Tag Archives: Jesus

Train Tickets

By Tagged , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the only books I had space to bring with me from North Carolina was Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, and a few weeks ago, my housemate and I started reading it aloud after dinner, but very gradually because we are often busy. And more than once while reading, I’ve found a lump in my throat that I must push down and push down again.

In the second chapter, young Corrie sees death for the first time when visiting a neighbor and is terrified, most particularly that she will lose her parents like this. Her father gently asks her, When you and I go to Amsterdam–when do I give you your ticket? And she admits, Why, just before we get on the train. He wants her to know that God gives us things only when we need them. Certainly he gives fish instead of snakes and bread instead of stones, but he doesn’t stockpile the bread and fish up around us to go stale and rot. Instead he.places them fresh into our empty hands at the moment we are most hungry for them.

For the adult Corrie of most of the novel, the train tickets God gives her one by one are to deal with the horrors she will witness and experience. I am not experiencing horrors or even hardships, but learning in small ways is learning too. Moving here has been overwhelmingly full of blessing, as I knew deep-down it would be, partially because in so much newness I can’t possibly see more than a step in front of me, so I can’t possibly plan my life the way I did in Greensboro. And as I inhale sharp gulps of fresh air which I sometimes don’t know how to take into my lungs, how to begin to eke the oxygen out of, I have had to rely on those train tickets, one by one.

And this week it was George Herbert’s “Love III.” I can’t say that I found it, more that it found me:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
 Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
 From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
 If I lacked anything.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here”:
 Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
 I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
 “Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
 Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
 “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
 So I did sit and eat.

I’ve known this poem since I was small, from my dad’s little pocket Temple, but it hit me with great force on Wednesday night: knocked me down and lifted me up again. And I don’t think I’ll ever fully comprehend its meaning. In fact, I don’t think Herbert did, either. He, too, was only human. We only begin to understand, but we must keep beginning, over and over.

The line that I wrote on my arm to remember was one of Love’s: “And know you not who bore the blame?” But the one that kept echoing in my head all Thursday morning was the speaker’s petulantly self-flagellating excuse: “Let my shame go where it doth deserve.” Strangely, it was not repeating itself in my own voice, or even Herbert’s. They were still, small words that kept saying, gently, but authoritatively: Let your shame go where it doth deserve. And it meant something quite different than when I say something like that to myself. Instead of implying that I ought to be wrapping myself in my sin like a comforting, moldy blanket and traipsing off to Sheol because that’s where I belong, this whisper meant that I am not my shame and guilt, that I am a made, loved creature, and that Christ bore the blame, lifted the weight off my shoulders and onto his own so it could die. And I must stop clinging to it so that he can throw it far, far away, far as the east is from the west. Yes, let it go where it doth deserve…

You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Always.

 

Seismic Shifts

By Tagged , , , , , 1 Comment

In less than a week I move to Vancouver. This is the age of change, of the ground moving beneath my feet, but not mine only. Just in the last week or two there have been shifts around me as well: coming marriages, births, deaths, my dad turning sixty, my sister able to go back to London at long last, and two weddings to attend in the next three days. Time is always marching on, of course, but occasionally there are days when we actually feel that, in all its wind and its weight.

Last night my family had a goodbye party for me, which was very sweet. Many kind people prayed for me and we ate chocolate mousse and drank what rosé there was in the house so my parents wouldn’t be stuck with it.

Then afterwards I couldn’t sleep, maybe because all the changing and churning of the world beneath me had gotten into my bones and was making them ache. I don’t know exactly. But I got up and read the beginning of the book of Matthew.

It starts with a list of genealogies: marriages, births, deaths, tectonic plates grating against one another as the earth turns round and round, and then it announces the coming of Christ.

An angel arrives and tells Joseph that everything Mary has been saying is true: she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins. Beneath the heaving, quaking breaths the earth keeps taking, there is a fiery core, a binding promise, a wonder: He will save his people from their sins.

On Eating It All Up

By Tagged , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Once a student asked me what my ideal birthday gift would be, and I told him I’d just like to have dinner at a restaurant with really, really good food. I love good food, and I’ve always been an adventurous eater. Anyone who knows me well knows this. Good food is the one thing I have no sales resistance against.

Except. When I get anxious, I physically lose my appetite. When I am in a period of transition, or stress, or just general upset, my desire to eat shrinks and shrinks, and sometimes disappears entirely into a general guilty nausea anytime food is set in front of me. (This is compounded by the fact that I am hyper-conscious of being a thin person who sometimes eats less than she should, but who doesn’t want people to worry about her needlessly. So I fret over other people’s perception of my eating habits. Which makes me more stressed. Which shrinks my appetite even more. It’s all very silly.) So I love food, but when I am discontent, I lose the love I had at first, and the thing which I relished, which was the joyful fulfillment of a need, becomes a chore, a strange, sharp little reminder of my inability to do something so simple as cleaning my plate.

In case you hadn’t caught on, this entry isn’t really about food at all.

It’s about abundance. I think.

I realized about a week ago that my summer is just not going to be very restful in the conventional sense of the word. I packed up my classroom last week, and I’m packing up my apartment this week. A few days after moving back in with my parents, we are heading to Minnesota for a family wedding, and then I will spend a few days with one of my best friends in Minneapolis. I’ll drive home from there, with a quick stop in Indiana, and have a couple weeks to get my affairs in order, before visiting friends in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida in rapid succession. When I get home again, I will have only a week or so before another family wedding, and then I will blink, and it will be August 16th, and I will be sitting alone on a plane, soaring towards a bright, blank new life.

This summer is so full of good things. I won’t have much time to watch Netflix, or even as much as usual to read and write, but instead my effort is going towards spending time with a few of my very favorite people, people who encourage me and calm me and make me feel most whole, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. Seeing them will be like sitting down hungry, after a long, full day, to an enormous meal. It will be like real rest, like letting out a breath I’ve been needlessly holding.

And these people and travels are not the only reminders of the abundance spilling out around me. I am in the midst of packing up my life into boxes and bags. I joked to a few friends that I am perfectly capable of throwing things out–I just have to eulogize them first. In one notable case last week, a eulogy wasn’t enough, and I brought a piece of student work down the hall to a teacher friend, and asked her to discard it for me. I hate to get rid of these shabby treasures, not because they have any value in and of themselves, but because they are tangible reminders of the bounty of the last few years.

When I am anxious and sad, I tend to tie myself up in knots, which puts a kink in the line, stops the good things from coming in. But sorting through these papers and odds and ends (among them medical gauze, water guns, a child’s pioneer bonnet, a blacklight, an incomplete Candyland set, and a topographical map of Knoxville) is reminding me. I am literally, unavoidably counting my blessings. My appetite is coming back in more ways than one. The world is so full of good things–my world is so full of good things–I must have, get, before it cloy.

Last night, when there were several more practical, logical, or even just normal things I could have been doing, I spent a couple hours drawing up a floor plan for a house. It’s not as if I really believe I will ever build a house, least of all one with three stories, a conservatory, and sliding stained-glass windows, but if I am dreaming, then I am hungry, and if I am hungry, I am able to glory in the wonder of food, along with company, and poetry, and every good thing.

If wide-eyed hunger drives me, I can pick myself up and dust myself off, and run with the faith of my seventeen-year-old self towards the divine eucatastrophe, the happy ending. God’s blessings are proclaiming that it is coming, the King is coming. Therefore, let us keep the feast.

May Joys

By Tagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

May is not a month I have ever associated with peace. It is a month of chaos and sugar and absences and red ink up to our eyeballs and holding on for dear life. And this May at school has included some mysterious deathly malady which has occasionally affected not only most of the copiers, but the AC system as well. We’re on our last rope, our last thread.

And yet.

Yesterday I went to Raleigh with some friends. We went to the NC Art Museum and then to dinner at some very cool place called Brewery Bhavana. I knew it was cool because I felt too old and too young for it at the same time, but I still enjoyed myself anyway.

The reason we went to the art museum in the first place was to see a special exhibit called “You Are Here.” The pieces were all supposed to be interactive, and in some way associated with light, color, and sound. (Again–too old and too young at the same time.)

My favorite was a big white room with forty speakers set up in a circle, playing a fifteen minute piece of sacred choral music on loop. And that was it. If you sat on one of the benches in the middle of the room, you could close your eyes and be lifted, as you heard the voices blending and building and melding into one another.

Or you could get up and walk slowly around the room from speaker to speaker, each of which was playing a different individual voice. Once, as I was doing this, the entire piece took a two beat rest, and then the three deep voices which were closest to my head at that moment swung solidly back in. I almost jumped with joy. I felt surrounded, unaccountably loved, known, as if my dear friends were leading the way. My friend Lauren whispered to me, It’s like heaven!

I wish May were that room, that I could walk up to each voice in the peace of a big white space, and listen to its separate resonance and contribution, over and over, that I could take my soft time with each word, each need, each demand for attention. I wish I could parse the million colors and faces swirling in my vision all day long, give each one its due in care, at long last.

But I can’t. I’ll have all the time and more for that in eternity.

But just for now, in these last two weeks as a teacher, I must sit in the middle of it all, close my eyes and be lifted.

Prayer and The New Code

By Tagged , , , , Leave a comment

Back in November I mentioned that I’ve been doing a project in which I interview women around me about their faith. The idea is to collect a mass of quiet stories about God’s goodness towards individual people, the kind of solid testaments to his grace which usually only your family and close friends end up knowing in full. I have a series of seventeen questions I came up with, and a few times after I’ve turned off the microphone at the end of an interview, one of the women I’ve spoken to has kindly asked me if I would, at some point, share my seventeen answers. In response, I’ve hemmed and hawed and gotten embarrassed, because the simple truth is I know that they’re hard questions. And I have satisfactory answers for very few of them.

But God does not need me to be satisfactory. He is satisfactory enough. He simply wants me to be willing. And the question I’ve been thinking of a lot in the last few days is #7: Who taught you to pray? In response, most people have mentioned a parent or sunday school teacher. A few have interpreted it more directly and simply told me that ultimately, the Holy Spirit taught them. Both of these perspectives make sense to me, but this is one of the questions I’ve felt most reticent about because I have always considered myself a bad pray-er, ever since I was a girl.

I was shy to begin with, and talking about spiritual things particularly galled me. Any time one of my parents, or any adult for that matter, tried to talk to me about a personal relationship with Jesus I would burst into tears, which I know was disheartening and perplexing. The whole thing, the enormity and seriousness of God, felt too big for my words, too big for my understanding, so I hid my face in my hands. I grew out of that as I got older, but I still struggled to pray. Like many people, I avoided doing it aloud in public, and had trouble concentrating when I tried on my own. Writing poetry helped, but only when I had the discipline to keep up with it. When others mentioned prayer I felt lethargic and ashamed.

And then came this year. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve cried this week alone. I do know it included three times on Monday at work. And three times last night while I was over at my parents’ house to belatedly celebrate my birthday with my family. I’ve always been a crier, but recently it’s reached a level that’s less human and more sink faucet. Last night my roommate came home at about 11:30 to find me crying because the fire alarm had gone off when I was heating up water on the stove, and I had just spent five minutes struggling to get the living room window open to create a cross-draft and air the apartment out. I was inconsolable.

I’m okay. Really, I am. I’m just finding it hard to leave. It’s hard to leave my family and my job and my students and my friends and all the sidewalks that I know. When I made the decision to go all the way to Vancouver for grad school I thought that going away so far would require the most amount of trust, but it turns out that it’s the leaving that’s the cliff’s edge. Every time someone talks long term plans now, I’m not a part of it. I don’t have a dog in the fight for any decisions at school for next year. I’m not sure about making it to fall weddings. I only have answers for short term questions. Yesterday I erased a penis which had been pencilled onto a desk in my classroom, and felt nonsensically pleased for having found a tangible, helpful task I could still satisfactorily complete in the little time I have left at Caldwell.

All that to say, increasingly over the last few months, I have met problem after problem which I have absolutely no power to combat. My hands and my mind and my energies feel achingly useless, and so at long last, in little dribbles and eddys, I’ve begun to pray, because it’s the only thing left. So that’s my answer to question #7: this year has taught me how to pray. Feeling small has taught me.

Prayer means to bring the thing that doesn’t fit in your hands and give it to the Lord. It means to bring the awe and the exhaustion and the love and the broken, blighted organs that continue to pump irregularly in our chests and the chests of those around us, to lay them out in the blinding light at the feet of the King, and leave them there. And then to come back again and again, at all hours, with more and more and more, piling them there for him to take, the only things we have to give by way of offering.

It’s a relief to no longer hide from prayer, but to hide in it. I can bring the things too big for my words or too big for my understanding to One who is larger still.

Light and Momentary Afflictions

By Tagged , , , , , Leave a comment

This writing thing works best, I think, when I tell the truth and show the rips in the fabric.

Late one night in early December of my first year of teaching I decided I was going to quit at the end of the semester. I was exhausted. The pushback I was receiving from some students and parents at the time felt like too much for my thin shoulders. There had been too many nights when, finally putting away my grading or lecture notes at two a.m., I had lain in bed, cried fat, angry tears, and wondered to myself what sadomasochist had dreamed up teaching as a profession. This experiment was over. I was calling it.

So the next day I went into work with grim determination that these trudging days were numbered. I think it was a Tuesday. That afternoon a smart, articulate student who had often liked to challenge me in class came up and asked me if I could help him with something. Would I look over the rough draft of his junior thesis? He knew it had a long way to go and he wanted extra feedback. He posed the question as if, though the assignment wasn’t for my class, I might know something about it, as if my opinion were worth listening to. So I said yes, and read the paper. It was clear and readable, but he hadn’t really addressed the opposition at all and made some unfounded statements, so I covered it in red. He came back in a couple days later and sat next to my desk, and we talked through my comments. He accepted all of them and thanked me profusely.

I think his asking for my help was, at least in part, a conscious act of kindness. He treated me as if I had something of value to offer, and so I changed my mind. I didn’t quit. I gave the experiment another try.

I stayed, and year by year things got easier. The work got simpler and faster, and I got to know my students better. I carried their weights and worries more heavily and mine more lightly. I still cried often, but gradually I laughed more and more. My feet grew to suit the ground where they stood.

When I leave Caldwell in a few months it will feel as if I am slicing the hundreds of nerves that connect me to the place. It’s a happier and more logically accurate metaphor to say that I’m leaving behind something I’ve built, but that doesn’t account for the hurt I know I will feel, because I already do.

Yesterday I sat down and graded the personal statements my sophomores turned in last week. They responded to one of three prompts: a prompt about failure, a prompt about challenging an idea, and a prompt about a moment of transition. And as I read their various experiences, often little but sometimes big, I was reminded how much personal growth necessarily involves discomfort. It involves inconvenience and sometimes pain to come into something new, as well as to leave something old. Being born and dying are both famously uncomfortable.

So the beginning of this chapter was marked by tears, and by all indications the end may be too. But though my worries and insecurities may show up as markers and half-rubbed-out stains all through the last four years, they do not define my time teaching. These years have been characterized by unasked-for grace: grace offered to me by my family, by my friends, by my colleagues, by my bosses, by my students and even their parents, but most especially by my God, who has said time and time again, “Yes, I intend for you to be here–I am here with you. Now take another step forward, and another, and another…” until I walk right off the page, on to the next unknown.

Holy Ground

By Tagged , , , , Leave a comment

Once when I was in college, a friend went to pray before a meal and got much more eloquent than all of us expected. I remember he said that every day, every moment, every place we go, God has been there first. I still think of this often. I have never pushed too hard at its theology, for fear it would leak, but ultimately I think it would hold true. He is in all these places and he knows all these things.

So here we are in February, and the Lord has been here first.

I’m getting over a cold right now. (I say “getting over” more hopefully than truthfully. Yesterday a senior girl who I no longer teach said hi to me in the hall, and when I responded, she immediately said, “You sound sick.”) It began with a little sore throat late one Saturday, and turned into a runny nose by midday on Sunday. On Monday my head was so stuffed up that I couldn’t hear very well, and I walked down the halls at work pleased with how quiet everything was during class change. If someone spoke to me directly I could understand and respond, but all the other words which leak from students’ mouths between-times had turned into a soft, indecipherable buzz. A simple bout of congestion had blunted the sharp edges of my world, and I was content. By that night my voice sounded like someone dying very gradually of strangulation, but dying happily, because I thought I sounded funny, and kept laughing a lot. I even tried singing in the bath. (Some days it’s easy to keep yourself entertained.)

So for the last week or so my voice has flickered in and out as I teach, and some days I have needed to escape to the bathroom every hour, on the hour, to blow my nose somewhat violently. At home I have gone through an entire roll of toilet paper stationed by my bed, because who actually buys boxes of tissues in their twenties? (Or am I just behind everyone else?) Several people have urged me to get tested for the flu, but I keep promising: it’s just a cold. It’s really just a cold. On Friday, I went to dinner at the home of a couple from church, and within fifteen minutes of meeting most of the people in the room, while we were thanking God for the food, I descended into a coughing fit. I escaped to the bathroom as my gag reflex began to engage, and for a brief, sad moment I considered the possibility that I may soon see pieces of my own lungs floating in the toilet bowl of these nice strangers. Then my roommate, whom I had come with, brought me a glass of water, and told me that she had assured everyone that I was okay so quickly that they probably now thought she was an awful, callous person. I said, no, of course, obviously I would have said the same thing: it’s just a cold. (And it really is.)

One of the ways I know it’s not the flu is that I had the energy to finally get my oil changed on Wednesday. Big deal. I went to one of those express places, where you don’t even have to get out of your car and they do the whole job in ten minutes. Now, I know these employees are trained up to be especially charming and chatty and use your name at the beginning of every sentence they say to you (Alice, Alice, Alice), but the mechanic helping me, whose name was Javier, he was more than friendly. He was all in. He was maybe twenty-two, excited to see a Calvin and Hobbes book among the junk in back seat, and when he asked what I did for a living and found out I was a high school teacher, he stopped what he was doing and stood by the kiosk telling stories with great enthusiasm about all the times he had skipped class as a teenager. (Once he dressed up in a female friend’s clothes and hid in the girls’ bathroom! But his crowning achievement had of course been the time he’d snuck out of ISS and ended up hiding behind a door [the logistics were vague here] as he listened to the teacher standing a few feet away tell some administrator via walkie talkie that she had looked for him everywhere but just couldn’t seem to find him…a moment of supreme victory.) He kept assuring me that I must not have any students quite like him. I smiled and privately began to count the number of familiar faces which had already popped into my head with the same kind of grin and the same tendency to wander the halls.

After Javier finally changed my oil (I think), and I had paid, he asked what subjects I taught. When he heard that one of them was writing, some light turned on inside of him. I had thought he’d been warm before, but now he was glowing. He said he liked to write poetry and told me about the fantasy novel he was working on and how hard it was to get it finished. I said that I could sympathize. The oil change took more than the promised ten minutes, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Also, I learned things. Not sure what, but, you know, things.

And last night, because this cold was still hanging on with a death grip, and because I knew it would be raining, I planned what I would wear today: a pea-soup colored sweater which I think is from Goodwill,  a denim jumper with white flowers embroidered on (which my mom likes to remind me is actually maternity, because she wore it while pregnant with me,) along with black lace tights and sparkly black rain booties, both of which are new (a big step for me). This is not at all a fashion blog and it’s not as if I have a picture of myself to show, but I wanted to tell you because I look like my college self today. And for a Wednesday in February, that’s a-okay.

Maybe my telling these stories has been boring, and I haven’t been able to make a good essay out of them. I don’t know. But that doesn’t change the truth of the matter: that God has been all these places and in all these things, so mundane or not, they are holy ground, and it behooves me to treat them as such.

In Exodus God makes Moses take off his sandals when faced with His glory manifest in a bush set on fire. The bush is impressively burning with supernatural flames which do not consume, but up until this point in its life, the bush has just been a bush. But perhaps no less holy.

Have Hope

By Tagged , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This week I told my students news I’ve been sitting on for a little while: next year, I’m not returning to teach because I’m going to graduate school in Vancouver, a city in some other country facing out over some other ocean. Some of them were calm when I told them, and some were less-so. Two fell out of their chairs. A few announced they could no longer do the assigned work for the day because of their great grief. I laughed. But my hands shook through the first two classes I had to tell. I am sad. I’m as sure that this is the right decision as I’m sure of my own right hand, but nothing can quite assuage the child-like sorrow I feel over leaving people and places I love.

However, my moving to another place and another life is the least of these things.

My sister told me this afternoon that everything feels heavy right now. This season has been one in which I’ve learned the weight of the world, and this week that weight has been not only burdensome but loud. All the pain in my peripheral vision, the groanings of the created beings around me, are making themselves known in cacophony.

I have been thinking of the Yeats poem I love which says: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” I grieve for the things I see that are lost, many beyond repair. He’s right: the things on which we rely will be shattered, and we can’t buy back past innocence for ourselves or for those we love.

I love that poem because it is completely true, but I also love it because it is completely short-sighted. I’m not disputing the obvious brilliance of W.B. Yeats, but human bitterness often assures that our long-distance vision is effectively nil. Things lost may be beyond repair, but they are not beyond redemption and rebirth. The things we rely on will eventually crumble beneath us, so that we may land at last on the Rock, the only one who can, in fact, buy back not only our innocence, but ourselves entire, and bring us into eternity. Yeats tells the truth, but only the first page of it.

One of my fellow teachers, a kind, kind man who was my English teacher himself back in the day, told me yesterday that I needed to write a book, because I had something to say. I hesitantly agreed, and perhaps what I have to say begins with this: I am hopeful.

Once I would have told you that I am hopeful because my students are sweet and bright and growing up into good people. I would have told you that I am hopeful because my family and my friends, they love me and make me happy. I would have told you that I am hopeful because God had given me far more comforts and blessings than I deserve. I would have told you that I am hopeful because spring comes every year.

But now, though my fears are bigger, because my fears are bigger, so are my hopes. They are stronger than they once were. Now I am hopeful because no matter where my students end up, they have a God who loves them each like the hundredth sheep. Now I am hopeful because that same faithful God loves me and has given me others to pass that love on to, in sinful fits and starts. Now I am hopeful because that love is so real that God saw fit to manifest it in his own bleeding, gasping Son on a cross. Now I am hopeful because I serve a God who dreamed up spring, who has pronounced that life can spring forth from the deadest death, that Yeats’ “blood-dimmed tide” will be followed by the clearest dawn.

Christmas (Promised)

By Tagged , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve always been one of those purists who doesn’t want to see any Christmas decorations or hear any Christmas songs or eat anything that tastes like peppermint or cinnamon until after Thanksgiving, because there’s a schoolmarm living on my shoulder who says that we must keep the season unto itself so that it will remain precious and unspoilt.

But this year I’m throwing that out the window. Maybe it’s because my mom has been texting me potential dates for the Christmas party they’re throwing this year, or maybe it’s because the books sitting next to me on the couch right now are Thomas Cahill’s The Gift of the Jews, Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, and Malcolm Guite’s Waiting on the Word, all of which sound like promises. But more likely the reason that my roommate and I took a detour the other night in Harris Teeter to prowl around for chocolate advent calendars is that in the last few months, and even especially in the last few weeks, I have been learning how little control I have over my own life and any goodness that comes from it, and how every neat little security structure I have set up will eventually fail me, sometimes in a spectacular fashion. But when I think of Christmas coming in forty-three days, I feel peaceful in a way that cannot possibly make sense to the outside world.

The advent of Christmas means the advent of a Savior, a Savior who will fulfill everything the prophecies foretold and see this thing through to the bitter, wine-on-a-pike end, all the way through to the blinding new life on the other side. So I’ve had a change of heart, like Scrooge, because it is more and more wonderfully apparently that Jesus is not only a rock, but the only solid one, and I want to try to “keep Christmas all the year” to remind myself.

Something else I’m doing this fall, besides learning hard lessons that I thought I already knew, is interviewing women about their faith. The first question I have been asking right off the bat is “Tell me your favorite Bible story.” So that’s how I’m going to keep Christmas today. I’m going to tell you the story.

It begins with a scared girl who is trusting, trusting and a good man with her who is trusting, trusting. The two of them are headed on a trip away from home to obey the law of the land, and then in a strange barn on the old hay with the smell of manure there is pain and terror and blood and then a crying baby, alongside the sleepy animals.

And an angel comes, but not to Joseph and Mary, to some tired shepherds on a nearby hillside. The angel announces joy to the shepherds, that the newborn in the feeding trough has come to save them, that this is God’s plan and they are the first the hear news of this One who bears peace and goodwill into the world. The angel brings a whole singing host with him. So the shepherds hurry to worship, and then they hurry to tell the story as far and wide as they can.

And there is a star too, a big, bright one, but not for Joseph and Mary. Instead the star is for men in the East who follow it to travel far and risk their lives to give the tiny King the worship that they somehow know they owe him.

And the scared girl who trusted gathers and treasures all these things in her heart. And so do we, because this is the promise of things to come.

Oh, joyful and triumphant, come let us adore him, Christ the Lord!

A Brief Come-to-Jesus Meeting with Myself

By Tagged , , 2 Comments

Just so you know, previous titles of this entry have included “The Very Great Difficulty of Living in Grace” and “Gifts.” It has been sitting in my drive in a half-finished, bits-and-pieces state for a couple weeks now. Every time I come back and fiddle with it, I end up cutting more of it. So now I am just going to tell you (and myself) some things I really need to hear, because maybe you need to hear them too.

There is nothing I can break that my God cannot fix and better. He makes crooked places straight.

In every way that I fall short, he does not. The overblown catalog I have taken to keeping of my failings is, conversely, a list of all the things he is not and never will be. He fills every lack perfectly. So I don’t have to. But if I let him, he will make me holy like him. And that’s a promise.

I am a child of a Father who runs to meet me as I emerge from the slops of the pigs. Who am I not to have hope?

Jesus’ love is for me. I wrote that on here a while back, but now I have something to add: I am for it. I am meant for it, made for it. My very first priority is simply to allow his love to surround me, to exist within it. If I am really doing this, abiding in him, then of course I will be bearing witness to his love and showing it forth to the people around me. Of course.

If I am abiding in him, I am doing enough for today.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:                                                                               So I did sit and eat.