about it all night, and then use your sleepiness as an excuse to get nothing done tomorrow. Why do all these happy people have demands on you, anyway? They have no idea. Just wash your hands of it. You'd never have to worry again."

The second idea (who introduces himself as "conscience"), exclaimed, "Listen to you! Do you know how blessed you are? How blessed you've been? Where is your gratitude? Forgotten under all the pity-party confetti, huh? Come on. You know this stuff isn't the truth. Also, you're not supposed to worry. Besides, God's got a plan."

First idea: "Ouch. He sure does. To bad you're too wussy for it."

Conscience: "Nice excuse."

And then, finally, like a cool breeze in and around and beyond the fly-buzz conversation, a Voice from beyond that little land spoke:

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

And,

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the prisoners . . . .

Cosmos and Chaos

I remember sitting in upper level English comp. classes at the Christian college I attended. We explored the purpose of art and of writing, learning about the call of God's children in a broken world. The world seems like chaos--hopeless chaos if we discount the redemptive work of Christ and the vestiges of His perfect creation still lingering among us. As Christians, we are called to look truthfully into the darkness and disorder without minimizing or dismissing it. And always, always, we are to shed God's light there.

But just now, I feel my perspective has taken a dizzying turn. Instead of gazing out into a wild universe and tracing God's redemption woven through it, I find myself looking inward and finding bewildering confusion. The chaos isn't just out there. It seems to be inside me, too. And yet, somehow, God reaches into this tangle and draws out a long, straight line of everyday grace. I do not understand it, but I think it's beautiful, and I'm awfully glad He does it.

Father, I feel so faulty today--
Weariness fogs behind my eyes,
and something (is it anger or sadness or worse?),
threatens to shake off my meager regulation.

I'm sorry for running and running
in the same circles, to get away from--
what?
When all along I always knew
It was to You I should have run.

Please, I don't want to escape
the stable. I want to feel
the ground quake beneath Your cross,
and to wait in the cold garden
for the first rays of Your rising sun--

Yes, I want to stay, even if that means confronting
whatever what is.

Problem Paper

Among first and second graders it is not unusual. The slipped marker and consequent dismay: "I ruined it!" Loathing the stray mark or misshaped creature on their former masterpiece, their eyes fill with angry tears and their faces crease with frustration. I've tried to hearten them: "Don't give up! Maybe you can turn it into something else. Sometimes mistakes can be turned into something that makes the picture even better!" But they don't buy it,and I'm not quite sure I do either. Inevitably the paper ends up discarded. Sometimes the artists are too discouraged to try again that day. From my adult perspective, I crease my brow and smile a little because no one but a first or second grader expects that first or second grader to be perfect. For the rest of us, the rabbit with round ears is endearing though difficult to identify.

One thing I notice over and over as I work with children is that the problems of adult humanity appear in their infant forms in communities of children. The thing I shake my head over is a less sophisticated form of the same thing I do. I, too, rue the blot and forget everything good still in the picture. I want to give up and throw it away. I want a clean paper. But that is not what we get. Thankfully, the Master Artist knows how to turn blemishes into something better. Under His hand, we cannot give up.

Our Enemy Despair

I was always irritated by one particular exchange in the film Anne of Green Gables. After hungering desperately for a home, Anne finds out the one she has been promised doesn't want her after all. She says she is "in the depths of despair." Wanting Mirilla to understand, she asks, "Can't you at least imagine you are in the depths of despair?" "No," Mirilla replies, "I cannot. To despair is to turn your back on God." The woman's reply always seemed a little heartless to me.

But in my own life, I begin to see a grain of truth in her words.

Despair is a nightmarish figure. In Pilgrim's Progress he shows up as a terrible giant. In The Faerie Queen, he is an old man living among "a ghastly windfall" of corpses--bodies fallen from trees upon which they had hung themselves after heeding his arguments. Despair lies and speaks from both sides of his mouth. He manipulates guilt and coaxes forth hopelessness. He is, indeed, a formidable enemy, not least because he often presents himself inside his intended victim's mind, speaking with the sound of his victim's voice.

"Things are so bad," he says, "they can never be set right. What mends today will only break again tomorrow. Why bother with life? It is a dreary business which you will certainly botch."

But to listen to him is to not listen to God. While physiological imbalances often play a key role in wrong thinking, a willful choice to despair is a faithless choice. For to despair--to absolutely despair--is to act as though God's goodness does not exist and Despair's black lies are the ultimate reality. "Curse God and die," said Job's wife. But he didn't. And we hear his impossible assertion: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me" (Job 19:25-27 NIV).

There is often a kind of fierceness when we choose to defy our enemy Despair. It is like standing blindly in an empty room and screaming. He makes us think that he is only our own voice speaking, not an enemy trying to devour our bodies if not our souls. Yet we speak into that empty room, saying in the face of what feels like flawless logic: "No. God does have a good point for my life--one that isn't simply to use me as a warning for others. I am His child and His poem. He has planned good works for me to do. Not only that, He has born my griefs, carried my diseases,and wants me to cast my cares upon Him, too! Is anything in this shattered world so ruined that He cannot fix it, He who has been broken Himself?"

So off with you--you pit, you giant, you gaunt old man! I have better company tonight. "How precious to [or concerning] me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you" (Psalm 139:17-18 NIV).

On Giving up the Violin (or maybe, taking it up again)

Father,
I am growing repulsed by the sound of my own voice.
Teach me how to raise it up to You,
thinking only of the beauty of the One it praises--
or maybe, too, seeing in it a sliver of Your creation,
and so, a thing not to be despised.