On Giving...when even taking a breath

is costly.



Funny what being sick does to you. Really sick, I mean. Not the kind that is inconvenient, but you can take a couple of aspirin and get on with the day. I mean the kind where you lay shivering, feeling a distinct pain associated with every heartbeat and wondering when you'll ever hit bottom of this abyss. I mean the kind that leaves you feeling strange and disassociated from the world, giving you pause when you go back out that front door to meet other humans and resume your daily activity again...it is similar to the strangeness you feel slipping into the sanctuary after a month of not quite making it to church.



I "went back to work" Thursday. Friday was better, but a long day. It has been a bad time to have the flu, as Valentine's Day is the one time of year my band has a fundraiser: the sale of friendship-grams. We are a very loving school--some even call us a hippie school for all the peace and good-will floating around at family events, and I'd believe it as a large percentage of the kids at "family movie night" ran around most of the night sans shoes, but I digress. In this fundraiser we average the sale of about 800 of these little well-wishing treats, but it is a huge volume of organizational work.



Fortunately, I had a band mom who stepped in and took charge of it for me while I was flat on my back for three days. This would not seem so odd if we were a long-standing program fitted out with a "booster group" and a "band parent president" as is common in larger programs. We are not that big yet. This was genuinely in the category of a gift; one almost mystical in its richness. I think of how I wallowed, on the second day of my affliction, in self-pity over how much easier it was to be sick as a child, in those days when a mother's care was never too far away. Now as an adult, a need for a new roll of toilet paper to come up from the downstairs bathroom to where I was: in the upstairs bathroom, this was enough to make me cry. I snuffled along about missing my mother's cool hand on my forehead. I reminded myself that "lung-stuff makes you tearful" a doc once told me. Well, the next morning, this band mom emailed me saying she could cover for me another day, thatI should stay home and rest, not to push myself, and then she added parenthetically, "just pretend I'm your mom talking!" Well, my lungs were still clogged enough that I teared up again.



It all got me to thinking how ever since Christmas, we seem to be seeing a theme in our lives: receiving gifts that help in times of need. I remembered how when we went camping at Disney, we had some friends who graciously wanted to invest in our family's memory-building, and so they gifted us the cost of our camping and then some. God commemorated their gift by planting us in a campsite that was sandwiched between French Canadians on one side and Virginians on the other, both points that reminded us of this couple who are our dear friends and benefactors in this instance.

I thanked God for all these timely gifts and began to wonder...

INTERMISSION
and then 24 hours later: I sit here wondering how I intended to finish that sentence yesterday. I stopped typing to engage in a creaky conversation with my husband (my voice is shot) which led to a trip to the doctor which led to penicillin and a decongestant in a little bag with a red border and a bright red label marked "critical." Ha! Then deep disorientation. This morning, Scott said, "Try not taking the Entex...just take the antibiotic, and voila...I can sit up, focus my vision on a chosen subject and other such lofty goals (by yesterday's standards anyway.) What doesn't kill you makes you healthy again I guess...

I remember now what I wanted to write about yesterday--a dream answer to a question of giving and spending. We've had so many other people help us out this last year. Even today the singer in Scott's band is coming over, making lasagna, running my sweeper--because when they came by yesterday to pick up equipment for a rehearsal she saw the state I was in, flung out across the couch; and, remembering her own case of walking pneumonia last year, she was quick to insist on giving aid.

Funny, that positive side effect of suffering or even remembered suffering. It is a great motivator toward active compassion. Why is that? I understand the altruism that brings with it a guarantee of some personal publicity, even in a small circle, for the giver. But what is this strange power or gift found in suffering such that it awakens in someone the capacity to be the widow giving her two mites?

I'll confess I am as prone as anyone to look at those people who live "sunny" lives in areas where I suffer much stumbling darkness: finances, health, etc. I wonder at times who I'd be if I'd had a sunny life in those areas? I wonder what makes a person get such a life? Is it automatic, or is it the result of great effort and talent, as most people with such lives would be wont to tell you? (I know I'd want to attribute it thusly if I had it!) If that's the case, then I am an idiot-savant in a zebra pattern, because I--and others would concur--have streaks of brilliance across me, too, in other areas: ones that are so patently of God-origin that I can't claim them to be the result of my talent and effort. More to the point, they are areas that don't particularly make daily life any simpler to live. Solomon or Jeremiah--don't remember which--said "time and chance happen to everyone." So the automatic answer must factor in there somewhere, for though effort sometimes brings a souffle, it sometimes results in spilled goo that must be mucked up off the floor.

And so I find myself facing a God who is leading me into a new bower, one previously unexplored by me. A dream opened its doorway. In that dream, God (as a Father who comforted his crying child just after He'd chastened the youngster and brought him to repentence) looked up at me and said, "There's more to Jesus than tears." As I studied on this strange statement, I was reminded of the verse:
Psa 30:5
For his anger [endureth but] a moment; in his favour [is] life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy [cometh] in the morning.

So I began a fresh reading of the Gospels, looking for a "different" facet of Jesus. rather than just the anguished languid man dragging his way to Golgotha. Not that I'm looking to diminish that! Rather that I'm looking to enhance it. In dreams and visions I've seen the man who laughs and dances and rides wild horses with eyes that throw sparks of encitement then lays Himself down in warm summer grasses, affectionate and companionable beside His love in a garden. I've seen His nature and how infectious is His personality, but can I also find that side of Him in the written text about His human life?

But before I could launch very far into such a study, I was hit with this infection; and I was reminded once again that my own "wealth" of vision serves little effect in protecting me from what could ravage me in this world. I fell asleep with the question on my mind, "Why, God? Why are my prayers for others so effective, yet I still can't pray myself "out" of a single nasty vius? Why can't I have a little while to "learn" what kind of person I'd be if I were one of those women who didn't have to address 90% of her energy to the concerns of others--not because she's particularly altruistic but because she's kind of "stuck" there? (That last is tongue-in-cheek, for I know what a selfish brat I was in college and shortly thereafter.)

That night, I had a dream that Scott and I were promoting an upcoming Christmas to our sons, whipping up excitement to a frothy high. Somewhere carousel horses were even involved. Then suddenly, Christmas was upon us and we'd spent so much time anticipating it that we'd forgotten to buy any gifts for the boys. (If you know us, you'd realize this is hardly a fantasy element in the dream.) I looked at him and said, "What are we going to do?" I began to pray. And I felt God tell me, "Tell the boys this is their most fantastic gift--the best gift ever..." which was our slogan and how we'd billed this Christmas to them during all those days of anticipation. Divinity continued: "Tell each boy to go to his room and choose something he owns that he thinks someone else might like. Tell him he is going to bring it out of the house and give it away. For receiving the power to give is the best gift a person can receive." That was the end of the dream.

When I woke, I saw the connection with this same theme of looking beyond the hardship and "correction" that had visited me in the other dream. I woke to a new and strange quietness about the whole topic of need vs. affluence. There is a frenzy in our society right now: what are you doing with your excess? Are you re-investing it? Get out there and spend, spend, spend! What? No excess? Here we'll throw you a bone, but just promise you'll get out there and spend it the minute the check hits your mailbox...and of course, all this to avoid looking down into the pit that has the big R word bubbling at the bottom, refusing to even project what the complexion of a first-time-ever global recession might look like, for economic woes are harder to quarantine these days.

...Yet as for me, I hear God say: Don't listen to the dying. Consider this question I'd put before you: What are you capable of doing with what I've already given you, particularly when it doesn't feel like an "excess" but rather is the stuff that meets your deepest needs, when in giving you find you suffer more than inconvenience for the loss of it? Can you even then hold it loosely? And when you give it away, will you reckon the investment to offer an interest package of morning joy even in the dark night of weeping when you first lay the "money" down? Finally, can you see in the end that this "contest" is more like a synchronized swimming event than a race as I not only measure what you'll do for others but also what others do for you. Can you trust that even as you give thereby creating a gap in your own personal ecomony, I will nevertheless fill that gap with the provision needed, and by the hands of other needy ones. And never mind the need-gap the swells up in their lives as I'll bring others alongside to help them.

Like working one of those sliding-pieces puzzle games. The hole gapes and moves around while the pieces are shuffled about, but eventually every piece is in the proper place to make a picture. The picture in the end is always the objective. The picture of joy in the morning.

Game-on...