Accolades or Condemnation?

(as in, not sure which I should receive here.)

Why is it that some folks are wired to make strings of scathing remarks about third parties in the hopes of eliciting more fuel for what seems to be a gossip bonfire. But because these are good folks who know gossip is bad, they occasionally pause to catch a breath and--like Jack Benny--say, "Well you know..." and then piously go on to use some platitude to justify the last half hour's judgment fest. Something like: "Whenever you do the right thing, you should just expect persecution."

So why is it that 80% of the people who are inclined to make that statement have just made your jaw drop in horror at this "right thing" that they did; and the other 20% who legitimately could make such a statement almost never do, unless it is to help someone else along the course toward forgiveness...and never for self-justification. As for me, I just said, "Hmmmm" with a lot of pitch variation for emphasis. But I wouldn't be surprised if she told her husband as she was hanging up the phone, "They told her not to talk." They didn't have to.

So my thought is that God allowed this poor woman to eat up an hour of my precious time with you, my love, on this busy Sunday before you fly out for yet another week...lost time because that is how desperately she needs prayer. For her family plans to leave the church where they have been serving--a church where they currently make the clergy feel the need to be advised by attorneys--to find a place with a more "godly spirit" about it. They want to find some new place to serve, and they wonder about our church. Forgive me, God, but the first thought that came into my mind was that I should play my church down...oh it is a place for seekers, new Christians, ones who were hurt by the church...a real life-application-of-scripture kind of place. And it's splashy, lots of multi-media and electric guitars...(all things that were cast with a spin that would make them look elsewhere.) Am I horrible or calling a viper a viper, Lord? Well anyway, it's done. I'll still pray for her, God, really I will, but I'm afraid her sense of self-righteousness is so firmly placed that You'll have to do some major and painful work on her to make a crack where Your true light can shine through, getting her to that place where restoration is her plea instead of restitution. May her faith survive the lengthy trial of such a humbling.
"How many definitions do you know for the word serve?" said our pastor last Sunday. Let's see, there's serve the needy like at the inner city community center that we visited today; and there's serve on a building finance committee; and of course, there's serve a warrant...

Atmospheres #2

Love is an Essence, an atomosphere, which defies analysis, as does life itself.(Romans 13:8)

Generalizations...

The Christians presume they have it all figured out
...but they missed the Branch.
Still, the great equalization must occur, because
the Jews presumed they had it all figured out
...but they missed the Root.
And the Muslims...God told their mother who they would be
...even before the days of their great Prophet, He knew them.
But they missed Root and Branch entirely.
And so in the end, all who stand with their feet in Jerusalem can say with that country's native poet:
"In Jerusalem, everyone remembers he's forgotten something, but he doesn't remember what it is." --Yehuda Amichai
Pride makes a dark veil of forgetfulness.


(For Christians to sing at the wall and perceive)
Jer 33:15 In those days, and at that time, will I cause the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall execute judgment and righteousness in the land.
Zec 3:8 Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, thou, and thy fellows that sit before thee: for they [are] men wondered at: for, behold, I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH.
Zec 6:12 And speak unto him, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose name [is] The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD:
Jhn 15:4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
Job 14:7 For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.
(For all to stand at the wall and perceive)
Isa 11:1 And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:
Jer 23:5 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.
Mat 24:32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer [is] nigh:
Mar 13:28 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near:
Job 29:19 My root [was] spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all night upon my branch.
(For Jews to stand at the wall and perceive)
Isa 11:10 And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.
Isa 53:2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we (the Hebrews) shall see him, [there is] no beauty that we should desire him.
Rom 11:16 For if the firstfruit [be] holy, the lump [is] also [holy]: and if the root [be] holy, so [are] the branches.
Rom 15:12 And again, Esaias saith, There shall be a root of Jesse, and he that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles trust.
Rev 5:5 And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.
(for the bride to sing at the wall when she makes herself ready)
Rev 22:16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, [and] the bright and morning star.

(for God to stand at the wall and remember why He named this child Ishmael, and why this one's daughter married the one named Esau.)
Gen 16:11And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Behold, thou [art] with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.
Gen 16:12And he will be a wild man; his hand [will be] against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
Gen 28:9 Then went Esau unto Ishmael, and took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael Abraham's son, the sister of Nebajoth, to be his wife.

(For almost exactly a year now--since my personal consecration Sunday--the act of spilling things has had a sacramental quality...finally it makes sense.)

A Prayer for Intimacy
If I am to get lost at all,
let it be in Your arms.
Help me to love You the way Mary did.
And may something of the spilling passion of her devotion,
spill onto me.

This was a Ken Gire prayer requesting intimacy that I quoted back in early June. It took me until this week to realize I'd dreamed this prayer before it ever found these words in my life. Revelation knowledge is a funny thing: you go for months with a strange and beautiful or incongruous image locked in your imagination, and you wonder what it means. Then when the time comes for understanding, you suddenly see its form under a bright spotlight, and your first thought is, "But this is so simple, a child could have seen it. So how did I not see it sooner?"

Foot-washing. I needed at least four references to pop up around me this week for me to be lead into that spotlight, because I hadn't given intimate thought to foot-washing for a long time. Not really since this:

Some years ago, when we were given charge of a youth group, we ended our tenure with them through a surprise foot-washing...do you remember, my love? Pastor Doane gave us that beautiful porcelain bowl and pitcher to use, then helped us by offering them Communion before they came to see us. I remember how incredibly intimate it felt, standing there ourselves also barefoot in that warm darkened room. The candlelight and the water and the soft towels and the music almost feeling as intensely personal as the trinkets that accompany a child's birth. And I remember those we served, first seeing their surprise, then the tears that stung their eyes--both the kids and their parents--as we said goodbye this way. That was a long time ago, when we lived on a lake named for Egypt, as we lived in a place called little Egypt--named thusly because it fed corn to other parts of the Mid-west during a drought long ago...living there as though we'd been planted in a place where Biblical Egypt would be remembered...along with Joseph's forgotten lineage.

Now this spring, on Palm Sunday, you had a dream in which you heard the One who loves us best say to you that His essence would be in the intimacy established between us and those He would lead you to meet...those destined to help us raise our sacrifice, our gift. My prayer is that the intimacy He described to you will feel like the intimacy of that foot-washing. But I also know how it will be different, for my Bible-reading this morning put me at Saint John's version of the foot-washing event. Christ's words to Peter were..."What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will after this." Peter did not want Jesus to wash his feet; he did not want to accept that his own dirty feet would cause Jesus to enter such degradation as to act like a slave given a filthy task. I can relate to that wish for my own cleanness to be such that Jesus wouldn't really need to suffer so much shame on account of me. Peter realized the depth of his connection with all that springs from Adam when the cock crowed on the witching hour...but by then he had already received the foot-washing and everything it represented. And so, I expect, shall we be on both sides of this intimate act of service, one that hardly bears its early ignomy, which is a loss. So is this the flavor of the presentation of our gift? I came across this verse yesterday, too. It also struck a chord with me on a personal level.

"In that day a present will be brought to the Lord of hosts from a people tall and smooth of skin [polished or scrubbed], and from a people terrible [awe-inspiring or mighty] from their beginning onward, a nation powerful and treading down, whose land the rivers divide--to the place of the name of the Lord of hosts, to Mount Zion." Isaiah 18:7


So...I finally have words for that dream from last winter, the dream that echoed Gire's prayer for intimacy and my own sense of making a sacrificial gift-offering. It was a simple dream: I was lying on the ground while a woman knelt over me, face down with her long golden hair flung above her. She'd positioned herself so that she could drag that hair down my body. The nape of her neck was delicate and feminine, and the hair ran up from that neck, each lock one of a thousand golden brooks of water, tiny currents rolling down me as she moved over me from my head to my toes. With the touch of that hair came that all-over good feeling that we both know is not of this world, and never comes except in these dreams. But in this dream, that "good" was not so bold as it is when He brings it, rather it was just a hint...indeed like a fine perfume that makes you ask yourself, "Did I just catch a whiff of something wonderful?" But you're not sure, because it disappears only a moment after it arrives. So I see now this dream is yet another after affect of a significant foot-washing.

Jhn 12:3 Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

It took me until this last week to see the dream's significance. Now as I bring my own gift to the Lord of Hosts I see how I am connected with Mary of Bethany, the Mary who spilled costly perfume on Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair. That hair carried in it the scent of the costly perfume mingled with the dust from His feet. How often did she hold it to her face and inhale the magic trapped there? Did she grieve when the day came that she had to wash it? He told her that this act commemorating His sacrifice would endure. No wonder Paul said,
1Cr 11:7
For a man indeed ought not to cover [his] head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

For a long time I had trouble with the verses that said a woman should cover her head if her hair would be long, or else cut the hair if she would not cover it. It seemed to me an instructional thing that somehow demeaned women in a way. Now any bitterness drops off like an avalanche as I see it is a beautiful prophetic thing that springs from this moment of anointing, indeed that the woman's hair carried a precious secret in it, one for her to protect until the proper time, and so fulfill the original role of Eve...only in this case the Eve that would be fit to serve Christ. I feel like the dream I had revealed the secret power in a woman's hair when employed in foot-washing. It feels like He sent her to me to place upon me that part of His essence bequeathed to me through her as I walk into the last days before I too offer some kind of sacrifice, and this a mystery and a secret...a transfer of power to glorify the Man.

If there be an underlying theme, it would be to define the nature of those who would walk after His ministry: for these are people who believe (and practice their belief) that doing the one thing which seems most demeaning carries with it a hidden glory given to both the one serving and the one being served.

Jung as a Visionary

Lately, it feels like we scuttle around on an iceberg that we have chosen to name synchronicity; we know it is an iceberg because we believe that the things we touch-see-smell-experience aren't all there is. We acknowledge that there is a part of this iceberg that touches the air: the part we can stomp across, the part we can touch with our hands to feel the cold, the part that makes us squint under the glittering glare of the sun, the part where we might even meet a penguin. But tell us that this is only the top 20% of all there is, and we wouldn't be at all surprised. In fact, we do not feel satisfied by simply accepting the truths that we can measure and quantify, the ones floating here in the airy part of our little world...such measurements don't explain everything satisfactorily. Often they don't explain things at all.

Gradually, I've grown accustomed to experiencing this sense of the 80% below the water line. But now a new thing come to startle me where the other has finally grown familiar. It is this synchronicity: others in the world at large also see what is below the surface; but often they don't even recognize it as a vestige of Truth. They believe they raise things out of the murk of their imaginations, and they do; but there is more to it than imagination alone.

Truth...new designers come along all the time and dress Truth up for different presentations; saying it is Opening Night for this New Show, but the Substance will always shine through the make-up, the costumes, the props, the sets--shine through as itself and no other. To know this is to know a powerful thing, for even a lie must offer up that shred of Truth that serves as its foundation. To understand this is to see Truth everywhere, and it is indeed a gift of freedom. (I've known many who refused to recognize Truth except when He stood buck naked on a bare stage. Only then did they give a safe sigh with their hands pressed to their chests. Truth is gracious and will not deny them.)

But for those who receive this freedom to see Him even in the darkest night it means having the power to come in contact with anyone who discusses that 80% of the iceberg that lies below the surface and not be surprised or shocked or faith-ruffled by what they see; for there are those who see Truth without knowing they see Him, thinking it something they imagined. When you know Him, you can hear their words/songs/stories and not be debilitated by the shock of experiencing something "psychic." Most of us rarely expect to experience a spiritual synchrony with someone else's tales about what the hidden ice is like; but when we give ourselves to the belief that the ice under the water is as solid as the ice in the air, neither will such commonalities surprise us.
One example of this experience of seeing things in common we discovered this very week. This was interestingly a bedtime story, interesting because the parallels we experienced to it occurred in our dreams.

"Originally written as a bedtime story for Night's children, LADY IN THE WATER is an imaginative reading experience that inspires readers to observe the world around them and consider their purpose on earth."

We saw this film on your birthday, the day after its release date.
But I in multiple dreams last winter saw myself associated with water, and being chased by an unusual type of dog, not a real dog at all. And even last fall, the image of protection coming my way on the wings of an eagle--this became an expectation, metaphorically speaking, for me.

And both you and one of my students saw hair color changes that struck you as odd in multiple dreams (although both you and she saw it in negative image to the way the movie portrayed it. You both saw light to dark.) You began dreaming this changing hair thing last fall; and my student saw it as something happening to our son's hair in a dream this past spring. Now we see these things on the big screen as images and ideas that floated around in the mind of this writer/director. A couple of years ago, this would have struck us as very odd. Now we shake our heads at each other and shrug.

Then it hit me again, although not so distinctively and not so specific to us, more globally as I was listening to this song:

Fields of Gold:

So she took her love for to gaze awhile, among the fields of barley. (Did he know why it was good to make it a field of barley, for more reasons than just the rhythm of the line? If he didn't, he will someday.)

In his arms she fell as her hair came down among the fields of gold. (Does he know who he commemorates with these words?...Does he know her hair shamefully loosed thousands of years ago was predestined to have a power beyond the bounds of time? I wonder.)

And though many who "refuse" to read his work would say Mr. King is anything but a spiritual writer, I'd counter that he understands the true essence of the gift of artistry and imagination. It is not that each man has his own little enviable pool of imagery...rather he has been gifted with a valve that opens a spillway and lets water flow...water that is there whether anyone spills it or not.

"What writing is. Telepathy, of course." --Stephen King, On Writing

Acceptance of Strength

Did you send this to me? Did I send it to you? Either way, I came across it today as I surfed through old email looking for the one with the funny road signs, (you only find Narnia when you're not looking, you know, haha.) Now that I read you the last blog of today, and you shared that you, too, feel a pull toward work with a different kind of meaning...that you were questioned today by your ride-along about all sorts of things about Jesus Christ and how the answering made you feel...well I wonder if my coming across this old email is pertinent...to encourage you to keep reaching up...don't stay a brick in the wall, at least not the wall you're in now. (smile)

saw this....thought it might cause you to pause...

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Not sure where it came from...

Though you are far away tonight, I feel nonetheless warm with your presence, my husband!

Renewals of Strength

I had a visit.
It has been a while since this One visited me.

I read back over old blogs you've written...sparing though you are on here, alongside my gushing, that is...and I ache sympathetically alongside the ache I seem to be bringing to you. You understand the beautiful things that are ahead of me. But I ache to help you reach that golden potential we know is before you as well. The verse popped into my mind again, "when the daughter of My dispersed ones brings her sacrifice..."

I feel such a personal connection with that verse, and I look at how the alchemy of this sacrifice pulls you in as well, and how you would spill your own blood into the mystic brew if it were asked. So I lifted a prayer...I asked that He make me able to bring the sacrifice that is for me to give.
That was I guess the key...the right time, the right idea, the right words, etc. Tonight's prayer was key because as I prayed this, I saw Him. He sat studying me for just a moment, then suddenly He became that fluid transparent gold, that stuff that could be liquid could be powder, and-- in this case--could be vapor, for He invaded me like gas being sucked in to fill a vacuum chamber, and then I saw myself the gold you say you've seen as He appeared superimposed on me. Then in continuous motion with this invasive rush, He lifted His/my hands above our heads to present...something...too bright to distinguish, but it was surely the sacrifice.

This was the moment you were constrained to wait for, I think. Whatever happens now, I have a focal point for remembering: not only does He initiate activity (in you) but He also receives it (in me) and offers it upward.

And, as usual, I cried after that little episode, cried for about 10 minutes...shoot, I was ready to bawl just seeing Him sitting there looking at me thoughtfully, but when the "vision" came to its fullness, there was no helping the tears. Not sad tears, just the kind that strike you when you see something so beautiful or so majestic. )Like the ones I cried when I first saw Mt. McKinley, remember?) What's most special of all to me is that you know exactly what I'm talking about because you've experienced it as well. There's just something about encountering that Presence that brings tears and tremors, huh?
There's so much more I want to tell you. To paraphrase Saint John as he finised his three epistles, there is so much I want to tell you, but I'll wait because I hope to see you soon!
Love,
your wife

Johnny's words of wisdom

I'm remembering the year we seemed cast to play Peter Pan and Wendy to the Island of Lost Boys. That was the year Matt, then an 8th-grader, dryly commented, "Most people invite a friend over and this friend asks the mom of the house, 'Where do you keep the glasses?' But my friends come over when I haven't even invited them and say, 'Hey, where are the Twinkies that were in the pantry yesterday?' "

Those days ended, and new ones replaced them; but I remember one day that year when I was driving along and saw one of these Boys trudging down the street. Johnny had a gimp leg from a childhood lawnmower accident. His walk this particular day told me he was hurting, so I pulled over and offered him a ride. He gratefully climbed into my van.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Card shop," he said. (They all went to the card shop in those days to play in Magic tournaments.)
"Well, Johnny, that's a long way to walk!" I said.
"I don't mind. I think about stuff when I walk," he said, then he paused as more thoughtful things took form in his verbal center. Johnny never said much; so when he did talk, he first paused a moment to consider, to "measure his words" as folks used to say.

"When you think about things while you walk, you don't notice how far you have to go."
"That's true, Johnny," I said, turning the corner.
"And when you think about things while you walk, you don't notice your legs starting to hurt."
"You'd know, Johnny," I agreed.
"And when you think about things while you walk, you run into signposts."
The fact that Johnny wasn't trying to be funny made him hilarious. I laughed out loud because Johnny only smiled proudly whenever his interesting mind spawned some comment that struck people funny. "Did you do that, Johnny?" I asked.
"Yeah, right back there," he pointed over his shoulder.

Ever since then, the reflections of Johnny the Teenage Sage have come to my aid.
Some days, you shouldn't think just for the sake of escapism; rather you should walk on through the pain and the long haul, because you need to be alert for those signposts along the way.

The Perfect Day

One day in a year,
(one year in a life)
you encounter the perfect day.
it's usually around now
(mid-July)
when the summer is solid--
not too young, not too old.

The perfect day displays itself casually,
in fact, not fully revealed until evening.
mid-day clouds quilt the earth
white silk lined with the old gray goose's down,
make you suspect
this could be the day,
(but you are still not sure.)
not until evening do you know for certain...
...can you say with conviction,
"Yes, this is it."

For on the perfect day, the evening lingers,
knowing itself lovely
so lovely that to die young--this would be criminal.

The modest crickets, the secret birds take part.
and even the mostly brash crow,
(even he)
is not shy to confess his private dreams:
"sometimes I think I am an eagle."
(a sheepish single "caw!")
but on the perfect day,
all other life can believe with him.

And on the perfect day,
smell becomes sublime...
...encompassing
(perfecting)
its sister: taste;
powerful and pungent
everywhere there is life--
in a crumpled sprig of parsley,
fresh pulled from its mother plant;
in the bitter perfume on the woman's wrist
as she carries her just-gleaned tomato to the kitchen.

On the perfect day, a tree
is a quivering mass
green spangles of light and shadow and monarch-orange
in the wake of a disjointed breeze.
and a ball tossed below its branches
lifts into a sunbeam
(for just a moment)
gleaming brighter than life.
and the ball itself loves to be in the game
as it flies under the kiss of the sun...

For the light of this sun has transformed
shifted across the day, across the season
Crystal sharp,
making you sure
you could count the leaves on a tree
three backyards away.

On this perfect day,
(somewhere in mid-July)
all of last year's deadness...
all the fragile mistakes of spring...
these have blown away;
and the final flowering, the drying out, the falling...
these are many tomorrows away
the heart does not pound them out now.

Therefore,
this day...this one special day...
you allow yourself this:
To feel you might never be hungry,
or tired,
or cranky,
or lonely
again.

(I'm glad you're 42 with me now, my love.)

Falling Upward

It is your birthday, and I've already given you your tangible gift.

Now here is your intangible one:

I'm reading a book that introduced me to this term used by social scientists: falling upward. It is a term used to describe a person's tendency to "be drawn to people who are more desirable--physically, economically, and socially--than themselves." During the last few years, I've seen you begin to climb to new heights. These were not so much aspirations of your own construction; but when you were challenged; you did not waver, nor did you lose strength. Now in this last year, I've seen you rocket up in these respects. And so I look at you in awe, and I fall upward toward where you climb:

"Isn't it wonderful all the ways in which this distress has goaded you closer to God?

You're more alive, more concerned, more sensitive,

more reverent, more human, more passionate, more responsible.

Looked at from any angle, you've come out of this with purity of heart."

2 Corinthians 7:11 (the Message)

Happy birthday, my love! May we continue to ascend together!

The Princess and the Pea

subtitled: Who Knew God Had a Quirky Side?

Well, my love, I finally have seen some activity on my own perceptive front to confirm what you've been struggling through...maybe because you've made your peace with saying, "yes" to God, although like so many other things, it feels silly to share it...real "foolishness (playfulness) of God outstrips the wisdom of men" stuff. We both know that laser beam intensity God puts on specific things sometimes. Well, here is a sequence of events that was under its glare:

While at Dad's I picked up a book of fairy tales to read and randomly opened it to "The Princess and the Pea." But while I was reading it, the thought pressed upon me that this particular story wasn't appearing so randomly. Then nothing else concerning this for a week, only the questing memory.

Last night as I lay in bed, finally feeling sleepy, I turned off the droning TV as a movie was starting, a movie called "Fairy Tale: a True Story."

I woke several times in the night with something digging into my back...when I finally woke completely this morning, I reached under me and pulled out a little round black plastic piece of a toy that Nolan had brought into bed with him. (He slept with me last night.) First thought on my waking mind: I'm living the princess and the pea fairy tale.

When consciousness came to me more fully, I still had the sense that a message was being sent to me: a call has been put out, and I am in an identity test to demonstrate that I am one who could fulfill it. You have been given the role of administering the test. So as I hang up the phone with you now, after hearing you tell me yet again your flight is delayed for the sake of the weather, this time you even got so far as to be sitting in the plane on the tarmac, I tell you that maybe this is a delay to appreciate. I tell you of the blog I wrote yesterday. Until you administer this "test" to me I am safely anonymous, but you are on the front lines. If you are stopped, I am stopped. I prayed for your safe travels this morning...as I often do...but today as I prayed, I had an image pop into my mind of angels all around the plane...and I thought of your dream of angels in an airport, angels who could work as long as they didn't get wet. They couldn't get wet for some reason. Now I pray again.

One other thing about this long-awaited confirmation I'm getting for this thing you feel called to on our behalf (on my behalf)...I finally had a brush with "the dream" you've been having regularly for months. You've been asking God to show me what He's been showing you for a long time, but I guess you had to abandon your will to God before that could happen. You finally did, and it finally did. (smile) But mine went a little differently. As we were approaching the dream's tell-tale activities, a small child suddenly entered the room. He carried an old-fashioned tape recorder. My dream-sense up to that point had been that the activity was to be captured on film and that this filming would make it "bad." But the child said, "No, it will only be a sound recording, and that won't be a problem for anyone." But then nothing happened, for your first call about a delay woke me before the dream could go any further.

It feels like the pace may be picking up again...in the domain of our delusions of grandeur. (smile)

Atmospheres

To God:

Just when I think You're finished talking to me through symbolic and repetitive activity, You give me pause over something new...the idea of the atmosphere. Look up, You seem to say.

Atmosphere. The word pops up again and again. A photo blog I follow has gone for multiple days under the title "visible atmosphere." I wonder how many days the blogger will feel inclined to use this theme? Then my middle son brings me a new (to him anyway) song to hear by a favorite Christian band who sing about God The lyrics of the chorus: "Just turn around and I'll be there, moving into your atmosphere." Suddenly, I am encountering the word atmosphere often enough to prompt me to ask You if this means anything.

Then You bring to my mind my husband's dream of some time ago...a few months maybe. He is working in a community when suddenly bad weather strikes...a sudden raging set of tornadoes akin to the ones created through computer graphics in the movie The Day after Tomorow. In his dream, as these tornadoes are throwing everyone into a scrambling panic, he finds a small pond and dives in, sinking to the bottom. Breathing is not an issue in the dream, rather he lies there watching the storms carrying their unwilling passengers and objects over the top of the water. But he is perfectly safe at the bottom of this little pool of water.

And finally, this morning as I opened my Bible for my morning Bible reading, I went to the two prophetic books I've been reading lately and find each of these ideas successively in the places I had marked to read next:

"The burden against the Wilderness of the Sea.
As whirlwinds from the South pass through,
So it comes from the desert, from a terrible land.
A distressing vision is declared to me;
The treacherous dealer deals treacherously,
And the plunderer plunders...
...For thus has the Lord said to me:
'Go set a watchman,
Let him declare what he sees.'
Isaiah 21

And then this one was my second reading:

"Behold the whirlwind of the Lord
Goes forth with fury,
A continuing whirlwind;
It falls violently on the head of the wicked.
The fierce anger of the Lord will not return until He has done it.
And until He has performed the intents of His heart.
In the latter days you will consider it."
Jeremiah 30

Given the fact that I wasn't looking for references on weather conditions, and yet weather imagery is everywhere, I feel the need to look up, to ask for protection...Especially for Scott. From the imagery of his own dream, I pray that he finds the pond of safety You've created for him. Strange, strange, strange.

Oh, and while we're at it, God, can You explain the strange cheese imagery, too? Between my dream of finding a steaming casserole dish of macaroni and cheese strangely placed in a kitchen cabinet and Scott's of sitting eating cheese fondue in the middle of a field, both dreams within the last few days...what's the deal with trying to show us something about dairy products in places unfamiliar? Cheese. Begins as milk before it curdles and ages. Milk. The first food of a man's life...are You going to show me a Biblical perspective on this one, too? So strange the way You talk to us...giving us things that are odd enough that there seems no way to attribute them to our own psychic undercurrent. As always, I come away from Your strange messages knowing little else to say other than, "Let it be according to Your word, O God."

Wednesday again...

...our day for missing each other
the most
each week.

















First, we traveled with you this summer, then we had you home for an "administrative week" and after that we had time spent busily helping extended family, so that ache I feel when you are absent from daily life hasn't been an issue much lately. But this week, it is back with a vengeance. Now the kids are asking, "How many more nights until Daddy is home again?" And I, too, am counting the days.

I was looking back through old photos for ones of Matt at prom etc. to email his grandma when I came across these candids he took of us. These remind me how it feels to be with you when we're not busy doing perfunctory things, but are just enjoying a lazy play day. I love having this part of our combined essence captured visually. I love knowing we've taught our eldest--now that he is almost grown-- to notice the best things about his parents' relationship.

trying a new look...

...with a template Elijah found now that he's blogging, too.
Shown here as the nonplussed child in the center, flanked by Preschooler and Younger Niece, as listed in a recent blog. Don't have a good shot of Older Niece. (She doesn't sit still long enough for me to get one.)

Speaking of things metaphoric...

to you, my husband, as you travel and consider many possibilities

...this is your week to decide whether you are willing to be drawn into something strange by God, and you fear you appear to me as some caveman, dragging me by the hair with one hand and a club with the other. Don't let that worry you, love.

I came across something that may give some peace. These days, someone being given to the world prophetically--as a metaphor in our language today...as a "sign and a wonder" in Bible lingo--this is pretty uncommon, but not so in the days of those ancient prophets. Just today, I was reading about how God made Isaiah walk around barefoot and naked for three years as a sign of things to come. Bible footnotes say that he was asked to walk around in this humiliation as a demonstration of a larger humiliation that was to come on neighboring nations. "God asked Isaiah to do something that seemed shameful and illogical. At times, God may ask us to take steps we don't understand. We must obey God in complete faith, for he will never ask us to do something wrong."

Funny I'd come across that text and its commentary this week, your week in the valley of decision, huh? I am not, however, implying that I am searching out nudist camps online. Our way of being a metaphor is different, and these things must be God-driven after all. (smile) I'm only saying that should you find God leading you to lead me to do something that seems illogical but may have this "sign and wonder" property to it, well then I trust your perceptions. Say yes to God and trust Him to deal with any effects your choices have on me. Remember, this is to be said of us: our victory came through the blood of the Lamb (already a part of who we are) and through our testimony and that we do not love life so much that we are afraid to lose it. "Life" can mean so many things when it is done the way we've been doing it lately.

Our melded roles--man and woman hearing from God and working for Him as interlocking parts of a divinely designed puzzle--in whatever this thing is...it all leaves me in wide-eyed wonder sometimes. It is a partnership for which I find no precedent in Scripture, except maybe when my other namesake called for the leader of the armies of Israel to make first-time warfare at that site where Armageddon will one day occur.
Feels like I should put an "Amen" at the end of this post. (smile)

Grandmother's Bible

Funny, the experiences you find so personal that you label them unique, but they are hardly unique at all. Recently, I discovered a friend's old blog about reading his grandmother's Bible and the way her memory and the "feel" of her seeped into him when he read it.

I, too, have a legacy Bible. It is from a great-grandmother--my namesake--who died when I was three. All that I know about her is that my mother revered her; that she made a delicately quilted baby blanket for me and a lace and blue satin garter for my "someday" wedding; that I wear her plain gold wedding band along with a cross on a chain around my neck, and that I have this Bible that was hers. (As I re-read this list, I get a chill. She foresaw and therefore left to me treasures a lot more symbolic than I have ever realized before.)

I took the Bible to teach a high school Sunday school class one time. I took it out of its box: a book-sized blue box covered in bright yellow daisies--not exactly the expected home for the Word of the Lord, but I know why she needed a happy cheerful place for this treasure. I had the kids look at some of the things she chose to highlight.

One thing is starkly obvious about this Bible: its user sent a husband to WW I and sons to WW II. I told my students that if a Bible is used as intended, it speaks not only about the God being sought, but also about the one doing the seeking. Then I asked them, who would your Bible say you are?

Todd, one of my co-workers, has a Bible that is held together with grey duct tape. There's no telling the original material or color of the cover. Mine is almost to that point. Why not just buy a new one? That question evinces the mystery of the Book. Though the binding is broken, I "know" where everything is in this particular copy. I can review my relationship with certain passages, continue to understand them as I learn to know them better through the processor of every-day life. I can discover new things to highlight that were dark even as recently as yesterday...indeed, the words are alive, and more alive...and they are uniquely Todd's this way even as they are mine...even as they are everyone's who chooses to claim them.

The Service Industry

A week of blogging in one day:

Some days, I have the time to follow the spiritual/financial machinations of ones like Tom Cruise and "the creators of South Park." Some days, I can lay their diatribes over personal hypocrisy and religious disrespect under a glaze of Brad and Angelina returning from their frequently publicized visits to the hungry and underprivileged, and I will respond in typical American fashion: I feel all warm inside knowing I come from a country where there is freedom of expression and people still care about those less fortunate than themselves. Having thus proudly roused myself from my mental lethargy to consider all this good, I drop my vicarious altruism and sink into my own little corner of the world again.

But other days, I dive into the choppy waters of "personal service" to discover that if you have time to do this "service" and time to measure your own convictions as they present themselves in this world of giving, you have little time left to nurse vicariously on the beliefs and actions of others. (In other words, we'd have few celebrities if we were doing what we should be doing.) This last week was one of those weeks of giving. My sister had her gallbladder removed, and I went to tend her children along with my own, to help her through the days surrounding the surgery. This gave me five children to tend--all between the ages of 22 months and 10 years--in a house of maybe 1800 sq. ft. For my own entertainment, I re-read from my dad's library everything from the spiritual fasting of Arthur C. Clark to the indiscriminate spiritual gluttony that is Shirley MacLain out on her limb. (smile) But that would be for another blog. For now, I just need to regurgitate some of the week.

For starters, it had a real yin and yang feel to it. Many events were punctuated with either a "Thank God!" or a "Well, shit!" Which of the two applied in each case is pretty self-evident.

DAY 1
Early evening arrival at Grandpa's where we will all be staying so that my sister can recover from surgery peacefully in her own home.
Learn that Grandpa has contracted services of a daycare so I don't have toddler-care duties during the days, only in the evenings. (He did this because he was called for jury duty this week and won't be able to help me.) Sister is gone a while so have my first run at full child care duties.
Dish up paper plate after paper plate of supper, this while children are discovering that a whole new pecking order for this large a group must be established, and they begin negotiating immediately. The results of this first round of talks: I am left waddling around on the floor picking up corn and green beans after an uneasy accord is established for the use of three video game controllers amongst four children.
Meanwhile, the baby sits screaming, his head stuck in the armhole of his shirt.
One child comes in and says, "By the way, we were invited to Bible school this week. Can we go?"
I don't tell them my thoughts, "Can you go?? Are you kidding??" I wouldn't care if this Bible school were being held at the "Nuke the gay whales for Jesus" church, I'd probably let them go...my raw nerves will need triage every evening. I can already see that.
I'm thinking that Grandpa's house might not have been the best place to lodge. Children turn into monsters at a grandparent's house. It is the place where they expect indulgence to rule the day. "Uuuh...you didn't cut the crusts off my sandwich."
Stop the children from bouncing on the beds.
DAY 2
Case settles out of court, so no jury duty for Grandpa after all, but his other "job"--that of supervising a summer stock theater group in its final week of production for "Little Shop of Horrors"--still keeping him busy every night. My thought: appropriate musical for this week.
Farm the children out to a movie matinee.
Younger niece calls home three times as she is bored with the movie she chose and would like to eat a sandwich as she is tired of popcorn.
Sister has consultation with anesthesiologist, etc. Surgery in two days.
Sister comes home from this appt. bringing dinner from a local country-cooking restaurant.
Baby flings chicken and dumplings all over the kitchen and rubs it into his hair.
You call. I ask how your evening is going.
You say that for now you're watching Titanic but have plans to take a little swim after while.
I tell you that if you don't want me to sound bitter, you'd better tell me you're busy pulling shards of glass out of your foot or something equally enjoyable. Otherwise, I can't be held responsible if I should say things like, "Oh, yeah? Well you can go take your swim off the Titanic, Flyboy!"
You laugh--and I do hear the sympathy in your voice--and tell me that you have ditch digging plans for later.
You tell me not to do too much, but I can already see that the time for a decision in favor of self-care is long gone.
First night of Bible school a great success.
Baths all around go easier than anticipated. Children go to bed.
Stop the children from bouncing on the beds again.
Sister has gallbladder attack. Strange new pain. Chills. Dazed look. Nausea. I start formulating plan for taking whole crew to the emergency room, but Grandpa arrives home from rehearsal, and Sister falls into uneasy sleep. Emergency appears averted.
I finally go to bed.
Preschooler decides to join me a short time later. Refuses to sleep any direction except one where he has both legs slung across my chest. I'm too tired to care.
DAY 3
Three straight days of rain and humidity finally break, making outdoor play again a possibility. Grandpa has to spend the whole day at the performing arts center. Show is in two days and a water problem causes him to need to run a shop vac for 8 hours before rehearsals begin.
Take the big children to the pool. Younger niece calls me once to beg me to bring her a sandwich, then gets a cohort to call when her own call proves unproductive. Then, Older niece (the just barely 10-year-old) calls to say she's been invited to go to a wedding with a friend tomorrow. It's in Kentucky, and they'll ride there in a limo. Can she go? I say, "No. Tomorrow is your mommy's surgery. We don't need to make out-of-state plans with one of your pool friends whom Aunt Debbie doesn't even know." Response: "Well, then can I just go to the movies with her?"
Everyone arrives for dinner. Sister, however, went to her own home to spend the night so that she is fresh and close to the hospital for surgery, so again...they're all mine.
Younger niece needs ketchup before she'll eat meatloaf and wants three servings of mashed potatoes. Older niece is nearly vegetarian and won't touch meat loaf.
Stop the children from bouncing on the beds again. Think to myself, how is it no one realized we have that thorny problem of perpetual motion solved, and it is right under our noses. All you need is a preschooler and a mattress.
Baby's allergies kick in with a vengeance.
Time for Bible school...racing around looking for shoes and at least one clean shirt left.
Baby drops big sister's electric guitar on the floor.
A couple of hours with just baby. Still doing life to the theme of repetitive motion, I hang up a dish-towel, and Baby pulls it off the rack and drops it on the floor, laughing. We do this 25 times if we do it once.
Finally, after Bible school and clean-up, children are in bed.
I go to check on them and discover they have all decided to sleep on the same mattress on the floor, even though there are two other perfectly good beds ready and waiting for them. The oldest is still awake and looks up at me with something akin to desperation as he is clinging to the side of the mattress, trying not to fall off. I use gesture language--God help me not to wake the sleeping ones--to instruct him to move to the empty bed. He complies without any gesture complaint. On a bathroom trip later in the night, I see they have moved again. Two are now in the bed, one still on the mattress and one has now rolled off on the floor.
Dream of my dead mother holding Younger niece on her lap in the little rural church where they're having Bible school. Reminds me of her mannerisms that are remote enough now to have become forgotten until the dream refreshed them.

DAY 4
Yet another day where Grandpa brings home doughnuts for an easy breakfast. Shove two doughnuts and a paper towel in each child's hands and be done with it. Besides, they are the best grocery-store-bakery doughnuts I've ever tasted. The town is known for these doughnuts.
Waiting for the library to open...the children's "activity" for the day...hunting shoes yet again...can't find the preschooler's shoes for the longest time because the baby is wearing them...and what is that the baby just dug out from under the couch and put in his mouth?
Younger niece wants to sit and chat with me. I feel guilty because when I ask her to give me a few moments to myself, she responds, "But I just wanted to visit with you." I learned that one day recently she (an 8-year-old) went about 6 blocks down the street, just to pay a social call on one of her mother's grown friends. She is wired to be socially interactive.
So, I spend time discussing body parts with the baby, the omnipresence of God with Younger niece, the tragedy of being low-man on the pecking order with the Preschooler and comprehensive altruistic sharing with The Eldest (the only one who brought an X-box to Grandpa's.)
Step on the cat.
Stop Younger niece from helping the baby take a dive off the back of the couch.
Hear from Sister's Husband...she came through surgery just fine.
Counting the hours until Bible school.
Receiving unexpected hugs from nieces; unexpected compliance from my sons.
Baby discovers with a chuckle that his feet have toes, just like mine do.
Last night of Bible school and almost miss it, as the children have been running all over town trying to recruit the most guests and thereby win the recruiter prize. Riding bikes half-way across town in heat and humidity causes Neighbor Friend--who has also been attending Bible School all week--to have an asthma attack in the middle of their trek.
Peal into the parking lot just in time...but when the "Last Night" is over kids want to stay late. A mom working Bible school offers to bring them home. Says that Younger niece had salvation experience that night during altar call time. (Dream makes sense now.) She comes home and smears Grandpa's shaving cream all over the bathroom during clean-up time. Making sure those sins are washed away, I guess. (grin)


DAY 5
Waking up early to something blackened and tender...not the residue of a dream about going out for a steak dinner with you, but rather setting foot on the remains of a banana dropped and forgotten beside the couch where I sleep.
Sister is able to communicate better on the phone today. Tells me she loves me.
Grandpa plans to take the three oldest children to see Opening Night.
Children dig large hole in Grandpa's back yard, then go to the pool.
Day runs suspiciously smoothly. Even near-vegetarian niece eats the fish sticks I made for dinner.
Then disaster: Oldest One left his only pair of sandals at the pool which is now closed for the night. Good news is, he is large enough to wear my flip flops. And in this town, showing up for Opening Night of a Summer Stock Theater Production in shorts and flip flops--and being presented there by a barefoot mom dragging along a diaper-clad toddler--this event doesn't turn a single head in judgment. Not here.
Take Baby home, wipe Baby off, lay him down with a bottle. Hear him mumble, "Nite, Nite, Mommy," (His only vocabulary for female care-giver, and so my name to him all week.)
Kids love the show! But still fight over sleeping arrangements.
Tomorrow: going home.

1/2 DAY
Grandpa makes the comment, "Well, you can't say you've done a thankless job this week, because I've been saying 'Thank you, thank you, thank you...' all week."

Headed for home. Transition between Rural World and Midwestern City World is marked with a stop at a convenience store in the Twilight Zone that falls in between the two. I go in and find that along with straight strong coffee, Steamers are now available. Where I've spent the last week, many convenience store workers would have scratched their heads if I'd asked for a steamer, scratched their heads and begun to talk about a cousin's boyfriend who worked on a barge on the River (the Mississippi.) I'd hear all about this boyfriend and cousin and other friends' friends...with my request for a hot drink now lodged in the remote past of conversation. Randomness isn't so random down here; what seems random is rather evidence that a lot of things are simply assumed, as people know each other so well and so long that things like conversational transitions are unnecessary and downright inefficient. My sister confirmed these musings I was having as I drove along--my children deep in travel sleep--when she called my cell phone to say, "Hey, we just had a crack appear in the ceiling and water is dripping everywhere. And I made fried green tomatoes tonight and none of my family would eat them with me...except Poote (the baby.)" Hardly a beat between the two thoughts. Yes, I decided for whatever reason things like transitions and subordinate clauses, these didn't make it into the vocabulary of my land of origin. Thank goodness I can slip back into the old lingo without too much difficulty.

And as for embracing the dualism of it...especially given this lack of transition...well, I think even I--the staunch mystic Christian--might have made Shirley MacLain take notice.

Parallel dreams again...

...I don't know if you will be anywhere near a computer any time soon; and as I go down to be with Kath through her surgery, I don't know if I'll be able to get back on one again before the week is out. But this was too strange for me to hit the road before I recorded it. Maybe you'll have a chance to read it before the week is out. You know how we came to a sense of clarity and a type of resignation to how things were supposed to "work?" You know how you were laying this week in front of God for Him to make any revisions He might want before you went into action on what He has already said? Then you had the strange dream last night where you were ordering at a burger joint before going to a place that from a distance looked like hills and lakes but turned into a swimming complex of many pools. That this was a place where you had worked before, but now it was a lot more high tech. Nolan was there and tried to get into a frozen one. You pulled him back behind the fencing around this strange pool. As for your own interactions with the water, you jumped in fully dressed and surfaced to put your wallet and keys on the side. Did I get most of that right?

...Listen to what Nolan dreamed. He dreamed he was at something that seemed to him to be like an amusement park, only he couldn't see any of the rides. All he could see was a tall mountain that was in the center of a huge lake. You could jump off the side of the mountain and swim, or you could parachute down from the top to the lake below and swim. He had dreamed of this place before, but when he was there in a previous dream, he was alone. This time, you and Elijah and two men were with him. He said you worked at a diner affiliated with the park the whole time, but that he jumped off the mountain and swam. He said the funny thing was that none of you were wearing swimsuits, you just swam in your regular clothes. Then he got out and went sliding, but not on ice...on some type of pipe like you'd use for skate boarding, only he had no board; he slid with his feet.

The parallel or at least corresponding imagery between you two astounds me. I don't pretend to know what any of it means, but I thought you'd be interested to read how much you two dreamed in tandem this morning. He dreamed his dream about the same time you were telling me yours, because he said I woke him as the sliding part was finishing to tell him I was taking you to the airport. The only thing that comes to my mind is that his duplication reminds me how it seems you two have some connection that keeps appearing in both your dreams. Also, that the next part of your dream...where you were at an airport full of angels and you saw a plane unable to land because its landing gear was stuck, making you wonder what you'd say if you were on a similar plane and had to make a last illegal call home to us to say goodbye to the answering machine...and that you wanted something different from that...that a voice in your head said "Why wait to tell them?" Nolan had no parallel to this part of your dream...but maybe the point of his having any parallel was to say "These dreams are important...don't think of them as merely subconscious backwash."

I will pray for you. I think it is a good idea to write those letters to the kids, telling them what you don't want to have to say in a rush or leave unsaid if death--or strange separation--comes in an untimely fashion. I will do this, too. For I also had a dream, one I will tell them. I will tell them I dreamed about giving them each an old-world blessing...walking past them as they stood in a line, laying my hands on them and offering them something like a spiritual legacy or heritage. To Matthew, that he be a stronghold. To Elijah, that he be joyful. To Nolan, that he be loving. I woke not having a clue why there seemed to be such weight to these blessings nor having a clue how each characteristic was designated specifically to each child. I should write these letters, too, I believe.

Remember how I told you about my musings over the life that we find in good words, eternal words? It is time for us to write some. I love you.

Something to keep you happy...

Here are some Stephen Wright funnies I picked up on my favorite forum and that I wanted to keep for whenever I need a laugh. I figure reading 2-3 a day should keep us chuckling for a while.

Here are some of his gems:
1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
2 - Borrow money from pessimists - they don't expect it back.
3 - Half the people you know are below average.
4 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
5 - 42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
6 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7 - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
8 - If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
9 - All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.
10- The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
11- I almost had a psychic girlfriend, but she left me before we met.
12- OK, so what's the speed of dark?
13- How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
14- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
15- Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
16- When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17- Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
18- Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.
19- I intend to live forever; so far, so good.
20- If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
21- Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
22- What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
23- My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."
24- Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?
25- If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
26- A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
27- Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
28- The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
29- To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
30- The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
31- The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
32- The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
33- Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.
AND THE ALL TIME FAVORITE:
34 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?

...Yet happy

...as I read back on the recent history of my postings, I am positive I would depress even the happiest soul with the angst I write of. I need to let you know that I am happiest when I am with you and my wonderful family...even when we are dealing with the "doom and gloom" 10 year old. There is a certain rhythm to life with you. One that is very much like the melody that plays in my mind, in my soul, that soothes me. When we are apart, much of that melody disappears, replaced by the ghost of memory, hopefully enough to sustain me until you provide the sweet sound of your instrument...Accompanied by the percussion section of the kids. Only a drummer can find comfort in those clangs, crashes, and concussions they sound....all wonderful music to my ears.

Yes, I am happy.

Empty.....

....after the last few days....empty to the things we have been feeling. Even when I am confronted with the messages that I assume to be directly from Him, I still feel empty. I don't know if I can will you through this...ask you to do this that is so fraught with uncertainty. I feel myself drawing to you...to envelop you, to center you. I wish no more than to be healthy with you, to grow old, to look back on the thousands of things we did as foolish youngsters...to play with our kids kids, to play without the fear of history. God is asking us something, this I am sure. My heart tells me this. Yet the more he asks, the more I fear losing. I am aware of the eternal aspect of our beings, yet I am not strong enough to release this current, happy time. I have been given an amazing gift in my life with you....He is going to have to show me the outcome, the other side of the stained window, before I can risk it. I feel that even the asking will change us, and I can not say for the good. My heart belongs to you....I can't deny it. Is He asking me to change that? Can I see a different kind of love?

Things I Love about Us

---that you buy ties decorated to display the molecular structure of alcoholic beverages.
---that I keep forgetting to buy a new make-up case, and so I carry my beauty around in a plastic quart-sized freezer bag.
---that even though the bottom is about to fall out of our charcoal grill, we have the faith to risk grilling on it "one more time."
---that we have an interactive relationship with our children, the evidence of which is buried in the files of their favorite video games.
---that we know when to clap at a symphony and why to laugh at a redneck joke.

But most of all...
---that when we both spotted the same t-shirt in a crowd yesterday, we recognized it carried a message pointedly advisory and fraught with a timely intimacy for us.
And still regarding this...
---that we instantly saw the significance of receiving this message from God, hearing its tone of dry humor as if He were standing there chatting with us
---that these were not lost on us, nor did they need interpretation from one of us to the other. They were so obvious, in fact, that you stopped--dead center of a crowded path in the middle of an amusement park--and put your hands and forehead on my shoulder even as your own shoulders shook with silent laughter. "Did you read that?" you said. I nodded, laughing along with you.

God gave us this laugh, and it was for no one but us; yet it was for us together.

White Funeral

Of course, we can shut out the flies and the pollen and the cackle of crows. And if a clean and quiet house is what's most important to us, perhaps that is what we should do. But if we do, we also shut out so much of the warmth, so much of the fragrance, so many of the sweet songs that may be calling us.The flies are all obvious, but what besides the flies is coming through those windows?What is God saying to us there?" Ken Gire from Windows of the Soul

Yesterday, we were on the closed window side of this question. Today, we are on the open window side. The open window does indeed reveal many good things beyond it. For you, it was the affirmation that you are indeed being led by God in all these things. I still stand in awe of that assurance when I pause to think about it, more so all the time.

When we sat at the fountain last night, and later on the bench under an arbor in the park, I found my peace; but it remained tenuous. Over and over, I lapsed back into fear, not that our faith was given to a false voice speaking in our hearts, but that I would not have the courage to go through the full cup set before us. I lacked confidence in myself. You were the rock. You were the bull that would drive onward toward the gate put before us, forging ahead without wavering. You wouldn't force me to accept the cup, but you wouldn't waver in your own confidence that God would protect us now and later. This is a part of your design, and your witness, and it sustained me more than you know.

Now I am in the place I saw yesterday. I sit in that comfy chair and stare out that open window, I think on these things that I read. They are about the white funeral--a burial of the old life.

"There must be a white funeral, a death that has only one resurrection - a resurrection into the life of Jesus Christ. Nothing can upset such a life, it is one with God for one purpose, to be a witness to Him...Have you come to your last days really? You have come to them often in sentiment, but have you come to them really?...We skirt the cemetery and all the time refuse to go to death...Have you had your white funeral? Is there a place to which the memory goes back with a chastened and extraordinarily grateful remembrance--'Yes, it was then, at that white funeral, that I made an agreement with God."

That cemetery. The question of whether I'd gone to that baptism into death in sentiment only, or if it had been real. This question still haunted me. I said the other day that I feared an amputation was necessary, and it was; but it was already accomplished. I learned it had happened last year, but I guess phantom pain made me wonder if the limb was still there, still sick. The amputation needed to happen, but it was already done. What a surprising relief.

All this is what was outside the window for me. I believed I'd had my white funeral, but I didn't know it for a certainty. So He told you to take me to view the grave. He told you to take me to a place where those dead bones that should not live nevertheless could live if they ever would. Was it risky? On the closed window side, it looked like it could be. On the open window side, we know they are dust.

He is so efficient, isn't He? Look what He accomplished in just one evening of living after months of grooming our faith:
You were affirmed as the head of me.
I was affirmed as one who walked in submission and did not follow my own agenda.
You were affirmed as one who hears and obeys the voice of God, and
I was affirmed as having indeed come through my white funeral not just in sentiment, but in truth. I think you have this gift alongside me, but I would not speak for you in it. I only say it seems like it to me.

Funny, this makes me remember the dream I had the other night. Remember the one with the white cat? I sat on a couch, and I heard a baby cry. The man in the room said, "Probably my cat bit the baby." This white cat leapt to the back of the couch near where I'd stretched out my arm. Suddenly, it bit the knuckles of my right hand; bit them hard. "See, he bites," said the man. But at the same moment I was feeling the pain of the bite, I felt the man tickling my thigh. Both sensations were so contradictory and sharp that I woke immediately with the thought bursting in my mind, "Which of these two sensations would you choose to give your attention? The pleasurable feeling or the painful one?" The cat was white pain, and the funeral was white death; but simultaneously a thing of laughter and joy was occuring. Much depended on how I chose to perceive the moment.

I started July first still skirting that cemetery of uncertainty. Was I really dead where I needed to be?

I start July second knowing what I needed to know to avoid guilt and self-condemnation, no matter where He may tell me to go. He was a friend of "publicans and sinners" and thus received the condemnation of the respectable. Yet He did not walk in shame or doubt about the places He chose to go. Neither now will I.

What a powerful place to be. What a vast savannah is beyond this open window for us now, my love.

The Road Less Traveled...

...such a famous phrase, often wearing an underpinning of smugness that says, "How wondrous that I see the good in things that most can't see as they rush through life." But I think this is a false path; a type of dead end that doesn't know it is a dead end.

How very different is the real "road less traveled." First, it must be found alongside the "less frequent companion" and is a path that leads to feelings like C.S. Lewis expresses here:
"My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature [I was with] was what we call 'good,' but I wasn't sure whether I liked 'goodness' so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card is played. For a second or two I was nearly in that condition. Here at last was a bit of that world from beyond the world, which I had always supposed that I loved and desired, breaking through and appearing to my senses: and I didn't like it, I wanted it to go away. I wanted every possible distance, gulf, curtain, blanket, and barrier to be placed between it and me. But I did not fall quite into the gulf. Oddly enough my very sense of helplessness saved me and steadied me. For now I was quite obviously 'drawn in.' The struggle was over. The next decision did not lie with me."

"If this cup could pass from me..." Jesus Christ Himself knew this road, forging a trail to make it navigable, then requiring us to travel it with Him when He storms ahead with His face "set like flint," and we wonder if we really know Him at all.

And along that road He prepares us, eventually revealing our own particular cup to drink if we are willing to see and receive it. Staring into the flashing depths of wine peculiar to this cup of divination, we see the thing we seem to be "made for" but in seeing it we are bemused, for it is our greatest heartache; a thing over which we would like to say to God, "This is too hard. You haunt my heart, telling it to be true to some secret heavenly vision, then tell me I can not have it but by this road less traveled." And it is never the road neatly bordered by smug uniqueness and false dignity, rather it is the one where voluntary helplessness and abject humility creep across the footpath.

No wonder so many choose another road instead: the Road of Resignation (even over the Bridge of Temporarily Constructed Joy) on our way to the village of Life the Best I Can Arrange It for Myself.

One More Day

Tonight, it seems, you may open a window of the soul in our world that has been locked. For good reason. We still don't know why to open it. Why tonight? Why this window? Faith keeps dragging us over to it, putting our hands on it.

"It could be argued that to open the possibility of God's speaking through other means than the clear teaching of Scripture is to let in all sorts of confusion. After all, a window lets in pollen along with the breeze, flies along with the sunshine, the cackle of crows along with the cooing of doves.
If that were your argument, I would have to agree.
But if we want fresh air, we have to be willing to live with a few flies.
Of course, we can shut out the flies and the pollen and the cackle of crows. And if a clean and quiet house is what's most important to us, perhaps that is what we should do. But if we do, we also shut out so much of the warmth, so much of the fragrance, so many of the sweet songs that may be calling us.
The flies are all obvious, but what besides the flies is coming through those windows?
What is God saying to us there?" Ken Gire from Windows of the Soul

We never have needed most of the things a lot of other people ache to have, which is strange. As for the things we do need, many others aren't even aware that such aspirations should ever be, and that is strange, too. The open windows...why even going out and sleeping under the stars themselves...these have always been our way of communing with God. Not to neglect the Scriptures, oh no; but to read them in a comfy chair near that open window, sometimes catching ourselves frozen in a moment of reflection, our eyes on something in the distant horizon, something we saw or heard that caught our eye and made a connection. The only difference is that we open the window ourselves this time, instead of it blowing open and forcing us to look out at the beauty and devastation there past the windowsill. We are mature enough to choose to open it now.

I don't at all understand the purpose of the premonitions of endings you're having...maybe we should say changes...in the way we know each other...transitions from life to life...but I, too, see the trend in your dreams. Opening this window has something to do with it, maybe everything. I, too, stand in gratitude saying to God as we wake each morning, "one more day," that He has granted us to have this incredible love. If ever one of us is on the other side of the window, I want to have practiced opening it--even in this state of trepidation--to receive what might be given from that place beyond.

Now, before I start foaming at the mouth and gnawing on a tree, like Heathcliff when he raved over the loss of his beloved Catherine in Wuthering Heights, I'll get on with preparing for today.
One more day.

The Tree Unpruned

I wonder what it is
...to be a snowflake, born on a winter's morning,
Gone under a mid-day sunbeam,
Never seen by human eye.

And I wonder what it is
...to be an ice-covered black mountain,
Lost in a range of my kin,
Glimpsed for a moment by humans airborne, but never
Trod upon by human foot.

I wonder what it is
...to be a tree never pruned.
From acorn to aged and diseased--
--naturally grown.
Never redirected for the sake of lines of power
Nor for someone's esthetic requirements.
A tree that doesn't pause to sigh or fear or dread
Such things as Topiary
Nor contemplate the why of it.

I wonder what it is to be a tree in a grove of these,
My own kind.
All leafing soft and fluffy every summer, rank and file...that's fine
Because with autumn comes to each a unique but complementary color.
To be never hasting through the current season, nor wisting for one gone.
Graceful even in the bareness
The indignity of winter. Waiting for that one day.
The day the ice makes us sparkle and crack
--oh it hurts some--
But the flashing blinding light.
A single morn of ice-bright drama. It is enough.

Some humans try to be the tree unpruned.
And it is good to notice and to wish.
But in knowing enough to wish, is not the thing proven
Impossible to have?
Such things are not possible for creatures with souls.
...At least
Not in this world.

Reverie

There is a place only old people can visit. You can ask them to go there for you, and you can revel in the way they describe what they're seeing as you watch them go there. But you can't go there with them, not when you're young. And best to ask one who is contented with life if you want to experience this phenomenon. Even as a child, I was fascinated with what I saw when old people transformed as they made this trip. Sometimes one would go alone, or sometimes two would go together. "Oh! Do you remember that--" and they would laugh together as they touched a place as elusive as Shangrila or Brigadoon. I never understood why, but I always knew it was a precious place, hallowed not so much by their words, the words in and of themselves meant little, a random little story, but their eyes and their tone of voice--these made the most mundane story special. Little things told me I was catching a glimmer not of a lost event, but of a lost world.

Now I, too, am getting older. And with age comes the initial loss of many things. Fear tries to play a larger part in what I venture and what I want. But there are new treasures, too. And this magic place is one of them. I am beginning to find certain landscapes awaken those things in me that I saw in the eyes of the old ones...for now, I still need a real-world trigger. It happened as we were coming home...off-road, driving through towns that are poor enough that time forgot to update the veneer on them. So I recorded each and every thing that made me feel like I was in that special place, that place of a world going lost everywhere but in the magic of my memories. These things have already migrated there in most places, but not in this one precious little town:
farm co-ops
front porches with wrought iron posts
hydrangea bushes
sun-bleached water towers bragging about the local mascot
metal burn barrels, smoking (were they ever anything but rusty?)
bathtub Madonnas
Queen Anne's lace growing at will
white washed tractor tires serving as everything from garden borders to playground equipment
neighbors chatting familiarly (How can you be a stranger to someone whose underwear you've seen through your kitchen window, underwear flapping in the breeze on the clothes line?)
aluminum pie tins in gardens
propane tanks behind the clothesline of underwear in the back yard
corrugated roofing-tin or plastic, no matter
roads dappled by sun and shade, or for a rare treat, trees that canopy across the whole road
rows of tall, cement block walls: the ancient ruins of a car wash (they were the same ancient ruins 20 years ago, too)
and
the community ditch, and as each driveway went across the culvert, the unique side of each family was displayed as they used everything from wagon wheels to magic-wand styled reflectors stuck in the ground on either side of the drive.

"I thought of home...and long ago...We sang the old songs...and many an eye was misty...
Memories...they come surging back into the heart to make it clean again...or to accuse it." from Peter Marshall's sermon "The Rock that Moved."

May the memories of everyone I love age well.