Diary of a Crazed Caucasian Caregiver

OK, faithful blogfollowers, remember the underwear incident? For those of you who weren't here then or just need a refresher, click here.

Well, everything comes back around. Dear, sweet Tom is at it again. Our Fear Factor Challenge this week? Blankets. Nasty blankets. The kind of blankets that once had a lovely graphic design on them that is now indistinguishable for wear. Oh, yeah -- not to mention the layered pattern of those brown-ringed stains you refuse to try and identify for fear of succeeding.

It's not so bad - only two out of the eight blankets he has on his bed are practically rotting where they lay.

No big deal, right?

He's got six more, right?

Wrong.

Last night, my boss brought them out to the dumpster. No more than fifteen minutes later, they were back on the bed. So she put them in a bag, emptied the dumpster, put the blankets on the bottom, and loaded it back up. Problem solved.

This morning, I awake to find them both back on the bed. It's amazing. The boy is just not that limber, but he is dedicated, I'll give him that. I'm tempted to cut them into pieces and drop a chunk in every dumpster along Highway 65 between here and home. Just try and fix THAT, Tom!

Why, Oh, Why, are we all so bad with change? Especially when it's change for the better? Why do we get so attatched to the familiar and the comfortable things in our lives even when they're just gross? Maybe it's the word "change"... maybe we hear "different" as "unknown and new and scary"... "Metamorphosis" works for me until I remember Kafka, who pretty much blew that one out of the metaphor pool. I like "transformation" better, but just try and get Tom to enter into that one. Yet, that kind of transformation, that sort of change, is precisely what most of us say we crave... We pray with the psalmist, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me," but are we willing to release the blankets that have warmed us and kept us "safe"? To trade them for nakedness before Him? To depend solely on Him to clothe us and provide the trappings of whatever comforts we need? For me, all too often, the answer is "Uhhhmmmm...."

Lord, show me - show us - the filthiness of our rags, the worthlessness of clinging to anything but You. Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief. Help me find my "Yes"es close at hand.

So let it be. Deo Gratias.

Rock (extended entry)

That word pretty much sums up the last few weeks. Last monday, I met for prayer with some dear ones, and (naturally) the topic of the tensions came up. Jan said "you need a hammock." My mind was blown with the concept that instead of me holding the tensions, feeling as though I might snap, there might be a possibility of letting the tensions hold me -- bear me up in support and rest.

Then I went to work. I couldn't sleep and wound up watching Inside the Actor's Studio. The guest was Angelina Jolie, and while she's always seemed a bit dark and broken to me, she's hot. Really hot. So I wound up watching, and had a moment of illumination. James Lipton was asking her about her tattoos, specifically that he'd heard about the image of an open window on her back. She laughed and said "Yeah, but not anymore." When pressed for an explanation, she said, " I got that at a time in my life when I felt everything was closing in on me, like my life was about to implode, so I needed a window handy to climb out of. Now I live my life outside the window, so I closed it." And her smile wasn't dark or wounded, but real and full. It made me think.

This Friday, I went to see U2 with three of my best friends and had a thoroughgoing blast! The Star-Trib reviewer referred to Bono as "The Pope of Rock", and I think that fits. I have so much respect for the man and the band that I almost live in a precarious fear of it being shattered. Ken heard on the radio that all four members of the band were outside the Target Center, shaking hands and signing stuff for an hour and a half or so before the show. The biggest band in the world rubbing elbows with the fans? Wow.

The music was great, but the moments that stick with me most were the human ones. A young woman was down front with a sign that read "Bono, I lost 75 pounds to dance with you." He took the sign and held it up to the cameras, shaking his head in awe. Then he reached down and pulled her up on stage, dancing with her through "Elevation." He didn't HAVE to do that. And he didn't make a big deal about the weight thing or anything -- he just treated her like a person. He actually seemed honored to have her onstage.

At another moment, a parent held up a kid who couldn't have been more than nine or ten (never mind the ramifications of bringing a kid to a rock concert - I'm not going to argue that one. If it was U2 and I had a kid and I could afford it, I would have). Bono reached down and locked fingers with the kid, looking right into his eyes as he sang (if I remember right) "Where the Streets Have No Name." That is a lucky kid. I wonder if his life will be any different?

The word of the night was CoeXisT. The "C" was the crescent of Islam, the X was the Star of David, and the T was the cross. Bono named Muslims, Jews, and Christians as sons of Abraham, and he was right. He did not say that all three religions were right, or valid. He did not tout universalism. He simply appealed to our common heritage and called on us to see each other as human. He didn't say it in so many words, but he reminded us of the fingerprints of God on all humanity.

The concert made me wonder more about the open windows, about how to live outside them, honoring God and myself and others, resting in a hammock He wove. I had a nagging sensation that something's been wrong inside for a while. At first I pushed it away, writing it off to stress, but then I started to pay attention more and more and began to actively wonder. Church this morning only served to confirm the realization that's been stalking me for a while.

Thus, the other sense of the word "rock": my head. I realized that, since school started, I've been practicing the presence of homework. Practicing the presence of the tensions, and not the One who resolves them. I am so sorry. I'm sorry for all the friends to whom I haven't been myself. I'm sorry for the opportunities I've let slide. I'm sorry for insisting on carrying all this and shutting out the only Hands that are strong enough. I give up. This is a lesson I never seem to master, but for the moment at least, I'm dropping the fear and the performance and the stress and the sorrow. I still have homework to do, but I'm trying to go to it prayerfully, listening. I hope I'm not the only thick skull here in blogland, but even if I am, I'm just grateful that God's patient enough to crack it.

I wish all of you the hammock of His goodness and the rest of His grace.

Deo Gratias.

A Ten-Minute Laughter Massage

A great professor is a wonderful thing. New to my schedule this year is Dr. Keith "Double-Shot" Jones. Okay, I don't actually USE the nickname, it's just my late-night, ham-handed way of telling you that I have two classes with him -- Shakespeare and Literature of Humor.

Beyond the fact that I'm pretty much going to get along with any prof who assigns The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we've had some good chats.

So when I got to work tonight and found an email from Dr. Jones containing this link, I found myself collapsing with laughter -- a laughter that was more therapeutic for me than 14 consecutive hours of sleep. Take the tour, but be warned - you may never look at mackerel the same way again.

Something's Gotta Give...

It is 1:21am, and I am just settling in to my last piece of homework for the night. My body is letting me know, in no uncertain terms, that I am not 19 anymore.

Earlier, on my way home from a class discussion group, I was seized by the desire to quit. Now, I'm something of a career quitter, but at that moment in the car, I've never wanted to quit so badly in my life. Quit school, quit my job, quit church, quit relationships and, like Hotblack Desiato in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, "spend a year dead for tax reasons."

Heather's referral to this blog as a resource on holding the tensions is a huge compliment, but what do you do when the tensions have you feeling like the waistband on a twenty-year-old pair of boxers -- all stretched out?

Once, just once, for the sake of variety if nothing else, I wish God would call me to something possible. Manageable, even.

Fortunately, He loves me too much.

When everything you're doing is needful, maybe it's not so much someTHING that has to give, but SomeONE. And He does. I actually have energy for homework right now, and I KNOW that ain't about me. Impossibility breeds dependence, and dependence is a funny sort of freedom.

A few years ago, I was meditating and listening to worship music when a Vineyard song came on that repeated the line "Every good and perfect gift comes from You." I remember weeping in gratitude. Our God gives and gives and gives so much... so often... so freely.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord! Deo Gratias. Amen.

A Digital Dilemma

Tonight, as I was killing a little time, I deliberately opted for non-required reading - in other words, having nothing to do with class. I grabbed a book of essays by a "technophile" (a label I can identify with) and came across the following words:

I'd like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something in the system itself, in the formal logic of programs and data, that recreates the world in its own image. Like the rock-and-roll culture, it forms an irresistible horizontal country that obliterates the long, slow, old cultures of place and custom, law and social life. We think we are creating the system for our own purposes. We believe we are making it in our own image. We call the microprocessor the "brain"; we say the machine has "memory." But the computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very slim part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule, and clarity. It is as if we took the game of chess and declared it the highest order of human existence.

The fact that Ellen Ullman, the author of this passage, is a computer programmer by virtue of something not unlike a religious vocation added extra weight to these words. Something unfamiliar rose up in me: a resistance to technology. Great. Just what I needed: another tension.

I am tremendously grateful for the blog. Thanks to this whacky universe we call cyberspace, part of me gets to be in Slovakia with Matt and Diane. This crazy-busy college student inhabiting my flesh gets to hear from people he loves but rarely gets to see. Like Bruce, who scribbles out his missionary heart in the middle of a culture that sees itself as beyond the need for such people. What utter crap. If I'm honest, I have to admit I see a mission field half the time I look in the mirror.

Yet, as great as this is and as many doors as it opens, blogworld is just no substitute for so many things: The warmth of Gloria's smile as she waves at me across the sanctuary. Christi's motherly presence on my left in pre-service prayer. Judy's depth of insight that mixes with her wit in ways that call forth astounded laughter. The sense of deep care and centered purpose that Jan wears like a mantle. Heather's obvious delight in the minds and souls of the students God's given her to shepherd. The fierceness of Tim's embrace as we say goodbye after two hours of deep, authentic life-sharing at Dunn Brothers on a Wednesday night.

Tensions. I guess there are always more waiting to be entered into. Sometimes I feel painfully stretched like a guitar string. But what I'm wondering tonight is if the ultimate resolution to those tensions is the Person of Love... if the tensions exist solely to provide God an instrument on which to play the melody of His all-surpassing goodness...

Eh... another incomplete metaphor to add to my collection. Regardless, I felt like I needed to share all this tonight, and to make explicit the following reality: Whether our connection is live and in person or mainly digital, I love you all beyond the power of words to capture, and am so blessed to lift you before God in thanksgiving.

Soli Deo Gloria. Fiat Lux (for those who've asked, it's Latin for "let there be light")!

On the Complexity of God and Coordinating Conjunctions

Allright. I know, it's been too long, but I've been readjusting to a life spent keeping balls in the air. I should be there soon, but in the meantime what I lack in frequency I will likely make up in volume.

Getting back to school has been glorious and hard. I have the honor to be in H. Jane's theory class, and that has been stretching. In fact, this semester is all-English all the time. As a result, something I've noticed happening last year is somehow stronger this semester: the sense of everything being connected. My classes inform each other in a way that can't be planned, since the profs are hardly in collusion with one another, and I feel like I'm not big enough to grasp the whole. I get that old sense of spiritual vertigo as I mentally "zoom out" when those connections happen and I feel like I get higher and see more every time. Yet I can't quite grasp it...

I hear Brennan Manning in my head saying, over and over, "God is always greater." I am so mindful of God-over-all in a way I can't remember experiencing before as He keeps busting through boxes. I'm not nearly (and will never be) a universalist, but I have less taste than ever for an exclusive, country-club, no-heathens-allowed kind of Christianity. My brain's a bit fried, so I'll quote an article by Gene Edward Veith, Jr. that we read in theory class:

It must dawn on anyone who seriously studies worldview, whether as reader or writer, that the Christian worldview is, in fact, bigger, broader, and more comprehensive than any of the humanly devised weltanschauungs. The non-Christian worldviews, to give them credit, are more than erroneous philosophies. They usually contain at least a grain of truth. The problem is that human philosophies tend to be partial, while the full truth as God reveals it is complex and comprehensive. It has been said that human reason works with "either/or." Christianity works with "both/and." Human reason would say that Jesus Christ must be either God or a man. Christian revelation says that He is both God and man. Human beings are both images of God and miserable sinners.

That starts to get there for me. I have the sense that God is all over the word "and." If I am truly seeking to see more of who He is, to be more like Him, then I need to be more about "and" than I am about "but" or "not."

Years ago, I heard a song by Waterdeep that has that word as its title. Something in me wept in identification every time I heard that song. It came back to me again at the end of communion today, when the cross connected the lyrics to my life once again. It's now officially joined the ranks of my personal theme songs.

I am haunted by my love for comparison,
a fascination with a single common theme
and I am hounded by the fear I might be losing it
slipping from reality into a dream.
And when my mind is muddled by the way it seems to work,
I start looking for just one connecting force
someone to assure me that we didn't lose the war today
and that the battle's General's still riding on His horse.

And in the mornings when I wake, I often come to You with dreams
little bits of plot that I can't comprehend
Sometimes I can keep my eyes unclosed for long enough
To see the blowing of a distant, steady wind
And the distance doesn't take too long for You to cover it
And when You reach me You just blow these things apart.
You clear the cloud that's gathered round the crisis of my soul
And whisper to my suffocating heart.

And is the juice in the joints of the motion of life.
And is the love that is between God and His beautiful wife
And has two hands and two feet and a long, ugly side
And rose three days after He was crucified.

So You're the force of gravity that I feel pulling at my feet
You're the pure light at the center of the sun.
It's Your Ghost that fills the atmosphere with what we need to breathe
Everything I've ever wondered, You're the One.
Well, both my hands are stained with blood, both my lips are stained with tears
from when I kissed the widow of the Man I killed.
You're asking me to swallow Your forgiveness here today
You say the bond required for my pardon's been fulfilled,

And is the juice in the joints of the motion of life.
And is the love that is between God and His beautiful wife
And has two hands and two feet and a long, ugly side
And rose three days after He was crucified.
And is the juice in the joints of the motion of life.
And is the love that is between God and His beautiful wife
And has two hands and two feet and a long, lovely side
And rose three days after He was crucified.

Hallelujah. Deo Gratias. Amen.