The Misapprehended "Yes"

OK, So I'm cleaning my room this morning, letting the studying I did for my lit test last night gel in my brain, and I catch myself reading over old class assignments. I'm sitting here, reading over old pages, looking for comments like "excellent!" and "good insights" as if to say "LOVE ME!!!", or at least "YOU LIKE ME, YOU REALLY REALLY LIKE ME!"

What total crap.

Why am I such a spiritual lemming? I know -- not just head know, but sometimes even heart know -- that only one Yes is worthwhile, and that's God's. So why do I still so often turn and run toward the stale waters of human approval? There's only death there, all the more deadly because it so cleverly counterfeits life. "All of You is more than enough for all of me." Help me remember that today, especially, as I press into tests and homework and frienships. Lord, smile on me. Make your "Yes" a whisper that drowns out the shouts that try to cater to my need. All I need is You.

To that, my soul says "YES!"

More from the News...

The Supreme Court today is hearing a case about land. Seven property owners in Connnecticut are challenging the city's "public use" buyout of their land. The city intends to turn around and sell to private developers to revitalize the community.
I heard from one of the landowners. His house was a wedding gift from his grandmother. He tends the same garden his great-grandparents did. The land has been in his family for six or seven generations. It's become part of them -- part of their story. I felt the weight of that. After all, I have no similar circumstance and it must be really good to know your place, to live in a bigger story even in the sense of your own family.
The city is in trouble. 80% of their commercial properties sit idle. 20% of their homes are empty. Industries have moved out, jobs have dried up, mom-and-pop businesses have gone the way of all flesh. They're desperate. This ninety acres will be used for a drug research center, a hotel/conference center, shops, condominiums. I picture Maple Grove in the last 5 years... And this smacks to me of hope. That good days are on the way again, that the town won't just fade away.
So today the Supreme Court gets to decide between the past and the future. The story makes me think about the ways I pick one or the other to be my focus, my home. I stress when I need to think about making sure my grades are up for financial aid and grad school, figuring out what to "do with my life". I get beat over the head by the ways things that have happened to me have shaped the way I respond to now. The ways I hurt people without knowing it and rifling through my memory trying to figure out why.
It is so hard to live in the now. Hard to stay present. Hard for me -- hard for everyone, I think. It's a battle. But the past is shrunken, a tunnel I can't stand up in. The future is smoke, always shifting and off-balance. Only now do I have a place to stand and freedom to move or be still. Only now can I remember God's presence and sit in Him, walk in Him, breathe Him, live in Him, let Him live in me. I need that for today if I'm going to experience it and not just remember it. I want to put on the Holy Spirit's presence like a warm sweater and luxuriate in it all day.
"Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. (Mt. 6:34a, Msg)" God, what are you doing in me now? How about around me? In chapel, in class, in between -- help me to look for it, to live in it, to move toward it. Remind me moment to moment that the story I live in is not about land, but a Kingdom.

Crazy Nights

Working with Down Syndrome guys is always a challenge. The latest iteration: using 50+ sheets of toilet paper per bathroom visit, totally clogging the pump and causing total backup. So I spent last night picking up the dog bed (wet with effluvia) to try and wash/deodorize/rescue the thing. Then, on to disinfecting the entire lower floor with bleach solution. Meanwhile, the boys sit and sing along with Shania Twain or play PS2. This whole time, the dying battery in the carbon monoxide detector is causing a loud chirp about every 15 seconds. Then the boys won't go to bed. Is it any wonder I have a headache? No, the wonder is that my parents aren't in a rubber room somewhere. I think back to the time I stayed up reading. My flashlight batteries were dead, so I put the desk lamp reeeeeaaaal low and hoped it'd be invisible. Well, in short order, I was soon smelling smoke, so I woke my parents figuring better safe and yelled at than sorry and spanked really really hard. The mattress was burning -- from the inside out. It's a miracle that we survive our childhoods. It's a miracle our parents survive our childhoods. After all, if it gets too bad here at work, I can always flip burgers instead.

Thanks, mom. Thanks, dad. I love you.

OhButILoveIt

Yeah, yeah, I haven't been here in a while. I'm trying to decide what to do with this space. I first started blogging to keep a "slovenly, honest, bold" journal of what's going on in my life, but there's always this felt ego-self pressure to SAY SOMETHING (All caps intended) -- there's a bizarre awarness of WHO's reading this and a need to say something thought provoking or deep or interesting or funny or enlightened. Well, no more, folks. No more promises to blog every day, though I'll try. No more forcing it. No more poses. And as soon as I say those things, I know they are LIES, damned lies. But they're what I want. How does that work? It's like I was telling Heather yesterday that I want to have a heart that God trusts. And as soon as I said it, I teared up because I became so aware of how true that is in sentiment, but how empty it sounds in light of my actions and behavior, how little time I spend consciously pursuing that. I'm really uncomfortable with my finite-ness sometimes. My soul longs for depth and wideness that my body just can't handle... and maybe my soul can't handle it either. No more than brief flashes of the Deep Structure. Maybe all the finite-ness is just to train us for infinity. None of this makes any sense on the screen, but it's what's in me and it's what came out.

So there. :-P

Carve this one on my heart...

"O God, teach me to be satisfied with my own helplessness in the spiritual life. Teach me to be content with Your grace that comes to me in darkness and that works things I cannot see. Teach me to be happy that I can depend on You. To depend on You should be enough for an eternity of joy. To depend on You by itself ought to be infinitely greater than any joy which my own intellectual appetite could desire." -- Thomas Merton

Tribute of Delight

"Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yesterday's hour and season was communion. jeb posted a wonder-full blog on the subject of serving that I can't say any better, but I was struck by a part of the experience this time that knocked me someplace new. Keith spoke of ministers in the 10/40 window... Pastor Steve was leading a group of students in Haiti... About a hundred kids were dragging us to the throne to offer our tributes of delight in worship... It dawned on me that this was the Body -- this is what it's all about. Age, race, location, language, these are all reduced to trivia when we step into that Body that we're always a part of.

As I served communion, I was in awe of the parts of His Body coming to meet me. The ones with bowed heads who whispered a hushed "Amen" as I blessed the cup to them, the ones who made eye contact as soon as possible, smiling and saying "Thank you!", the few who met my gaze with their tears and came to the table with desperate thirst. I was stretched by their beauty; I realized that by some mystery I was, in this moment, both the agent of Jesus on Earth and the least of the "least of these". I felt God's smile on me, on them, on US as we met with Him at the table.

I end just as I did on Friday, but this time not from emptiness, but from a fullness that is so far beyond being about me. It's about the Body. And tonight with the Body I say: "Come, Lord Jesus"...

nothing to say

Wow. All my friends' blogs are so brilliant, and I am so empty. It's a good thing (and a great comfort and reminder) that emptiness is OK. Emptiness can be the preparation for filling. It's communion weekend. Come, Lord Jesus.

Metanoia

The article jeb posted today reminded me of this poem by Scott Cairns that's caused me to think a bit more deeply about how I respond to my sin, and to my God.

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Metanoia

"Repentance", to be sure,
but of a species far
less likely to oblige
sheepish repetition.

"Repentance", you'll observe,
glibly bears the bent
of thought revisited,
and mind's familiar stamp

-- a quaint, half-hearted
doubleness that couples
all compunction with a pledge
of recurrent screw-up.

The heart's "metanoia",
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward,

as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so BAD
as it is a waste of time.


I don't want to be trapped in the unending cycle of myway-Godsway-myway. I want to be moving steadily upward, though it may look scattered and eclectic, bouncing back and forth, I want the motion to be always toward -- running when I can, and crawling when I have to -- but always wasting less and less time.