Tag Archives: Jesus

Deepening Ruts

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Two years ago, for a full school year, I wrote a poem once a week, always on a Monday. Why I chose Monday, I don’t know, except perhaps for the fact that Mondays were the worst days for it, so I’d get the best poems, ‘cause I’d have a lot of feelings. The only rule was that the poems must be addressed to God. I stopped when summer came, and have written inconsistently since, so I only have a handful more, but so often I find myself going back and reading over those lines in that green moleskine, especially in the past few months. Many of them are sloppily constructed, and some of them don’t contain anything of value at all, but a handful of them are true. I managed somehow to wraps words around God’s gifts and hand them back. I read them now and I am reminded. I am reminded of my Lord’s steadfast faithfulness whenever I am lost, and lost, and lost again. Apparently we can bear witness of the truth not only to others, but to ourselves.

I have sometimes done the same thing with these blog entries, wandering back to re-read the things I learned three or four years before. Coming to understand the Gospel, Jesus’s good news for us, is not so much a series of revelations as a deepening of grooves, a learning of the same things over and over, only heavier and more each time.

And as I read over these last few entries, I think that in a roundabout way, I have been trying to talk about beauty. Of course I have always believed that God speaks to us through beauty. You’re supposed to believe that when you read and write for fun, and make other people read and write for a living. You’re supposed to believe that when you’re me. But only recently, I think, have I really begun to understand beauty as something that I am surrounded by, that will teach me about the God who made it, who delighted in it first, who called it good.

So, though it’s small, I will just tell you this: I have learned recently that beauty is the moon still hanging gossamer in the sky at seven-thirty in the morning while I drive to school, like a disk of stretched lace, mislaid in the thick blue.

And I believe that next time I come back to read this, I will have learned beauty just a little more.

Measurements

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If I were to tell you briefly what I miss most about studenthood, I would tell you that I miss all the measurements. I miss the measurements because back when I had them, they could tell me how I was doing. The grades told me I was doing well, or I was doing alright, or sometimes they told me “Oh no!” The comments I received along with the grades gave me other measuring words: “Excellent analysis” “Adequate reading” “Very poor introduction.” But my favorite was the way that for a student everything, good, adequate, or poor, came to an end: years, semesters, classes, papers, projects. Everything reached a point where it was finished, polished and shiny, ready to become my ancient history. I used to love the moment when they passed out the test and you put your notes under the desk: whether I had studied for fifteen minutes (which was not enough) or three hours (which, frankly, was rare) there was nothing more I could do now. I knew what I knew, and not what I didn’t. I found it easy to be a philosopher when it was up to others to decide the value of my work.

But now it is hard. I have a great deal of freedom in my job, and I am grateful for this, but it means that much of the time I am my own judge, jury, and occasionally executioner. Each day I come in, and for lack of anyone else to constantly measure me, I become the fly on my own wall as I make curriculum decisions, pacing decisions, policy decisions, grading decisions, classroom management decisions. I sit and watch myself, with the good, adequate, and “oh no!” score cards waiting in my hand, as I make second to second decisions about what words and inflection to use with the student I’m speaking to. Oh, I want to do well. I want to do well so badly that I am hard on myself, because how else will I grow? I’m terrified I might end up complacent or even delusional about my own performance. So I come into school each day, saying, “Alright, do better, Alice,” without really knowing what I mean by that. Sometimes I wonder if the standards I ask myself to meet are possible, or even definable. But I never know, because that final test that would tell me never comes.

And if school is bad then summer is worse. It is formless and quiet. By choice I spend a lot of time by myself, left to my own devices. And there’s the rub. Alone, unshowered, on a July Tuesday morning, I sit on my bed, feeling a desperate pressure to accomplish something, without entirely understanding what I mean by that. I know that it is summer, and I am free. Free to do all the things I don’t normally make time for: cook and clean and read and write and walk and talk and put on make up and spend money. The list begins to grow and overwhelm me, the Mr. Knightley I have built out of extra shards of my own conscience says “Badly done!”, and I end up watching Netflix and indulging in a self-loathing which is nothing like rest.

I say all this not to sound dire, but because this is so often the gist of my inner monologue. I want to be told that I’m doing wonderfully, and by a more reliable source than myself, but I also want to be alone, and do things my own way.

So first I must laugh at myself, because that is usually a good way to begin (and beginnings are the best endings).

And second I must repent of more than a little self-aggrandizement. I must repent of the silly belief that even if I cannot be the savior of the world, I can still be the savior of myself. I must remind myself that goodness and growth and learning come not through human effort, but through God’s grace to us.

Last, I must find a new way through. I am not a good measurer of myself, so I must find something else to measure, some other structure to lean on, to tell me the value of the work I am doing. I must hold it up to the cross, I must ask it about joy, I must find if it leads me to worship.

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains

       But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Peace

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School is done and so is our post-planning workweek. I don’t think I genuinely believed the last day of school had happened until about three or four days after it had. I am mind-weary. Teaching fills you up to overflowing, but it also makes you forget almost everything you ever learned. (This is ironic, but, happily, so are most things.)

The other day, going through papers at home, I came across something I wrote when I was seventeen. In it I had quoted a line from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “Darkness declares the glory of light.”

I used to love that line when I was a teenager. I would quote it aloud and in my writing. I may even have transcribed it onto various whiteboards around school, because that’s the sort of kid I was: obsessed with words and more starry-eyed than was necessary. Reading it again startled me. Though I used to be so fixated on those words, somehow I hadn’t thought of them for years, and I was arrested by their truth. How had I forgotten? What superfluous worries had edged them out of my consciousness for so many years?

A couple nights later I took a short walk by myself. It was not really dark yet, only fading into gray, but there were fireflies coming out anyway. I thought of the line again: Darkness declares the glory of light. All sin and evil is just good that has been twisted and marred. Nothing bad is original material. So the existence of any wrong means that there once existed, and if you believe the promises of the God I serve, still exists, an opposite and more powerful right. So all darkness, in this or any world, inevitably, though unwillingly, testifies to the existence and the power of righteousness. We identify a shadow only by perceiving the light around its edges. That’s what Eliot meant.

As I continued to walk, alone in the June evening, a small voice asked politely if I still believed it to be true. The darkness you understood when you were in high school was tiny compared to the darkness you know of now, it said. Has the light really grown in proportion?

Hesitantly, I tested it. I summoned the creeping, long-fingered spectre of my anxious fear, which did not exist at all when I was a seventeen, or certainly not with the size and power it does now, and asked what particular light it declared. What was the opposite of fear? I resisted the immediate urge to shout “Boldness!” which can sometimes be foolishness, or even “Courage!” for which fear is actually a prerequisite. I wanted more than that. I stared into the deep trees leading down to the arboretum, lit by the shy lightning bugs, and realized: peace. The existence of fear declares the glory of peace.

Peace never seemed to me to be a very important virtue. It is, as some of my students would say, vague, and usually brings up visions of Miss America contestants expressing their hopes for the world at large, or automatic signatures on emails from hipster Christian college students. But maybe it is hard to express, because, like humility, it cannot be showy. You can impress others with your love and joy and kindness and courage and perseverance and patience, but peace is simply not an outward action. In fact, I think peace may be invisible. The only two people who will ever really truly know if you are at peace are you and the God who made you.

Peace is the state of being right with God. You can have all this world, but give me Jesus. To be at peace is to be able to unreservedly worship, to enter the state for which we were made.

So though teaching makes me forget and heavy shadows loom larger with each passing year, I am learning and learning still. I am learning that peace is the virtue for which I have long been thirsty without knowing it, and I am learning, like Lucy Pevensie does, that Aslan grows larger with each passing second. Not only has the light I can see grown in proportion to the darkness around me, but it will eventually obliterate that darkness and surpass it, far into eternity.

All things exist only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

Blessed Are the Februarys

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I feel as if every year in February I write a blog entry about how little I like February.

This is because February is grey. It has a sandy feel that goes down your throat and into your stomach, and everyone seems tired and cynical and little bit empty in the eyes. I usually feel used up and far-from-home.

So since this February has arrived in all its disheartening splendor, I have been feeling small and small and smaller lately, and then this past weekend I read The Great Divorce. And I read where the Spirit tells the man with the lizard on his shoulder that “the gradual process is of no use at all.”  I stopped and I sat very still. This is at least the fourth time I’ve read the book, this scene has always been my favorite, and I think I may even have already underlined those words before. But I guess I haven’t actually been paying attention.

For a very long time, I’ve fed myself the narrative that since life is long and winding, and we change so slow, it’s okay to come to Jesus the long way. It’s okay if I don’t do the best thing, the right thing, today, or if I only do it halfway. I’ll begin being faithful eventually, when I’m older and better, when I’m tough and mature enough to handle it. I’ll join the ranks of the saints once I’m fit for sainthood.

But He must have all of me now no matter how flimsy and sullen that “all of me” is. The plan is not for me to inch towards Him as I have the strength and inclination. I’ve got to throw myself onto the pyre to be made new. And beyond that blaze lie the unknown regions of sheer grace.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

Blessed are the ones who sing off-key,

Blessed are the ones who’ve lost their appetites,

Blessed are the ones who forget their turn signal,

Blessed are the ones with illegible handwriting,

Blessed are the uncomfortable, the fragile, the speechless, the lowly,

Blessed are the ones who are often flat-out wrong,

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and the “Bleeding Charity” that flows at its heart is theirs for the taking.

Christmas and Tradition

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When I was growing up, Christmas meant Grandma’s. It meant long hours in the car stuffed with puffy coats, reading Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud stave by stave, and then arriving in Missouri to cousins and orange balls and running fast on carpet in sock feet. Christmas meant crowded rooms and couches and beds. It meant all twenty-some of us choosing a favorite carol in order from oldest to youngest while siblings switched off at the piano. It meant sitting hip-to-hip with contented joy. I was in awe of those Christmases, so in awe that they sometimes made me forget myself.

But I am grown now, and no Christmas will ever be the same. My grandparents have been gone for over a year and the house is sold. The place we went is no longer ours and the faces which used to await our arrival have been buried. The things which made me love Christmas so seem to have vanished. So it is tempting to me to spend the holiday mourning the traditions and the stability that are lost. This time of year, I want nothing more than to run back to the comforts of childhood or even adolescence, to revel in the reliable beauty of those Christmas customs.

But I cannot return to those traditions, so instead I will try to remember the self-forgetfulness that they taught me.  Because Christmas is not actually meant to be about tradition. It is meant to be about the world turned upside down, shook to its core. It is the story of a remote corner of a poor place where a child was born to speak truth, and to sweat blood, and to die, that I may know truth, and be clean, and live.

Every year that is true. The foundations of our little worlds may shudder, the walls which kept us safe and warm may crumble, the faces around us may seem strange and hard, but every year, if we look up, a star calls us to Bethlehem. We are meant to follow its light, to worship and be changed.

On Friday, I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my juniors for storytime. I laughed through some of it, but some lines moved me:

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any presents at all!
He HADN’T stopped Christmas from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

I am grateful for the Child who has come to save, and I am thirsty for his grace.

Pockets in the Between

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One of the things I have been doing this time of year is making my students write thank you notes. I tell them that it’s good for us to make ourselves be thankful and to express appreciation to those who don’t hear it from us much. And I tell them that I do this because one day during March of my first year of teaching, when I went to check my box at work, I found a letter inside from my college friend Kate. It was a gem of a letter: warm and kind and deeply thoughtful and valuable. I remember that I kept smiling all day because of it.

I dug it out just now and reread it. She wrote that she had been thinking of me recently because this was a between season in her life and to her I had always seemed to be good at the between. This was generally true of me in college, I suppose, but I think it’s easier in college. High school is over, full adulthood has not yet arrived, and you’re in a strange, happy, stressful bubble where you only hang out with people your own age and talk about the things you love all day long.

But now is different. Now is hard because it feels like it shouldn’t be a between anymore, like I should have moved past the transition stage. There is a voice in my head, coming from God-knows-where, which says to me, “Oh, but you should have arrived.” And it’s true. I have many of the things I’ve always wanted, not the least of which is my job.

Except that the person living this life is not the shiny new Alice I always hoped I would turn into at the stroke of midnight some night, but instead, the person living it is me. I am still stuck with myself–the one riddled with weakness, who tires out and turns inward, who dreams big and lives small.

I’ve been understanding this acutely lately, and I get stuck in it, I get stuck in the dissatisfaction like mud. So this is me backing up, pulling my sinking ankles out of the mire, and climbing onto solid ground. Yesterday I read a passage from Lewis’ Weight of Glory with my juniors, and I told them that our inherent value is not in what we do or what we say, but in our status as image bearers and in the blood of Christ. Everything else is “nothing but filthy rags.”

I should listen to myself more, you guys. I’ve been taught some pretty good wisdom. My kindness, my smartness, my care with my words, my worry over my students, the red ink in my grading pen, the clothes I wear, even the thank you notes I write, are nothing at all when compared with the grace of Golgotha. We can, and should, be grateful, but our goodness–whether we have it or merely wish to have it–is not our own.

I am best reminded of this, I think, by the strange moments when I have stumbled on some surprising pocket of joy which could only have been placed there by One who loves me. We cannot really go searching for little eternities like that–instead they overtake us and, for a second at least, lift the veil.

One night January of my junior year of college, I left a game night at the Edwards’ early so I could go out for a friend’s birthday. It was late, after eleven, and I remember that there was some talk of sending someone to walk me back to campus, but I wanted to go alone. It was very cold that winter–we sometimes woke up with ice coating the inside of our windows–and the powdery snow was falling with a silence that demanded I listen. The road was completely still. My friends were supposed to be picking me up on their way, but they weren’t there yet and I walked up the hill to campus through the streetlights by myself. As I reached the entrance by the baseball fields, my roommate’s car pulled out and past me and I ran out into the street behind them and waved. A couple hundred feet down the car stopped and waited. I could see more than one pair of gloved hands waving at me through the foggy back windshield. I began to run down the middle of the road, through the snow, soft beneath my heavy boots, and through the silent golden streetlights filled with ten thousand quiet snowflakes. The sky was black and starry, and I wanted that moment to go on and on and on.

I cannot figure out what allure it had, except for beauty: as if the wall between myself and glory were sheer, as if Jesus loves even me.

Saving and Spending Myself

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This summer I was talking to a former student about how she wanted to travel the world. I said that I had never really had wanderlust, but that she should follow her dreams and go every place she could and all that jazz. She paused and said, “Well, if you don’t want to travel, what do you want?” I had never been asked that before, or at least not so bluntly. “A house.” I told her quietly. “I want a house.”

I have been drawing blueprints for houses since elementary school. Many of them were for fictional characters to live in, but some were just for me. And in the houses I drew for myself, there was always one central, special haven of a place. There was always a great big round perfect bathroom. It had a domed ceiling, with windows high in the walls. There was a fireplace and bookshelves wrapping all around. A toilet and sink would be tucked away behind some curtain somewhere, and the enormous claw-foot bathtub would sit in the heart of it all, built with ledges wide enough to hold books and papers and snacks and drinks. Most importantly, the door would shut and it would lock. If that bathroom ever actually existed, I would probably never come out.

I love closed doors. I love closing my bedroom door and my classroom door and the door of my car. I even like closing the door of the stall in public bathrooms. It gives me instant relief when I am anxious and it makes me feel safe.

I can blame this on my introversion all day long (and sometimes do,) but the fact is, I am saving myself up. This is my justification. I don’t want to run dry and run out so I conserve energy and patience and self, as if I, a human being, am some allocated amount of precious resources which must be spent judiciously and reasonably at just the right times and in just the right places, then locked away when not in use, away from all those leeches: those other human beings.

I am not a misanthrope, but, though every one of my vices is pretty darn drawing-room appropriate, they are all ways of pulling the latch-string through, retreating, “shutting the door and sitting by the fire.” So many things I run to to heal my soul seem to be just more ways to keep people out. As if the others are the problem. As if my occasional human agony and weariness is not born of the sin in my own heart.

I am not some valuable resource to be scrimped and bartered with. I am a growing, stumbling child on the great communal road to righteousness. I am a created vessel, meant to be filled and poured out, washed and filled again, always open. I am a door for my precious students to walk through and through and through.

A great and dear friend of mine wrote once that we ought not “draw imaginary lines on the seat; let people lean into your space and when the pain comes ask Jesus for the grace to bear it.” I have not been redeemed  from the pit by the God of the universe so that I can spend my time locking myself in bathrooms. I have been redeemed to be an image bearer, to become like Jesus, to take up my cross and give myself away.

I still want to buy a house. But I’d like some other people to live in it with me. Or at least one. We’ll start there.

Without a Place

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Last month, I read an essay by a woman named Jennifer Trafton, and in it she described “the feeling of being the Picassoesque face in every crowd…You would like me, surely, if only my left ear were not hanging crookedly off the end of my tongue.” The essay made me cry.

I was raised by parents who were academics and who were Christians. They had PhDs from the University of Chicago and now taught British literature at a state university, and every Sunday morning we brought along hymnals and sang “Fairest Lord Jesus” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” on the way to church in the minivan. In a world where the evangelical mind was a scandal, and universities were ever busier building ivory towers of Babel, they, and therefore we, were impossibilities. Yet there we sat after dinner each night, reading aloud everything from Corrie Ten Boom to Thackeray to Yeats to the Psalms.

And so I was always acutely aware I was like no one around me. From the time I was about six I understood that I was my own little untethered island, floating through the strange seas of the wide world. My friends listened to Adventures in Odyssey and went to the beach every summer and spring and watched the Disney Channel and had things like Gushers and individually packaged Pringles in their snacks. I read multiple books a day and swung on a swing my dad had made and took long walks when my mom kicked me out of the house for reading too much and ate home-grown dried tomatoes off the racks of my mother’s dehydrator. Through sticky North Carolina summers, we went without air conditioning and lived with windows open to the breeze, and in winter we heated our house with a wood stove. Once, while standing in my kitchen, a friend who had been to my house dozens of times told me that it seemed strange that my family owned something so modern and practical as a microwave.

I felt displaced. I was made of some other metal than all those around me, softer, with an odd sheen, and I knew the differences went far beyond my family. I remember as a child spending afternoons wandering round and round my backyard looking for a place that could be only mine, that felt just right. I climbed trees and I crawled under bushes and no place fit. I was the wrong shape for all of them. Later when I first began to write stories in earnest, I always stuck consciously to fairy tales. I felt so unsure of and baffled by the world around me, that I didn’t think I could muster it onto the page. I did not belong to it, and it did not belong to me.

I don’t think a day has gone by when I have not felt too small or too large, too old or too young, too much or too little. I was loved and am loved, and I have never once doubted that, but in every group, I feel like the token, though I’m never sure what I’m meant to be a token of–the one who reads and dreams and cries and digs her heels in? The one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other girl?

When I was young I resisted my differences: I wished my parents had named me Sarah, like everybody else, and when the other fifth grade girls chatted about their manicures and asked me if I was going to get one too, I said ‘maybe,’ knowing as I said it that it was a lie. But by the time I hit middle school, I had decided to make peace with my awkwardly glinting differences, to learn to love them. I began to cling to them, in fact, sometimes at the cost of relationships with other people. I was shy and stubborn and defensive. (I am still shy and stubborn and defensive, but sometimes I am a little better at hiding it.) I cowered beneath the banner of myself. In fact, there were seasons and places in my life when, for my own comfort, I consistently translated “I am different than you” into “I am better than you.” I thought that superiority would ward off loneliness and fear. (It didn’t. It just made me bitter.)

Around the time I was seventeen or eighteen, though, I gradually began to get a little better at friendship. I started to actually listen, and wait, and wade slowly through the waters of the people around me. And I found, over the course of months and years, that many people who to me had seemed as if they fit so well, were actually covering their own strangely shaped hearts with their hands, and covertly glancing at the world around them with incredulity. I began to carry a quietly blossoming sense of awe as I encountered others. I wasn’t the oddity. We all were.

I know now that the misfit feeling comes from different sources and is more tangible for some than others. For some it’s characterized by real, crushing sorrow or sin which has marked them like Cain, for others by differences in race or culture or ability or interest or by unhappy and broken families and relationships. For many of us though, it’s just a vague feeling that one is some complex and malfunctioning prototype abandoned in a warehouse full of unlike objects.

None of this seems joyful or purposeful and yet I remain awed. I’m not certain why. Perhaps it is because I know our loneliness has the potential to teach us compassion and kindness. Perhaps it is because I know we were not abandoned in the warehouse after all, and that God has a plan for all us billions of impossibilities. Or perhaps it is because I know that God came to seek and save the lost and call little Zacchaeus out of the tree where he clung. I am overwhelmed by the largeness and the strangeness of such original Love.

seated-woman-in-garden

The Smallest Joys

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This is going to be mundane. I’m excited.

First, you have to understand that I don’t spend much money. This is partly because I don’t have much and partly because I don’t need much, but also, and perhaps most importantly, because I have very, very good sales resistance. I usually walk into stores with a very definite list of what I need, and often I walk out with less than that. In fact just last week, I went to one specific store to buy one specific thing, looked at it for a while, decided that I didn’t want it after all, and went contently back home with nothing. I’ve never learned to be a good consumer.

So everytime I go to the Farmer’s Market out on I-40 I stare wistfully at the stalls of gorgeous bright flowers and tell whoever I’m with that really the only reason I want to get married one day is for an excuse to buy buckets and buckets of those things to fill a church with. Usually my companion tells me practically that since they’re only ten dollars, and typically my paycheck is more than that, I should go ahead and buy some now if I like them so much. I never listen.

But last weekend I threw a little bridal shower for a friend and, feeling a little giddy, I headed out to the Farmer’s Market with Karen, and walked away with a bunch of the much-desired flowers cradled in my arms like an infant. Since the bride was leaving town two days after the shower, I kept them and the most hardy of them are still sitting on my kitchen table, shining out the last vestiges of their glory.

Then on Tuesday I went to run an errand for a friend before I had a hair appointment and realized I had some extra time, so, perhaps feeling the afterglow of the marvelous floral purchase, I decided to wander around a little bit. I went to Barnes and Noble, where I bought myself a just-for-fun book, and then to Schiffman’s, where I had my ring cleaned, and then I took myself to lunch and read in the car. Granted, at both Barnes and Noble and Panera, I used gift cards, the book I bought was from the clearance table, and jewelry cleaning is an entirely complimentary service, so I didn’t technically spend a cent on myself all day (even, incidentally, at the hair appointment.) Yet as I stood there in Schiffman’s waiting for my ring, smiling into glowing glass cases at the silver and gold, and politely deflecting the saleslady’s attempts to get me to start a “wishlist” (ha!), I felt a warm, creeping joy, and decided that no matter how puny and silly it might seem to anyone else, I was having my own personal girl’s day out. I felt incredibly frivolous and also heavenly.

Most of the time, especially since fully entering the adult world two years ago, I try to go into every situation and do what should be done. I buy what I should buy, I go where I should go, I say what I should say. I live by the word “should.” Should is a very important word. Should makes the world go round.

But should is not the only word. Perhaps, at times, I need to keep an eye out for places and moments where should has nothing to do with it, where the only real operator on the scene is small, bright joy. And, if you’ll excuse me for applying theology to something as silly and ephemeral as consumerism, I think Jesus died so that “should” would no longer have to be my master. He died so that he, the Light of the world, the Lily of the Valley, could be my master instead.

I’ve worn my grandmother’s ring nearly every day since my senior year of high school, and in that time, I’ve only had it cleaned twice. Now when I look at it, it sparkles. And it makes me happier than I ever knew it could.

Words for Teaching and Words for Everything Else

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School finished a week and a half ago and my last workday was last Thursday. Since then I have read and gone on walks and written and cleaned out my closet and watched The Office and washed my hair half as much as usual.

May was a tough month. The chaos of the end of the year arose, which we all expected, but it seemed that the weight of the world also descended upon all of our heads, which we didn’t. My fourth period can attest that I felt this way, considering that one Thursday I inexplicably burst into tears after morning announcements. It was a sign that we all needed summer, I told myself.

But in retrospect, when we look back and make sense and try fit our feelings into the facts of the matter, we sometimes surprise ourselves. Since September, I’ve been writing a poem every week. I’ve taken the occasional, accidental week off, but for the most part the green Moleskine my mom gave me when I graduated from college has been a place of solace and even occasional clarity. I often look back through the poems to see what I have learned and which ones are really worth their salt if I were to compile a chapbook one day, so I’m well-aware that all year most of my meterless lines have expressed the constant struggle between my lazily writhing loves and the overwhelming and still power of God.

But not so in May. During that month when I felt most afraid and desperate, I find that I wrote of the largeness of his joy. I reminded myself that he does not grow weary in well-doing. I wrote more than once about hope, Dickinson’s thing with feathers, and about my God’s hands holding us in this long earth’s-hour. While my feelings and actions were tiredly treading the ways and the lies of the shadowlands, somehow the words I wrote knew truth.

Oh, how I try not to discount the power that I know words have in my life, and oh, how often I fail. Since the beginning of my first year of teaching, when, in reading or listening, I come across a line that is particularly applicable to my classroom and to my heart at the front of it, I write it on a post-it and tape that post-it to my desk. Coffee-stained and messy, often covered over with stacks of papers, these post-its have become a chronicle of my worries and small mountains and of the ways in which Christ promises to see me through. They are words of peace, reminders that I am not called to heroism, only to the humble service of a God who died and lives again.

But those words are stuck to a desk and I forget to heed them, especially when I leave that desk for months on end. I wander into summer, nervous and burdened, as if John Henry Newman has not admonished me in my own scribbled ink to “show mercy to the absurd” (even when the absurd is yourself,) and George Herbert has not enthusiastically recommended prayer to me as the “heart in pilgrimage…land of spices…something understood.” I wander as if I did not after all have an anchor, forgetting that so many who’ve gone before me not only offer their shoulders to stand on, but their rich, sturdy sentences.

2nd year desk

I must remember. All the words I build up for teaching, they are truths which are meant for the rest of life too. I am diminishing the Word if I try to corral him and only let his power and his healing into certainly places or seasons or callings. I must let him into all spaces and all parts.

The oldest post-it on my desk is actually one I wrote out for myself senior year of college, while I was drafting a novel (something I am beginning to do again this summer). It is from a John Donne poem, and it says “But who shall give thee that grace to begin?”

So I begin, and so I begin with his words and his grace.