Tag Archives: moving

Prayer and The New Code

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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.

The Cruelest, Greenest Month

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Ever since I was a little girl I’ve had a little bet on within myself. Every year April comes, and Easter, and the trees are still grey and bare, but I say to myself, just wait, just wait, by your birthday, just wait. Eventually everything will start to bud, but the days will be coming on faster and faster, speeding up as they go, and I start holding my breath to see if spring will make it in time for my day.

But it does. It always does. I turn twenty-six on Tuesday and outside are bright, thin leaves, bold against the blue sky. Every time I look up, I feel a knot in my stomach.

This morning I went to my Aldi for the first time since its recent remodel. I’ve loved Aldi since college: it’s cheap and predictable. There’s one path you follow through the aisles, and I learned to make my shopping list in the correct order, so no grumpy older person would scowl at me if I had to turn against the flow of traffic to go back for something I’d missed. I liked that the first aisle was the snack food and wine, so the inevitable temptations could be dealt with early on. I liked the loud yellow price signs above products stacked haphazardly on pallets. I think I even liked that the aisles were barely wide enough for two carts, so that it was necessary to make friendly eye contact as you maneuvered past each other.

But now it is bigger. And they have more items stocked than ever. And the first thing you walk into is the produce. And they have labels up which say things like “Cereal” and “Personal Care” and “Cheese.” And the wine is in the last aisle, on sliding racks with mood lighting situated around it. The aisles are so wide now that I think the only person I made eye contact with was the cashier.

If you like nice, easy-to-navigate grocery stores with low prices, you should go to the Aldi on New Garden. But if you’re deeply change-averse like I apparently am right now, you should stay home, because you will hate it. Instead, take baby steps. Open a window and look at the green leaves and pink and white blossoms against the blue sky. Sit quiet and ask for the thing you have been steadfastly resisting: for the God who breathed this life to remake your heart in the same way he remakes spring every year, an act no less wonderful for having been promised.

Moving

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Since probably mid-elementary school, I’ve been shy. My teachers described me that way then, and generally, I would describe myself that way now, though I’ve managed to enter the adult world semi-successfully at this point.

And when I was a freshman in high school, right at the peak of my self-consciousness about the way I looked and walked and talked and thought, a senior boy started waving at me. I don’t remember when or why, but suddenly, whenever I passed him in the small hallways of my high school, he would wave insistently, obviously wanting a response. At first, I refused to give him one, because I assumed that I was being made fun of, that I was the brunt of some mysterious joke.

As a high school teacher now, this makes me realize how little I really understood the people around me, because teenagers’ meanness tends to be somehow simultaneously more obvious and more subtle than this–it doesn’t usually take the middle way–but this fear of some potential mockery I wouldn’t understand dictated the way I behaved with peers outside my own social circle for a very long time. In fact, I probably didn’t entirely outgrow it until my early twenties. A close friend once lightly called me “ice queen,” and it cut surprisingly deep. But I realize now the name was warranted: I used to stiffen, and behave terse or even rude, sometimes outright ignoring innocent and friendly overtures. I figured if I just kept walking and didn’t engage, I wouldn’t get hurt.

But this guy kept on waving. It went on for weeks, multiple times a day, whenever our paths crossed. I couldn’t understand it: since it was a small school, he probably knew my name, but he was confident, cool, unnervingly older. What could he want from me? Finally, with my stomach rising up into my throat like a balloon, I took what felt like a very great risk, and waved back. And he didn’t make some insulting gesture as if he’d caught me in his trap, he didn’t turn to a friend and snicker (in fact, I think he was alone), instead he jumped and he cheered aloud. And in the days that followed he kept waving, even more enthusiastically than before. Pink-faced, I would raise a hand in response. Sometimes he would ask how my day was going. Occasionally a friend would notice the interaction, and I would shrug and whisper, I don’t know…

Gradually I accepted these uncomfortable moments in my day as simply part of my lot in life, and continued for months to dutifully wave, much to his delight. At the end of the year, instead of just saying hello, he began to badger me everytime he saw me to sign his senior journal, which was laid out with all the others on a table in the upstairs hallway (one of many adorable Caldwell traditions). The first few times I ignored the request. I figured he didn’t really mean it. But he kept asking and asking. So finally I did. I know some great war must have gone on inside me between my shyness and confusion over the whole situation and my innate desire to be original and witty in writing, but I have no actual memory of what I wrote. What I do know is that he must have demanded my yearbook to sign in return, because here’s what it says on the second-to-last page: “Dear Alice, Even though we don’t talk that much I still consider you a best friend. I’ll miss your waves.”

The combination of complete understatement and complete falsehood in the first sentence broke through to me, and I think I laughed when I read it. Somewhere in the swirling chaos of my fifteen-year-old thoughts, I finally understood that I had, for months, been the recipient of an ongoing act of pure and joyful kindness. The last line he wrote was the simple truth.

 

Mary and I flew to Vancouver on Saturday to visit for a few days and the sun was rising as we came over Wisconsin. Snow sat in the creases of the mountains, and as we descended into Minneapolis, the new yellow sun shooting through clumps of bare trees turned their brown bones a glowing orange-gold like momentary stained glass. And everyone at Regent, where I’ll be in school next year, really likes singing the doxology: before meals, before class, probably under their breath as they ride the city bus.

I am moving very far away in August, and the little girl who was frightened to wave has left the stifling shell of her paralysis behind in the dusty past. I am thankful for her, but more than that I am thankful for the bright figures dotted throughout my memory, who have waved and shouted and jumped up and down to lure me out of my shell, into courage and sometimes even light.