tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81129329777557768922024-03-12T17:01:27.702-07:00 Deep Mystery Deep MajestyAshleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-33120484423816658272019-04-21T16:20:00.002-07:002019-04-21T16:34:21.776-07:00Just lil ole me...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I heard His voice for the first time when I was out of my mind on acid, tripping hard, as the parlance went back then: I sat at the window of my city apartment and watched a million undulating rainbow lattices ornament the street below, blooming and collapsing and overlaying each other in a sumptuous visual feast. But even this had an emptiness at its core and despite my desperate hunger for Something Real that led me to assail my brain with chemicals, I was lonely, lost, love-starved and hopeless.<br />
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His voice cut through the black mire like a piercing ray of light in the dark: You don’t have to keep doing this to yourself, He said. And here, finally, was not Something Real but Someone Real: the voice I had longed for, a voice which knew the depths of my darkness and was totally unafraid because He’d seen it all before, here was someone who was not lost but utterly found and was foundness itself, was home itself. My tears were tears of relief and grief and regret and joy, all woven together in one polyphonic deluge. I was found. I was known. It was Love Himself.<br />
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I wish I could say I was devoted to Jesus Christ from that moment forward, but my path to Him was still winding and forked with dead-end tangents as I continued to chase flittering holograms that promised satiation even as they siphoned my soul, though less and less because I was haunted by that Voice, by the one promise that didn’t ring hollow. And finally I surrendered, sitting and sobbing in the second pew from the back in a church my husband had practically dragged me to, eight months pregnant and finally willing to abandon my idols: both the tangible ones in my Hindu goddess statuettes and intangible in my pride, my delusionally high appraisal of my own intellect, my neurotic white-knuckle hold on the illusion of control.<br />
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I was tentative and slow to trust. I still am, sometimes. But I am fully convinced that He himself is our peace (Ephesians 2:14), and in him are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (every single last one!) as Colossians 2:3 tells us, as well as all the mysteries and depths of beauty I was searching for all those years I tangled up my mind and sieved my soul with psychedelics.<br />
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I am passionate about limning out in words and stories and images how Jesus loves us in the here and now, this beautiful and sometimes terrible place between the kingdom come and the kingdom not-yet-here. Words help me understand more fully what His presence looks, tastes and feels like; how His grace pervades our lives and sustains us and carries us. Because of Jesus, hope is my default and defiant posture.<br />
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But it’s not all misty-eyed gravitas, Psalmic agony-ecstasy bipolarity and waxing cosmological around here… just mostly. My husband of 11 years, Steven, tempers my tendency to take myself waaaaay too seriously by doing things like straight-facedly quoting Metallica lyrics when I’m trying to have a super deep conversation. I loved his long hair; he hated it sticking out from the sides of his hardhat while he climbed wind turbines. His solution was, naturally, a mullet. I believe in naked vulnerability to a degree which occasionally chafes him (are you talking to people about my balls AGAIN? Is a question he’s asked more than once when I've written about trying to conceive after his vasectomy reversal) and love big words to a degree that often chafes him (What does ‘apoplectic’ mean? He asks. Really angry, I reply. Then why the heck didn’t you just use ‘really angry’?! He cries). <br />
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I have chicken problems, namely, I cannot stop myself from buying them and am ever searching for more exotic and in some cases unseemly breeds. I love books, especially big thick ones which promise a grand immersive adventure and which, only if absolutely necessary, could be used to soundly clock someone. I feel safest in a library, ensconced by rows upon rows of the things. There is nothing quite like the rich synesthesiatic bouquet of New Book or Old Book or even Library Book. Aside from Jesus and marriage, motherhood is the sweetest thing that’s ever happened to me and I love homeschooling my children, Israel and Arrow.<br />
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My favorite words, in no particular order, are: glissando, bougainvillea, frisson, and luxuriate. I love Bob Dylan and weird folk or amateur art and grapes and cilantro and kombucha and broken people thirsty for Jesus. My always-prayer is that my work is beautiful and true because it distills some droplet of The Truth, the living water, Jesus Christ. I would love to hear from you! <br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-38703347276747670012019-02-07T17:19:00.002-08:002019-02-07T17:19:26.872-08:00Teenagers...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“I think Jesus was a woman. That’s what I believe.”<br />
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She says it plainly, boldly, her eyes smoldering with the heady drug of open defiance. I’m unfazed, though. She is so fresh, so pretty, waffling on the threshold between girlhood and adolescence. And she’s so different from a year ago. Physically, yes, she’s taller, with slightly oily cheeks and a pimple or two betraying sebaceous glands that are kicking into high gear. But she’s undergone that reckoning of puberty, The Change: the bubbly, childish innocence has morphed into brooding, sulky suspicion.<br />
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“Interesting theory,” I say. We’re clustered around an inadequate table in child-sized chairs, me and these seven tween girls, studying the Bible, supposedly. “Where did you hear that?” I ask.<br />
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“Dogma,” she says, citing the 1999 Kevin Smith movie. And now I am fazed. I eye her askance and frown a little but catch myself, not wanting to seem scolding or prudishly disapproving.<br />
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“Yeah… I’ve seen that movie, too,” I reply. “Not the most appropriate movie for a 12-year-old.”<br />
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She shrugs. “I’m thirteen,” she responds, as though in one year she’s definitively crossed into a realm where watching such things is, in fact, entirely appropriate, or at least not worth questioning.<br />
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I ask another girl to read the opening of the Gospel of John while the others whisper and giggle, paying attention for a brief moment only if I call them by name before they return to their commiserating. The room is warm and the air is close and at least one of these young women has not been properly informed on the necessity of wearing deodorant. I feel my frustration building as these magical words, in him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind, drift listlessly about the room, looking for willing ears and finding none. So it seems.<br />
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“Who do you all think Jesus is?” I ask loudly and abruptly.<br />
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“He’s like this nice, sweet guy who just kind of floats around like he’s on a cloud,” one of them rhapsodizes half-mockingly, and it’s all I can do not to laugh.<br />
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“Well,” I hesitate, trying to keep a straight face. “He was definitely kind, and all about mercy and grace, but he could be pretty savage sometimes as well. Let’s read John chapter 8.” As I begin to flip to the page I hear her mutter, the one who apparently pictures Jesus as an innocuous and perpetually stoned pushover. The girl next to her giggles and as I look up they’re both looking at me and smirking. “Excuse me, what was that?” I’m amazed at the power of teenage mockery to make me simultaneously revert to a painfully self-conscious adolescent mindfeel and also summon the prim indignance of an austere school marm harassed by insolent children.<br />
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“Savage is, like, so outdated,” she sneers. “No one’s said that since, like, 2017!”<br />
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I sigh heavily and close my eyes, taking a moment to compose myself. I’m supposed to be showing these precious children the love of Christ, dang it! They’re supposed to be awestruck and dumbstruck by the kaleidoscopic prismatic profundity of John’s words, overtaken by the grace and beauty of the Light Himself. Yet they are not impressed, and they are especially not impressed by me. How can I make them believe Jesus is a real, dynamic, living presence, the one who changes everything, without whom Kevin Smith would not be able to make his stupid movies because Kevin Smith himself is HELD TOGETHER by Jesus?! How can I possibly achieve this when everything else beckons so persuasively, so seductively, and those very movies glitter with a patina of cool snark, and I get made fun of for using the word savage and am markedly uncool by contrast?! So much for speaking the language of the youth. I kind of want to go home and cry and then watch Dangerous Minds and regroup.<br />
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“Well, whatever,” I mutter, and begin to read the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery. I pause after reading Jesus’ line about those who are without sin casting the first stone and look up. “Why do you think he said that?” I ask them.<br />
She’s the first to answer, to my surprise, the Kevin Smith fan. “He means no one is perfect,” she replies. I nod encouragingly.<br />
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“Yes, exactly. The Pharisees were always high on moral superiority, thinking they’re better than everyone else. In another place Jesus tells the Pharisees ‘go and learn what this means – “ here I have to raise my voice to a pitch that is perilously close to yelling to get the other girls to quiet down, but she is still staring at me intently – “ ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ He was quoting – I don’t know, maybe Hosea? – but what do you suppose that means?”<br />
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She answers eagerly, her blue eyes bright, the brassy glint of rebellion gone for the moment: “It means he would rather forgive than sacrifice someone or have them hurt!”<br />
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Yes, I think, and I say it. “That’s what God is like.” And I realize He is there, even as the rest of our sad farce of a Bible study goes down the tubes amidst clamoring discussions of who is going to spend the night at whose house. I realize the Holy Spirit is swirling and soaring and diving and moving among us even now and always, with sacred legerdemain so deft and gentle and whispery that it is barely perceived but no less powerful than a thundering voice or a burning bush, and I don’t have to wrest and wrangle interest out of these girls, I don’t have to shake them silly while screaming “don’t you understand?!?!”, I can allow them to laugh uproariously at my interpretation of the Orange Justice and take it in stride when they shake their heads and tell me nobody whips OR nae-naes anymore. Do *I* even understand?! Do I have to? Or need I only trust? And is this being a fool for Christ? I can take it.<br />
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Why am I so quick to take a heavy burden upon my back? Why am I so loathe to trust him, to believe that he is working more prolifically than I could ever conceive beneath the veil of seen reality, weaving beautiful vignettes redolent of him, fresh as dew and older than time, recapitulations of THE Story which crescendoes even now toward a climax no eye has seen and no ear has heard? Do you hear it, though, the future-echoes, flittering toward us from the new heaven and the new earth? Do you see it, the intimations of the Really Real, the hint of new birth simmering and percolating just beneath the surface of all things? Do you feel it, the days when even the flowers seem to stand up and shout his grace and colors take on all their original shimmering Edenic intensity? Sometimes I have to squint and strain, I admit. But even despite all the death of the past year, and perhaps even more vividly so because of it, I know it is there.<br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-53332331733745506162019-01-12T09:21:00.001-08:002019-01-12T09:21:08.910-08:00Then and Now <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” - Matthew 6:22-23</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh, how great it was back then. It yawned vastly like a bottomless cavern emanating with a miasma of decay, a death-bouquet of emptiness, nihilism and despair. My whole body was clotted with it and the idea of hope seemed a flickering wraith, a child’s thing, a quaint and flaccid make-believe trinket that could not stand in the onslaught of darkness. My eyes were more than unhealthy. They were putrid, rotten, veiled with hatred and fear. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I looked nice then, sure. “Miss Ashley, why are you here? I wish I looked like you,” the curvaceous nurse said, with a broad smile, after handing me my daily medication in a tiny plastic cup and tapping over the old-fashioned scale to take my weight. “You be lookin’ like a model.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I felt contaminated in her presence. She seemed so clean, so sweet, so good. If only she knew. I may have looked nice, but I felt irredeemably ugly. I had used and exploited and devalued people and allowed myself to be used and exploited and devalued and ran from God, disavowing his very existence and hiding from him in terror in a garden that appeared, to my eyes, to be crawling with rot and sewage with hideous beasts lurking behind every shadow. The enemy stoked my fear and hopelessness to rattling crescendo and here I now stood, between the rock of death and the hard place of interminable despair. Words left me and there were only tears. So my parents checked me in to a psychiatric facility and here I dwelled, feeling a bizarre paradoxical mix of deep belonging among these seriously ill people and perspective that I wasn’t, perhaps, quite as damned as I’d feared.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">My roommate was a slip of a woman, a sweet and unassuming alcoholic who neatly folded my clothes for me. There was a man who’d staged an epic standoff with police before surrendering to inpatient treatment. He was loud, brash and aggressive, a braggart who proclaimed in group therapy that he’d slept with over a thousand women and attempted to coach me like a drill sergeant during our rec basketball game, but who turned meek and warm when he introduced me to his petite wife during visitation. There was a young man, a boy really, who beat me at chess and said he’d been hospitalized for violent outbursts but who cried like a child when his mother and girlfriend came to visit. There was my best friend that week, a 20-something around my age with a droll sense of humor who had been on lithium for as long as he could remember for schizophrenia. And there was the near-silent, pale and wasted woman without a stomach who I sat with on a couch one evening who spoke softly of how the doctors couldn’t figure out how to get her body to absorb nutrients. I was sobered. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Listen: I tried everything to fix myself. I sampled liberally from the vast smorgasbord of cures which clever and glittering marketing inflates to panaceas and came away only more hollowed out than before. Jesus is the only remedy I know of. What inexpressibly sweet relief to hear his voice beyond the noxious din of the world, telling me at first hard truths: yes, it was true, I was really, really messed up. Fatally flawed, even. I was headed down to death. But wrapped up in his hard truths, inextricable from them, was a brightly dawning undercurrent of hope, like a new movement within a suite, the movement which will change everything and swell to an exultant blaze of joyful triumph, was an <i>unless</i>. And that unless was everything. <i>Unless</i> you turn toward me and receive the free gift of everything you’ve ever truly desired. <i>Unless</i> you give your life to me so I can give you mine. <i>Unless</i> you come home. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And eventually, that unless became not a mere unless, defined by its preceding truths, but instead an ecstatic, victorious, ever-blooming YES in Jesus, a riot of color and surprise and delight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I used to think my story was embarrassing. But I am not ashamed of it any more, only because I am not ashamed of the gospel. I look back at my asylum week and my numerous mental breakdowns, and I see God weaving them in to the beautiful whole of how I falteringly came to him, a story full of backsliding and stops and starts and hesitations and pride and finally, a fear-filled leap. I’m still stunned to find myself with a place at his table with a sumptuous feast laid before me, my head anointed with oil and these wonderful vessels of the holy called friends sitting around me. And Jesus says that he and I are family!!!! What is this miracle of grace?!?!?! There aren’t enough exclamation points or exclamation point-question mark couplings in the wide punctuated world to express my astonishment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Friends, I was and am so unworthy. I was the sinner of sinners. I railed against God. I told people he didn’t exist. I sneered and scoffed and treated his people like trash and murdered them in my thoughts. If there was and is hope for me, I am absolutely confident that there is hope for you. Praise him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can hope for or ask. His grace is there waiting for you. I promise. </span><br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-81342710174333740252018-06-30T17:58:00.001-07:002018-06-30T17:58:32.625-07:00Dad's Eulogy <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I thought I would open by sharing some of my dad’s classic sayings and expressions. They won’t be nearly as funny in my voice, but perhaps you can imagine him saying them. There was his own brand of nonsensical Spanglish – “calondo lahondo” and was always going on about “Portuguese rice”. “Easy!” he would exclaim, along with “cool it and rule it” and “get back”. About twenty percent of the time I called him he would answer “Joe’s Bar”. He frequently used “Bite me”, “GOOD NIGHT!” and “I give up”. He often employed a particular gesture I cannot replicate in church to express his dismay at something he felt was silly or trite. Some other favorites were “you’re a real piece of work” and “you make a better door than a window”. He was constantly saying “I’ll see you a week from Tuesday” which still continued to fool me sometimes even though I’d heard it all my life – occasionally I’d momentarily pause and ask “Wait, what are we doing next Tuesday?” One of his favorite pranks was also pretending he was being choked behind the wall -<br />
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One of Dad’s signature displays of affection was “The Limpy”. He and his brother were blessed with the ability to relax their forefingers while holding the rest of their fingers with their thumb and solidly thump you on the head with said waggling ring finger. Dad’s limpies went beyond a mere “love tap”, however, thanks to his massive jewelry. He wasn’t one to keep it subtle – his rings were massive chunks of metal with hard edges and straight lines, like brass knuckles envisioned by some brutalist architect. So limpies were always a little painful, but our skulls really developed well.<br />
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He was also very intentional about teaching us what he called the “classic defense” – if someone came at you to poke your eyes, you simply needed to raise your hand like this to thwart the attack. And if your assailant changed tactics and came at you sideways, you could invoke the “double classic defense” and foil them yet again. So if anyone wants to come at me and test my reflexes after the service, I assure you I will make my dad proud. He trained me well.<br />
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He delighted in teaching his grandchildren about the important things in life… actually, just the one important thing, namely, John Wayne. Dante and Angelo were exposed early on to the rapturous viewing excitement of John Wayne’s film oeuvre, a rite of passage with my dad that Lia and I had to endure as well. On the altar you can see one of my dad’s most prized possessions – the photo of when he and his brothers, George and Don, met The Duke himself in California. He also enjoyed teaching Israel and Arrow about the American flag – from a young age Arrow would emphatically point one out to me whenever she saw one and exclaim “that’s the American flag – Papa taught me about that!”<br />
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Toward the end of his life when he was less mobile, he loved playing card games such as Kings on the Corner with Dante and Angelo. I remember Dante being eerily and suspiciously lucky when it came to winning. The boys also loved riding in his canary yellow Humvee, though their mother and I were slightly less enchanted with our father’s ostentatious taste in vehicles when we were teenagers, but I came to appreciate and even embrace his distaste for the conventional in every area of his life (though I still got pretty nervous that he’d nick off a rearview mirror or two when he came to visit me when I lived in an apartment in midtown).<br />
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He logged many miles in both his Humvees exploring the American west with my brother Sean. Sean was unable to be here today, but most importantly, he spent Dad’s last few days with him, and was even here for the very end of Dad’s life because he missed his flight the night before – praise God! I asked for his permission to share the following post he wrote on Instagram, accompanied by a picture of him and Dad standing in front of a vast canyon somewhere in the West:<br />
“I don’t post a lot of personal photos on this account but this week I lost my dad Glynn. Better known as GB. This shot is representative of our most precious times together. For many years we would meet up in the southwest and take a trip together exploring the western US. Many times with other family members such as my uncle Don. We would explore every back road we could find. We didn’t always agree on politics or religion but who cares. When we were exploring the open road we were one and the same. We miss you GB, until we meet again. Life is so short, do what you love and don’t waste your time. GB did it his way for sure.”<br />
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If you knew my dad at all, you knew of his deep love for animals. He was pretty much just one creature shy of an exotic animal farm, and would welcome to the Brown menagerie any animal he could get his hands on. We had horses, ponies, goats, sheep, chickens, rabbits, doves, peacocks, sundry pheasants, tusked pot-bellied pigs, a llama, and a cow at one point. I inherited his affinity and look for the freakiest chickens I can find in the hatchery catalog every year, though my husband drew the line at the “ Turken Naked-Neck” this year. But dad loved seeing photos of my chickens and holding them when he was still able to visit. Whenever I called to consult him about a chicken-related issue and my mom answered the phone, she would quickly call “Glynn, Ashley has a chicken problem!” and hand the phone to him.<br />
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His dog, Lucy (which, by the way, remains the best gift I’ve ever given – I got her on Craigslist while searching for a kennel for our dog and I came across an ad reading “Extra large kennel - $1 – must take the airedale that comes with it), passed away a year and a half ago, and he was physically unable to care for another. So, he coaxed squirrels onto the back porch with birdseed and crackers. He simply had to have a pet. While he was lying in the hospital, he asked Izzy and I to “feed his squirrels”. My mom said “oh, they have enough, don’t put any more out there!” But while she was busy I found his feed tin and went ahead and did it anyway and when I reported back to him that I fed his squirrels despite mom telling me not to, he said “good job Ash!”<br />
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His affection didn’t stop at domesticated animals – he gradually coaxed the raccoons on the back porch into grabbing bread slices from his hands. He made them feel so comfortable, in fact, that they decided to move into the walls. Many a relaxing night watching television in the family room was abruptly interrupted by the violent keening and snarling of raccoon brawls coming from the wall somewhere above where the television was mounted. But my dad, being my dad, refused to exterminate them. Instead, he set traps nightly and drove the raccoons out somewhere to release them into the “wild” – that is, someone else’s “wild” – the next day. For a while, my sister or I would accompany him on these catch and release ventures until Lia, in her brutally honest way, broke it to him that this was an exercise in futility considering the raccoon population near our house likely numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.<br />
<br />
But that was how my dad was - hopelessly tender-hearted. I remember once when he had received a shipment of baby chicks and one was injured beyond hope of recovery – I don’t remember the details, but there was someone there that day helping us out, maybe a farmer buying one of his animals, but someone more inoculated to animal deaths – and he told dad to simply go out and hurl the chick against the wall to end its life. Dad told me to go inside and not watch, but I remember peeking out and seeing in his expression the pain it caused him to extinguish a life, even if it was “just” a chick and ultimately a merciful gesture. One of my favorite images of him is him surrounded by a motley flock of animals while standing in the middle of the corral, meting out pieces of bread. He was in his zone.<br />
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Being a designer and just, well, himself, Dad had a very pronounced aesthetic. Looking back, I can now appreciate how stunningly beautiful and unique the house I grew up in was – but at the time, it was just our house. He always approached and arranged and refined things with his totally singular artistic eye. But God help us if we wanted something which, for him, fell under the umbrella of "tacky”. I had a wonderful and privileged childhood, but there were things deemed “tacky” by my dad that seemed to us unbearable deprivations at the time. Lia and I couldn’t have a slip-n-slide – tacky, plus it would ruin the grass. A giant trampoline? Unthinkable. A fake pink frosted Christmas tree? Sacrilege. I know with absolute confidence if I were to put plastic flowers on his grave he would come back to haunt me. I remember visiting a Frank Lloyd Wright house on one or another of our trips. As he approached the front door, he practically clutched his chest in horror when he spied the astroturf the current owners had put down on the front porch. There are some things that are beyond tacky… and this was simply desecration.<br />
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My mom has told me all my life “you and your father are exactly alike”. My grandma, Cece, has always been very emphatic to this day that “you look just like him” – not always what I wanted to hear as a teenager and young woman. True, I didn’t always love the Humvee, or the political opinions, or the marginal legibility of his handwriting when he signed my book reports, but now, when I think of how much my dad is a part of who I am and how much he shaped me, I just feel proud. So very proud.<br />
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My dad was very proud of all of us – me, Lia and Sean as well as his beloved grandchildren – and would tell us so. But his very particular Glynn Brown aesthetic inhibited him from fully appreciating my artwork in particular. “The portrait is excellent, Ash, but can’t you just put a nice landscape or something behind it?” he would often ask me. My mom told me that recently while bemoaning my ‘strange’ art he said, “Nancy, I hope when you get to heaven you tell me Ashley quit making all that weird art.” Remains to be seen whether he’ll get his wish. Sorry, dad.<br />
My dad claimed to dislike nicknames and insisted my mom choose a name for me that couldn’t be shortened, which I find terribly ironic seeing as he had a nickname for nearly everyone. I was Ash the Smash, Sean was Seanzo, Lia was Lia Lia, my grandma, Cece, was Cecyle the Seasick Serpent, my daughter Arrow was Arrow the Sparrow, my husband was Stevarino, and his grandson, Dante, was Danto. I remember him having nicknames for his employees and even his pets.<br />
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Accompanying him downtown to his office was always a special treat for us. Although they turned the Folgers building across the street into condos a few years ago, my memories of dad’s office are forever redolent with the aroma of coffee beans. Especially as I got older, his employees seemed super cool to me, being 20- and 30-somethings who were “hip” and “urban”. Dad was always joking around with them and giving the more “liberal” ones of the bunch trouble.<br />
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Speaking of… if you knew my dad at all, or even ever saw his vehicle, which was plastered with bumper stickers, you know he was somewhat opinionated about his political beliefs, to put it euphemistically. It didn’t take much for him to brand you “liberal” – even saying something seemingly reasonable such as “Well, Ronald Reagan wasn’t entirely without flaws” could relegate you to Jane Fonda territory in his mind. But as black and white as he could be about his politics, I see so many shades of grey and tones of mercy in his relationships. He was always giving people second and even third chances, forgiving seventy times seven, and seeking out reconciliation. That was his heart.<br />
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Even up to the end of his life, he was always cracking jokes and making people laugh. When the nurses came in to ask him how he was feeling, he responded, “about that way”. Once when he appeared to wake up from sleep disoriented, Sean asked him where he was. “Here,” he answered without missing a beat, and promptly fell back asleep.<br />
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Many of you know that my sister, Lia, passed away unexpectedly in October. Death has a way of pruning things, of decluttering, of purifying and distilling what is important. It has a way of bringing to stunning, crystalline clarity that sentiment Paul expresses in Romans: “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressed through love.” As painful as Lia’s death was for our family, as shocking and traumatic and terrible as it was, I believe the gem buried deep within the sorrow was that it showed us all what counts: love.<br />
Toward the end of his life, I can see how God was drawing my dad deeper into an understanding of grace, into a sense of wonderment at the love whose height, depth and width we can only begin to glimpse through the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection. After he passed, I found a piece of notepaper tucked into his daily calendar– on Ronald Reagan stationery, naturally - on which he’d copied down Galatians 2:16: “know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified.” I believe toward the end, Dad was truly walking into knowledge of his identity as God’s beloved child, and believing that nothing we can do or fail to do changes His love for us. It has only to be received, surrendered to and believed. A couple of nights before he passed, he told my mom "I think Jesus is accepting me". I believe by the very end, he knew, and his cry was not one of fear or ambivalence, but the childlike confidence of “Abba, Father!”<br />
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Toward the end I was playing the Johnny Cash version of “Just As I Am” for him on my phone. When it finished, he said “Ash, you know what song I really like lately? That one about “The Bible tells me so,”. Oh, I don't know that one, I said. I began searching for a song with that title on Spotify. I found one, a jaunty country tune, but after about ten seconds he said “no, no, that’s not it. It’s the one that says ‘Jesus loves me’”. And I just lost it. The song he was “really into” lately was the most basic, childlike, foundational Sunday School song everyone knows. So we gathered around – me, mom, Jana, Sean, Steven, Israel and Arrow – and together we sang “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak but he is strong.”<br />
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Watching my dad die was sad and hard and painful. But it was holy. Eternity was breaking in, and God was there. Really there. As I reflect on those precious final days and hours, I am reminded of two things that Jesus said: the first is that anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. And the second is that you don’t keep new wine in old wineskins. Dad was changing. God was changing him and preparing him. The old was passing away. Jesus was making new wine out of Dad, and the time had come for him to go.<br />
<br />
I already feel his absence profoundly in my daily life. Especially since Lia died, I talked to him every day. I am troubled by the dwindling population of Brown family members with sufficient joint laxity to perform “the limpy”. Who’s going to tell me the secrets of growing thriving plants, such as talking to them in gentle tones and telling them you love them? Who’s going to troubleshoot my chicken problems? But I take heart in knowing that Dad was ready, and he knew into whose arms he was passing. He knew he would awake utterly safe and found in the embrace of the one who knit him together. And I know this is far from our story’s end. This is just him lovingly saying, for now… bite me. I give up. See you a week from Tuesday.<br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-23944815715141982872018-05-16T06:11:00.001-07:002018-05-16T06:11:13.444-07:00Do You Know How Much God Loves Me?!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Light of the World by William Holman Hunt</i></span></div>
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“I know that you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are looking for a way to kill me, because you have no room for my word.” - John 8:37<br />
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“If the cross is the place where the worst thing that could happen happened, it is also the place where the best thing that could happen happened. Ultimate hatred and ultimate love met on those two crosspieces of wood. Suffering and love were brought into harmony.” – Elisabeth Elliott<br />
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“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is… do you, Mr. Jones?” – Bob Dylan<br />
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<br />
The past year has been characterized by Things I Never Saw Coming. Among them:<br />
1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I got a cat. And I love the cat. I love it so much.<br />
2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My sister died.<br />
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Yes, one of these things is not like the other. My sister, the only sibling I had excepting my significantly older half-brother, the only sibling I grew up with, suddenly, shockingly dead. And much of the first few months after her death felt like fumbling insensate through a desolate, labyrinthine maze of death. (I’ve never been known for my understatement. Just ask my mom. Or Steven. Or anyone I’ve known for more than ten minutes). Death is at once the cruel definitive blot of a period and the interminably gravid expectancy of an ellipsis. So done, but so undone. So abrupt, but so resonant. Suddenly, death made its shocking entrance into my life as a reality – not something that happens out there, but which has happened in here, to someone I love, to someone with whom so much is left unfinished and unsaid. And its surreal denouement was riveted with aftershocks of guilt and questions and bafflement and haunted with flittering holographs of memories, imbued with even more meaning by her death.<br />
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But it was also saturated with an immediacy of God’s presence like I’ve never known before. So much receded into triviality. Life took on a dire urgency, a vividness that was both terrible and beautiful but so very real that I was almost afraid of it fading and life resuming its mundanity. The fragility of life was an immediate and inescapable truth instead of an abstract notion. At times that truth gave me a groundswell of fluttering panic and more often it felt like the freedom for which Christ set us free.<br />
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And I believe in truth it is. To live is Christ, to die is gain. And sometimes, just sometimes, I could truthfully echo tearfully, and with delirious joy, the words of Paul: “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him…”<br />
<br />
There was room: tragedy blew it wide open.<br />
<br />
I was listening to sermon recently about space, and how the “Selah”s in the psalms were about pausing and creating space for God, about how God in the beginning created space and how we, as creators in His image also create space in the form of imagination. And I was reminded of that verse, John 8:37, that had dropped like a lead weight in my gut recently: you have no room for my word. The Pharisees had no room for his word – his grace - because they loved the self-justification of the law, the moral superiority, the power. The dead onus of the law that they wielded like a bludgeon produced a nacreous blindness to the real presence of God. They crowded it out. They had no room. And I’m struck by how often I have no room, what with screens and words and vapid thought trails and the constant procession of sensorial gluttony I feast upon, with my presumptions about how God will act, with my legalism masquerading (quite unconvincingly, might I add) as righteousness, with my fear and lack of faith and scorekeeping and vain striving. Oh, wretched (wo)man that I am! I echo with Paul? Who will save me from this body of death?!<br />
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Sometimes I look at the cross and I have urgent doubting questions. How can I believe what God is asking me to believe, something nearly impossible to believe – that this man, who was also God himself, being crucified was the dividing point of history, the point at which the universe collapsed in upon itself as the one in whom all things hold together bore the sins of the whole world (when mine alone must weigh a good three tons) and moreover this person is the lover of my soul, the only one who can give me rest and the one in whom I must believe to be saved? What does any of this even mean?! And why did it have to happen this way? Did God really turn away just before Jesus cried “Eloi, Eloi, sabachthani?” And what does that mean? What does that say about God? What does it mean for God to abandon God? Did Jesus become un-God in that moment, simply flesh, sin itself, absent spirit? But no: “For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” (Psalm 22:24)<br />
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And yet: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21) How does the holy embrace the unholy? How does God become sin? A whole new cascade of questions is born and, bolstered only by the hopelessly jerry-rigged and tenuous scaffolding of my own understanding, my anxious mind finds no rest. It finds no space. And I leave no room for the Word, for Jesus himself. <br />
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Because as soon as I try to own the mystery, to parse it out and diagram it and inspect it with the tentacles of logic and reason and tidy cause and effect, to apply the perverse and sterile taxonomy of my human understanding, it dims and wanes and recedes. And I realize anew that I don’t own it, and I didn’t invent it, and I can’t box it. I can’t look directly at it, only luxuriate in it. The most high does not dwell in houses made by human hands. The revolution will not be televised.<br />
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One thing that delivers me from the desolation of complete unbelief is that if there is a God, he must be love, and being love he must have been and he must be willing to make himself known and comprehensible to his children. And so other times, I look at the cross, and just look. And look. And the theological ruminating, the tidy delineations, the explanations predicated on our deeply flawed notions of what constitutes justice, just turn ashen and fritter away. And then I think it’s the only thing, the cross, that in this world, in this drove of molten churning chaos, in this vale of voluminous lachrymosity, makes any sense at all. The place where, yes, the worst thing happened – but more, much more: the best thing happened.<br />
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What is this love that comes so low? This love that showers mercy where there should be nothing but the cold, hollow clack of a gavel and a sentence of condemnation? The love that stands so near, unashamed, while my accusers- including the one inside myself – shamble away in shame? The love that draws an orphan, utterly unmoored and lost in a chaotic cosmos of guilt and shame and condemnation, to the still center where she is known and known by, as totally loved as once totally shunned, as totally found as once totally lost. What is this love? It’s not normal. It’s not quantifiable, it’s not commodifiable, it’s not logical, it’s not reasonable. It’s preposterously unfair and inequitable. It is not to be understood, but rather luxuriated in, relished, delighted in, marveled at through tears and incredulous laughter. Where is the wise man? Where is the philosopher? Paul, the great lover of both Christ and rhetorical questions, asks.<br />
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He is alive and well, oh so clever, ever pondering but never arriving, so close to the truth yet so far away. I found him in the strain of perverse curiosity that led me to check out from the library and read “Recovery” by Russell Brand: I remember so well the new age fatigue, the yogic malaise, the endless register of rulesy self-analyses and self-inventories and doggedly futile self-saving techniques. Religion is religion is religion. “We don’t bother with soteriology, because it’s too damn complicated,” he says. And it was. The rules. The eight limbs. The four agreements. The 21-day cleanse. The 108 sun salutations. One more hit of acid. And yet the glittering stairway to heaven I thought I was fastidiously building revealed itself as a rancid mound of bilge in the judicious light of day. I must be doing it wrong, I thought, and the cycle began anew.<br />
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Part of the beauty that drew me to Christianity was its simplicity. Just Jesus. Him and him crucified, saving me from my self-salvation schemes and the dizzying rollercoaster of bloated pride when I was doing ‘well’ and gutter despair when I more often failed and “fell through a trap door in the bottom of my soul,” as Denis Johnson says. But I still muck up the simplicity by thinking I’m smarter than I am, by pretending to seek Him when I’m really just seeking more knowledge. And Jesus recedes farther and farther away and I’m stuck in an impotent morass of frustration and doubt.<br />
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Because what is the point of knowing about love if you don’t know Love? What is the point of doctrine or soteriology or eschatology or missiology or really any -ology if it doesn’t lead you deeper into love?<br />
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My friend Marcia likes to approach people and ask “Do you know how much God loves me?!” She always leans in close, her eyes wide and glittering with awe, looking perhaps slightly unhinged, a giggle always poised at the edge of her breath. She says this and other things with a giddy, girlishly conspiratorial air as though she is just discovering profound truths about God for the first time. Like someone suddenly and radically born again. Like a child. Like a person once blind who now sees. Perhaps, even, like an effete self-styled intellectual disarmed and dumbfounded by the power of the cross.<br />
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May we all become slightly unhinged by the wonder of His love. May the cynical refrain of “how can it be?” be turned on its head by the cross and become the tearfully baffled worshipful rhetoricity of “how can it be?!” May we have room for His word. Amen.<br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-90490126550372789992018-01-24T17:09:00.001-08:002018-01-24T18:50:04.496-08:00Love leaves all kinds of traces. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Note: I wrote this two months ago, but it just didn't seem like the right time to share it until now.</i><br />
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It’s been three weeks since the night I learned of my sister’s death through a text message. No one meant for it to happen that way, but that’s how it did.<br />
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“Lia’s gone,” it reads. “[Her roommate] came home and found her passed away on her bed. I’m so sorry.”<br />
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Gone, I think? She skipped town without telling anyone, then, I think. Not the first time. But ‘passed away’? What a odd choice of expression to use to talk about her leaving town.<br />
<br />
Lia’s gone. Passed away. So sorry. My brain bandies these strange phrases about, hearing the terrible news but not receiving it. I’m so sorry. Why should he be ‘so sorry’ about her skipping town? I mean, it’s definitely not good, sure. Sorry, perhaps, but so sorry? So sorry. Passed away. Lia’s gone.<br />
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And then it hits. And I start shaking and crying and Steven runs in from where he’s rewiring the living room and he’s laced with ancient cobwebs and dusted with more ancient insulation from crawling through the attic and I scream “Lia’s dead, my sister’s dead.” And he doesn’t understand and I still don’t understand and the nightmare just keeps doing its ghastly unfurling from there.<br />
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She was always so private, so secretive, so protective of her world and her possessions. I worked for two months to borrow her Calvin Klein logo shirt when I was in the fifth grade. For two months, I begged, I pleaded, I cajoled, and was met with stonily persistent refusal until one day, some random, merciful whim utterly unrelated to my weeks of begging struck her and for one glorious school day, the shirt was mine. That was Lia: an impenetrable fortress from which fleeting moments of tenderness and acts of generosity emerged with no discernible pattern, all the more priceless and worthy of wonderment for their rarity. And though sometimes she came out, you were never really allowed in.<br />
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So now, here we are, left with fragments and pieces of that demolished fortress that I fool myself into thinking will bring peace if I can only piece them together. But they’re like one of those maddening grid puzzles. Move one square and another and you’re forced to move another even farther away from its apparent, logical position in the scheme of things in order to put that one there but then you can’t get the other back to its place without more movement and it never ends. And I’m standing like an obsessive, red-eyed detective in front of a corkboard feathered with this plumage of notes and clues and personalities and it’s an impossible labyrinth but I convince myself I’m on the precipice of discovery. But discovery of what? And for what purpose?<br />
<br />
Maybe to know her at last. To finally know her, this person with whom I shared baths and snow days and endless My Little Pony vignettes. The one whom I trusted so much that when she told me there were prizes inside of buckeyes, I spent hours one afternoon trying to bust one open with a rock. The one to whom I submitted without question when she said it was time for a haircut and mom wouldn’t mind. The one with whom I decided to run away one afternoon when mom was being ‘mean’, with whom I tied handkerchiefs weighted with an hour’s supply of snacks to the end of sticks and set off, making it all the way to the bend in our gravel drive before our resolve dissolved and we trudged back.<br />
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But she was also the one I tiptoed around later, when the school calls and the real running away and then finally the arrests started, the police visits in the middle of the night. She was the one I avoided those months when she was homebound with a band around her ankle that intermittently pulsated with a red light, and she paced between her bedroom and what we still called our ‘playroom’, talking on the phone to friends I didn’t know or watching The Simpsons or Cops on the playroom TV, no matter how many times my parents asked her to turn it off. She was like a livid, volatile ganglion of pain and anger in those days, and honestly she scared me. All her life, she cut through pretense and deceit like a knife, and back then the knife was often unkind, though almost always truthful. So I avoided her, the prisoner in our home.<br />
<br />
But that was a decade and a half ago. Time and two precious baby boys had changed her. A new era was dawning, I believed, in the months before she died. We are going to finally get close, I told myself. We’re going to be sisters like sisters are supposed to be. That was the narrative I was constructing, the one I was believing in, with the nights of volleyball and the jokey texts and especially that precious night in July when on the way home from volleyball she broke down and opened up to me in a way she hadn’t in years. Maybe ever. We even talked about God, a subject that had elicited nothing but apathy from her before. And she told me she loved me and I told her I loved her, too, and we hugged. So what if she was a little tipsy? I was exultant. My sister loved me. And I felt buoyant and hopeful after that night. Things were changing. We were changing. But now she’s gone, and we’re left with the pieces and fragments she’s not here to defend or explain.<br />
<br />
This was never the way it was supposed to be and never the way I wanted it. And she would be horrified that her life is now laid out like a tableau for perusal. And me desperately trying to right things, to undo things, to resolve my guilt at not trying harder to be close to her, is helping nothing. I had to lodge my foot in my mouth after I fired off a nasty note to someone I believed had wronged her, only to be proven otherwise. “Stop digging up dirt,” my dad beseeched me. I balked and started to cry and nearly screamed “I’m not trying to dig up dirt, I’m trying to make things right, can’t you see that?!” and unceremoniously hung up on him.<br />
<br />
It is real – this burning, this desperate wish to make things right, to untangle the knotted story, to enact a justice that isn’t mine to seek. To reconcile the paradoxes of who she was. Distant, undemonstrative – but she had every school picture of mine through my senior year in high school in a folder in her room. Stoic, reticent – yet with a mysterious tenderness that drove Arrow to cling to Lia like an adorable barnacle every time she was around her.<br />
<br />
But I can’t make it right, and my efforts come to nothing and seem to do more damage in their profitless pursuit and I have to apologize to my dad for doing things like angrily hanging up on him when he’s dealing with the loss of his child.<br />
<br />
I walked through the first week feeling at once detached – like I was enveloped by some kind of insulation that muffled the sensory world – and dreadfully awake, senses heightened. I lay awake in the middle of the night, staring but not seeing the walls, the ceiling. And now I can tell I’m entering the long haul, the valley trudge, of grief. And it’s hard to see beyond the gray tundra. It’s hard to see where resurrection could possibly bloom. And I’m still finding it hard to pray. But I wait, because there’s really no other option.<br />
<br />
Early in the morning, hours after I found out she died, I was hurriedly packing and preparing to leave for Kansas City, and in a trance I ran to feed the chickens and went to lunge up on the porch to get their grain and missed and shredded the skin on the lower part of my shin. It’s still healing, and I’ve been thinking about that Leonard Cohen song “True Love Leaves No Traces” and how completely inane its titular claim is. True love leaves all kinds of traces; the truer the love, the more and deeper the traces, the wounds, the scars. But pain leaves traces, too. Pain like spending most of the first two years of your life in an orphanage. Pain like knowing your biological mother gave you up but never really knowing why, or whether she cared now or thought of you or was looking for you at all.<br />
<br />
“Unwanted babies should never be born. People should just get abortions,” she flatly spat out once before a volleyball game this past winter. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but her declaration was bitter and definitive, and I think I can guess why.<br />
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Probably the most comforting thing that has been spoken over me since her death – something which, when spoken, made me weep tears of joy and sorrow and relief all running together in one symphonic deluge – was that God is meeting her in the place of her original wounding. He is meeting her there in the orphanage, undoing the bonds that were broken or never formed, weaving the synaptic connections that tell a child you’re safe, you’re loved, you’re cared for. She knows now she is not alone; she doesn’t have to claw and fight for survival and maintain hypervigilance over her emotions and heart. His perfect love is filling the voids where human love failed, making her heart a spacious place, a heart that can finally receive and receive fully the love for which and by which it was made. He is good. And he made and makes a way for us. But it still feels a little shallow when I say that, a little contrived; like I’m forcefully gluing down a neat little bow on what’s messy and unhealed. But I think of David and one of my favorite of his psalms, Psalm 13. I used to wonder if he went back and tacked on the final two verse months after he wrote the original few because it just sounded bad to leave them standing alone.<br />
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“How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever?<br />
How long will you hide your face from me?<br />
2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts<br />
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?<br />
How long will my enemy triumph over me?<br />
3 Look on me and answer, LORD my God.<br />
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,<br />
4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”<br />
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.<br />
5 But I trust in your unfailing love;<br />
my heart rejoices in your salvation.<br />
6 I will sing the LORD’s praise,<br />
for he has been good to me.”<br />
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But now I think he was just speaking truth to himself even when and where he didn’t feel it. And so will I. God is good. He made and makes and is making a way. And resurrection will spring up in the wastelands, even though I can’t see it yet.<br />
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<br />Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-54740360688891289662017-12-29T14:43:00.000-08:002017-12-30T20:33:18.042-08:00The valley. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Lamentation of Christ, Andrea Mantegna, 1480.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“When I felt secure, I said, ‘I will never be shaken.’ </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lord, when you favored me, you made my royal mountain stand firm; </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">but when you hid your face, I was dismayed.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">– Psalm 30: 6-7</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“My tears have been my food day and night, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">while people say to me all day long,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">‘Where is your God?’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These things I remember as I pour out my soul:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">how I used to go to the house of God</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">under the protection of the Mighty One</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">with shouts of joy and praise among the festive throng.”</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">-Psalm 42: 3-4</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?” – Bob Dylan, Desolation Row</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Turns out I don’t control grief any more than I control God, which is exactly not at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Several years ago a dear friend who lost a child to leukemia told me that her mother had told her that grief was like a bowl of soup, and some people sip while others gulp. Although I love analogies and often find them helpful, this one planted itself in my memory and when my sister died suddenly and unexpectedly and the terrible time of its blooming arrived, I tried to wrangle it and formulize it and shunt the amorphous, vaporous yet black-hole-heavy beast of grief into its proportions. I’ll gulp that bowl, I told myself. I’ll prodigiously glut myself on it, hand myself over to it, let death reign in my body, and then I’ll be done and new life and hope and beauty and all good things will flower forth again. More than anything, things will <i><b>make sense </b></i>again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And glut myself I did. In those stuporous first weeks I gulped down grief, or it gulped down me, and when dawn seemed to rise after the first month of catatonia I exhaled with relief. It’s mostly over, I told myself. Life can resume. And it did, for a time. And then it turned out to be merely an artificial dawn, a ruse of a spacious place, because the wave was retreating merely to gather its strength and pound the shore again and subsume any semblance of resurrection. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The more I try to wrest new life from the wasteland, the more I try to wrangle the whole mess and piece together a mosaic from the shattered pieces of an invulnerable life, the more I try to wrangle a good story out of sorrow, the more I try to forcefully glue a neat little bow on the mire… the more my woeful inability to do so trumpets itself until it’s unavoidable. And I’m defeated. Is this where God wants me? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is nothing to do but wait for the miracle. There’s nothing to do but trudge joylessly through a valley of indeterminate length for an interminable amount of time. The glass-half-full non-Goth interpretation of this would be something like “God only gives you enough light to find the next step”. But I grow weary of covering things with platitudes, even true ones. Something in me begs to concede defeat, to have my full measure of wallowing. Is this faithlessness? Or is it surrender? I’m not sure anymore. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The only thing I can wager is perhaps there is something valuable in sinking into the sorrow completely. Before the most meaningful Easter I ever had, I took Good Friday seriously. I didn’t flick it away as a minor temporary setback, a mere illusory obstacle. I didn’t quell it with promises or whitewash it with wishes. I dwelled in it and I let it dwell in me. I sat down in it. I fasted. I flirted with maybes – maybe death won. Maybe empire won. Maybe violence and power and all the coercive ways of the world are just the way it has to be. I imagined how the disciples felt as they scattered and struggled to hold on to Jesus’ prophecies and promises in the stark apparent reality of total defeat, or perhaps lost themselves entirely in doubt and fear. I imagined how Peter felt knowing that he had failed in the one way he had sworn he would never fail, the suffocating tide of shame that must have overcome him. It was too much to bear. Yes, I had heard the promises of Easter, but they were hollowed out by Good Friday, distant. Good Friday had leeched the power from their whispers, now just a faint, tuneless polyphony of the careless wind blowing around so many empty husks. Yeah, it got dark. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But somewhere in that near-nihilistic silence, a defiant note sounded. <i>No</i>. NO. That’s not how the story ends. There is a power greater, a power that, unlike the world’s power, can’t be owned, can’t be tamed, and can’t be usurped. Its beauty is unmatched and in fact it is beauty itself, the wellspring from which all created beauty unfurls. I know my God. I know my God, and he is not a God of naughts. Or knots, for that matter. He is not a God of vain striving, of dead ends, of dead things at all. It all gets untangled in the end. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive. (Luke 20:38). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After Jesus, Leonard Cohen said it best:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">God was ruler</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though his funeral lengthened</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though his mourners thickened</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Magic never fled</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though his shrouds were hoisted</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The naked God did live</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though his words were twisted</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The naked magic thrived</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though his death was published</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Round and round the world</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The heart did not believe</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The heart did not believe. Because the heart was a quixotic dimwit, unacquainted with the ways of the world and living in a saccharine Hallmark movie hologram? No. The heart did not believe because it wasn’t true. The story doesn’t end in pain, in death, in destruction. But it’s hard to see that now, when there is only death, dying, barrenness and pain visible. There aren’t even any pleasant distractions if I choose to fix my eyes on what is seen rather than what is unseen. I’m mad that Lia won’t be here when my dad, who is in stage 4 COPD, dies. Or when mom dies, for that matter. She won’t be here if we (ever) have another baby. She won’t be here for a whole litany of things. She’s just… gone. To me. And it hurts like hell. But to him all are alive. This can’t be the end of the story, and somehow the resurrection, the new life, in whatever stunning manifestations it comes, will be richer, ever more miraculous, ever more dazzling because of – not merely in spite of, cause God’s much better than that – the 2.5 day wait. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There’s part of me that still resists. God, in his sovereign goodness, in his light in which there is no darkness at all, left two and a half days between death and resurrection. Why? Why would Good Friday be needed? Why does that have to be part of the story at all? Why does the valley have to be borne? I don’t know. And I’m not going to glue a bow or pull out my Bedazzler on this one. But I do know that when I started writing this I felt like a sewing machine who had just finished sewing a turd on a trash can lid - a sentiment I borrow from Richard Brautigan and one which is the best characterization of utter futility I’ve ever come across – and now I feel a little bit better. So I’ll be that sewing machine, if God will still be God. And he will. And so I wait. Sometimes because I can muster genuine hope, and sometimes just because there’s nothing else to do. Either way, he is faithful.</span><br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-6169464516865757552017-10-09T19:31:00.000-07:002017-10-09T19:31:03.516-07:00Steppin' Out<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Why this picture of this particular chicken (known as Bloomis Chaffee) to accompany this particular post? Because... what an audacious creation! Who would dare to create such a delightfully ludicrous flightless bird? GOD, that's who!</span></div>
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"Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold." - 2 Corinthians 3:12</div>
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One of my all-time favorite cinematic scenes comes toward the end of Finding Nemo. Marlin and the lovably daffy, amnesiac Dory, his happenstance companion, are desperately clinging to the ridges of a whale’s massive tongue as it rears backward, tilting Marlin and Dory nearly vertical, and perilously close to dropping into the whale’s digestive system. Dory had earlier claimed to speak whale, yet another of her dubious but authoritatively stated claims to knowledge. And now, as they dangle just above imminent death, Dory makes yet another outrageous claim after harkening her ear to the lilting, sea-muted melody of the whale’s latest communique: the whale is telling them to let go. This is simply too much for practical, skittish, eminently reasonable Marlin. “He wants me to let go?” he asks, balking at the request. Dory insists and Marlin balks still at this wildly irrational command, which directly opposes exactly every single last facet of his current seen reality. “But how do you know something bad isn’t going to happen?” he yells, anguish twisting his features. Dory stares back, wide-eyed. Her answer? “I don’t!”<br />
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I don’t. I don’t know. For years, this has been my place of wrestling. And if I’m being honest, “I don’t know” are the words I am most loathe to utter, and “let go” the command I least want to obey. Yet often our fullest surrender precedes the miraculous. When Marlin and Dory let go, instead of tumbling into the oblivion of digestive acids, they’re borne aloft on the whale’s spray and catapulted back into the ocean, where they can finally breathe again.<br />
Faith is by nature unreasonable. Often it seems more than unreasonable – it looks like madness, like dropping into the abyss. Forgiveness, at first, can feel that way – like tossing our standards of justice into the black unknown. It can feel like tossing a lot of standards into the black unknown. It can feel reckless. I admit there have been seasons in the past few years where I’ve been able to muster faith only on the basis that the alternative – not believing in a transcendent God who holds it all – is just too horrifyingly bleak.<br />
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But I feel God calling me, calling us all, to a different kind of faith, one that emboldens and enlivens and reorients our whole reality. A faith that is based not on tepid, tentative hope and cliched platitudes, but a deep confidence, an unassailable knowledge, of the radical goodness of God. It is a goodness so pure and radiant and powerful that the grave can never suppress it, a goodness so suffused with light and life that it is somehow both itself, yet it’s never needed the darkness for its definition. It is knowing that kind of goodness that makes us brazenly, joyously, unreasonably brave. We can be bold because God is that good. And when we finally believe that, when we obey the whispered refrain of ‘let go’, we are buoyed against all odds on a refreshing spray of freedom and surrender and blessed bewilderment.<br />
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We can be bold because, when God is for us, there is seriously nothing to lose. Just think about that! Can you believe it?! We can be gutsy because our guts are not at stake – instead, our gutsiness is staked in his eternal goodness. We are free indeed.<br />
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One of my favorite scenes in the Bible is when God tells a man named Ananias to go lay hands on Saul of Tarsus and restore his sight after Saul has been struck with blindness. Saul was basically a homicidal maniac single-mindedly bent on eliminating the Jesus movement, and now God was planning on him becoming the most famous evangelist in all history. (Talk about bold! Would you hire that guy?!) I imagine Ananias balked a bit, because he proceeds to give God a summary of exactly who Saul of Tarsus is and what he’s been up to, you know, just in case God was unawares or a little confused (God is never either of these things). And, of course, God says yes, that’s the one. Now go. And Ananias goes. He goes because although it seems absolutely nutty from his perspective at first, he knows his God – the one who is eternal and unchanging yet always moving in new and fresh and delightfully surprising ways, forging life in dead places and springs in the desert – is good. Immutably, unwaveringly, inescapably good. Can we believe that? Imagine what we could accomplish if we did, all the time!<br />
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What could possibly go wrong? Oh, a million and one things, from our earthly perspective. We will hurt, yes. We will suffer and know sorrow. One of my most ingrained mental hobbies is straining to concoct the worst possible scenario in a given circumstance. But God’s purposes will never fail, and, with surrender and faith and perseverance, nothing will ever be pointless. It is safe to trust, safe to let go of our white-knuckle hold on the gritty whale tongue or the illusion of control or fear or whatever it is for you. It is safe to crack open in Jesus Christ. <br />
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I’ve been thinking lately of the maxim ‘dance like nobody’s watching’ and how I don’t really care for it. I think we should dance like everybody is watching, but we’re going to freestyle and move like a lunatic anyway, because our freedom can inspire others to bust out of their buttoned-down, arms-at-the-side subdued sway. I think we should live out our faith that way, too, because people will know God by how we move in the world, spilling over with joy in spite of it all, safe in the promise of his redemption and able to love with abandon as he has loved us. Be bold and dance in his embrace. It doesn’t depend on you – it depends on him.<br />
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<br />Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-78343658020174211942017-09-13T19:39:00.000-07:002018-10-07T16:58:19.528-07:00The Longing.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For years, it was the longing that had no name, the longing that I wouldn’t allow myself to name. Denied and suppressed, it took on ugly shapes. She must be completely worn out, I would think when I saw a woman with three or more children. Thank goodness we stopped at two! As I watched older siblings lovingly dote on baby brothers and sisters, my heart leapt but my mind - knowing nothing but a bolted door waited at the end of that dream and therefore resolved to not take so much as a wistful step toward it - tamped it back down. Are you crazy? Don’t you remember how giving birth feels? It screamed. What is wrong with these people? Aren’t they concerned about overpopulation? (I told you it got ugly).<br />
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I remember one evening at church when I held a intermittently fussing baby for two hours. When I finally handed him back to his mother, my arms hurt and I made sure to make some joke about my occasional yen for another baby being “cured” by babysitting because - ha ha! - my arms hurt! See? my brain muttered smugly. Babies are a pain. They’re an inconvenience. Babies hurt. Aren’t you glad you’re done with babies?<br />
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But as I walked home that night, tears rolled down my cheeks. My heart was sick and tired of being trampled by cynicism masquerading as practicality. Yes, babies hurt, I thought. But they’re magical and wonderful and delightful in every way and worth all the hurt and more and I want another one so badly that my womb aches, I want another precious little soul to love and adore, another set of sweet kissable cheeks and rolls upon rolls and downy skin and pure unencumbered smiles and I even want the oceanic pain of birth and its afterglow of sheer bewilderment, when you feel like you’ve been destroyed and reassembled and everything is new, most of all this perfect fresh little creature in your arms, at once so deeply known, so deeply kin, and still so yet-to-be-known, a tiny galaxy of glorious potential in the most tender vessel imaginable, I want it ALL! my heart shrieked, in one epic cathartic run-on sentence.<br />
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I thought two was a reasonable place to stop. My husband did, too, and all of our family. We couldn’t afford any more, we decided; and besides, two was plenty. We should stop there and call it good, we told ourselves. Arrow, our daughter, had been a surprise, and we were resolved to have no more surprises. I was just beginning to emerge from the early haze of caring for a newborn and a toddler when I dropped my husband off at his vasectomy appointment. It became a joke - he was practically sprinting to the urologist! Oh, we are done. Sooooo done! I emphatically responded to any inquiries as to whether we were having more children.<br />
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And yet, my heart wasn’t buying it. it wasn’t buying the jokes and the cynicism and my desperate vie to redirect, co-opt and rebrand the yearning that still smoldered somewhere deep within. But I absolutely refused to give myself permission to dream. Perhaps it was a defense mechanism - we’d slammed that door shut, and I believed dreaming would bring nothing but heartache.<br />
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And it did, for two long years. When I finally admitted to myself that I wanted more children, and announced it to my husband one tearful night, he was mortified. And for the next two years I cajoled and begged and pleaded, and when all that failed I pestered and prodded and screamed and threw tantrums. I pounced on any millimeter of apparent yielding with such violence that I only hardened his resolve even more. Finally, one night when he firmly stated again that he didn’t want any more children, it felt strangely final. I wept. And I told God how sad I was, and that I wasn’t okay, but I trusted that he would make me okay in time. And I became silent on the whole topic of babies, so much so and so ominously so that my husband started randomly asking “Aren’t you going to say something about babies?” Nope, I replied each time, perhaps a bit too curtly. The sadness lingered, and I waited for God to make me okay. But then one day my husband sat me down to tell me that he felt called to get his vasectomy reversed. I shrieked with joy and threw my arms around him and marveled at the miraculous: hope glittering from the grave of gutted dreams.<br />
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I really felt like since I’d been waiting for so long, I was entitled to get pregnant immediately after the surgery. Four cycles went by and it didn’t happen and I poured out my woes to a wise friend and mentor, who gently shared the lessons God had taught her through her unsuccessful tubal ligation reversal. I knew there was truth in her words. Yes, I nodded begrudgingly, I will learn contentment. There will be so many rich, faith-enhancing lessons I will learn if I don’t get another baby, I thought, with my fists and jaw clenched. I thought I was fooling nearly everyone with my forced holiness, including myself. But not God.<br />
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I was driving a couple of days later when the welling that had started deep down in my belly reached my throat and erupted. I pulled over on a gravel road and wept violently, gasping and heaving like my sensitive son after he takes a hard fall. I tried to breathe deeply and stop crying repeatedly, even forging forward a quarter mile on the road, thinking my composure would follow, before pulling over again and giving myself permission to weep from my core. And there, on that quiet country road, as I cried and pounded on the steering wheel, the truth came out. “I don’t want to learn any more lessons!” I yelled. “I just want a baby!” And instantly, I felt relieved. Lighter. I didn’t have to pretend anymore. And God smiled, because I was finally being honest.<br />
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It’s so easy to forget that before God, we have permission to be real. It’s even more than permission - it’s a requirement for true relationship. God doesn’t want a gritted-teeth resolution to be good, which is destined to fail anyway.<br />
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So here I am, not yet pregnant. And so I wait, and give myself permission to hope, and hope desperately, and dream wildly. I give myself permission to cry out to God and I continue to ask for what I want instead of pretending to be okay with not getting it. Will he make me okay, no matter what, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now? Yes. But I still want a baby.<br />
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-39536026589943278502017-09-11T20:06:00.000-07:002017-09-11T20:06:42.113-07:00Butterflies.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Cain said to the Lord, ‘My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” - Genesis 4:13-14</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem… to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” - Hebrews 12:22 & 24</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Sometimes I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true /</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">” - Bob Dylan</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I hate butterfly season. Why would one hate butterfly season, you ask, when these fragile, colorful creatures emerge in abundance and, borne aloft on gentle zephyrs, christen all manner of flora with their ethereal osculations? I hate it because I have to watch one after another of them flutter innocently unawares across the highway only to be violently sucked into the slipstream of my vehicle, hurtling forward at 70 MPH toward some fool</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’s errand (okay, usually I have a pretense of purpose; I just like the phrase ‘fool’s errand’), and (presumably, I never see because, you know, 70 MPH) spat back out again, mutilated and destroyed, in a millisecond. For me, it’s just a particularly stark illustration of how things are not as they are supposed to be between humans and creation. Our command was to rule and subdue; we ransack and pillage. God help us. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">This season also happens to coincide with my much-hailed annual beginning-of-the-homeschool-year freak out. As the almost grotesquely immense array of curriculum options unfurls before me, my thoughts become increasingly hysterical in pitch and projection: “oh my gosh, look at all this STUFF available! We’re not doing nearly enough!” and “we need to do EVERYTHING or my children’s education will be woefully deficient and they’ll be consigned to a life of chronic ne’erdowellitude and it will be all my fault!” “Israel is in second grade and I haven’t read Shakespeare out loud to him yet! Oh, forget it, it’s too late, I’ve blown it. Just call the whole thing off!” God help us. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And there’s always the world at large: natural disasters, dueling despotic rulers with bloated egos sheathed in the impenetrable armor of pride, hatred blooming blackly in a thousand demonic forms. So much profligacy. So much waste. So much futile hurtling towards nothingness. God help us. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Yet in the midst of it all, beckoning to me in the stillness I too rarely seek, He is asking: </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">What matters? </span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">And he is whispering: </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.</span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The thing is, left to my own faculties, I have no idea what matters. Out in the hinterlands of Nod, I will frenetically sprint after a thousand holograms, each more glittering and more vapid than the next. I’ll almost gleefully cannonball into a bottomless quagmire of deliberation over even trivial decisions. I’ll project every possible negative scenario with the superstition that certain possibilities can be staved off by the very fact of my anticipation. I’ll Google things like “how large is a nuclear fallout zone?” followed by “where would…” after which two words Google conveniently and perceptively fills in “North Korea bomb?” for me. Thanks, Google, for anticipating our neuroses like an obsequious servant. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My pattern - the one I still revert to more often than I care to admit and the one which has ingrained in my very DNA since Adam and Eve befouled the primordial soup, is self-reliance. The only catch is that I am wildly, utterly, incorrigibly unreliable. My recidivism rate is exactly 100 percent with a 0 percent margin of error. In my flesh, I am dead. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I still remember the first intimations I heard of another Way. Another way than frantically straining to save myself, to control, to shim and jostle things into a coherent pattern, to wrest meaning from what I believed was a godless (or, later, impersonally God-ed) universe. It was a maddeningly circuitous venture. My self-inflicted punishment was more than I could bear, and I was a restless wanderer on the earth, riddled with paranoia and fear. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Jesus is always whispering of a better way. A way of rest. A way of surrender. A way of trust. A way of faith that rests on His goodness and His faithfulness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It means listening. It means stillness. It means biting my tongue when I’m itching to enter the fray. It means believing that He is my father, my creator, and that he has etched me on the palms of His hands. It means saying I don’t understand but I trust anyway. It means luxuriating in instead of fighting against bewilderment at the riotously undeserved gift of grace. It means joyfully becoming a fool, joyfully ceding my claims on power and knowledge and dominion, joyfully turning away from that impulse to glut myself on the tree of good and evil and turning towards Jesus, in whom I am made alive and in whom this restless wanderer can finally rest from her endless vigilance. It means watching and waiting and preparing to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It also means trusting that God will accomplish his purposes, as he always has, since the first Garden, and my fretting and hand-wringing and cataclysmic projecting are absolutely non-essential (and in fact inimical) to the cause. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My dear friend, Evan, commented recently that she suspects her father thinks she’s lazy. Like me, he is prone to that fretting and hand-wringing over uncertainty, while Evan is pretty darn good at trusting that God is God, and good and faithful beyond even our rosiest, but still sin-dimmed, reveries. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I think people thought Jesus was pretty lazy, too. He knew the Father. He </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">knew</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> Him. He was with him since the beginning. And so there Jesus was, napping in the midst of the maelstrom, and I think he was even a little annoyed that his disciples thought it warranted interrupting that nap. Once he calmed the seas, Matthew says they were amazed. Mark says they were terrified. I think both sentiments fall under the umbrella of bewilderment.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">We have extreme difficulty trusting something unless we can cram it into the narrow margins of our own understanding, own it, classify it and, in the end, desacralize it. When we decided to go our own way and call it another lonely day, we started trying to do that to God. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that’s impossible. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Yet we’ve been trying for a long time, and we still try. Formulas, methods, procedures, ceremonies, appeasing sacrifices. Any desperate scrambling to try and circumvent the nakedness of relationship and yet, still, the Spirit blows where it pleases. I even try, subconsciously, to turn Bible-reading into a formula. It’s just so hard for us to cede control. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">But when I go and sit in our garden to just be with Jesus, I remember. It </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> this simple, and this ineffably majestic. My poor garden - it is long-suffering due to my neglect. Every spring I am inflamed with gusto and a deep conviction that this season will be different… and then around mid-July I give up again. And yet, in spite of my negligence, beauty blooms, utterly undeserved. The green onions that the previous owner planted everywhere are yielding their tiny six-petaled white flowers, little nebulas perched atop tall green stems. Delicate lavender-colored flowers dapple the tops of the sedum and a rose bush I forgot to fertilize in the spring is blooming again and here I am, reaping where I did not sow. Deep mystery, deep majesty. Oh, and there are butterflies - butterflies en masse alighting on the sedum flowers. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new!” said Augustine. I am always late, because I first revert to the hand-wringing, the fretting, the negativity, the anguish of self-reliance and paranoiac wandering. And then when I finally give up, often more from fatigue and the attrition of every last resource of my own power, Jesus is there. And I remember. Oh yes, You again. Home again. The sum of my yearnings, the arms in which I was always meant to rest. Just me and Jesus in the garden and my utter found-ness in this person, fully God and fully human, who waits for me at the center of the spinning universe. That which is worth everything, the kingdom buried in a field, the pearl of great price. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And, miracle of miracles, he thinks of me in the same way - worth everything, even death on a cross. Oh, blessed, blessed bewilderment. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">He is always there, waiting for me to quieten my hysterical pitch. And, ultimately, at the crux of any circumstance, he always asks: Do you believe that I am good? Do you believe that I can be trusted? Do you believe that I can do immeasurably more than you can ask for or imagine? And our work, the work of belief, is to answer yes, even when all appearances contradict it, even when our flesh cries “panic!”, even when our millennia-old patterns scream no. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Because He is, and He can. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Amen.</span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-46282452366940039722017-07-20T06:58:00.003-07:002017-07-20T12:00:08.413-07:00Nine - Could it be divine?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWk3_7mR0OHAd4VVgtajBNa3WkQU9Wn487N3RaocJVju1Z-PxbPv9QsiA8h78Kq7vvLz8YpLz0yPkHS2UZ5HrRccz3H0TgMfVygcgUyupCa_vWjuJjHHdbuQTihVZcPI1VUL8lJNL8us/s1600/menpap2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNWk3_7mR0OHAd4VVgtajBNa3WkQU9Wn487N3RaocJVju1Z-PxbPv9QsiA8h78Kq7vvLz8YpLz0yPkHS2UZ5HrRccz3H0TgMfVygcgUyupCa_vWjuJjHHdbuQTihVZcPI1VUL8lJNL8us/s320/menpap2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“We’re just spinning leaves in the flight of a dawn, little girl</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Falling through an eternal horizon of time</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">But I’d like to think as we lie here</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">that all we’ve got will be ours forever.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Don’t you think we’re forever?” - Roy Harper</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Love is a stranger</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And hearts are in danger</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">On smooth streets paved with gold.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Oh, true love travels on a gravel road.” - Elvis</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I was in the throes of fresh matrimony, the stars still sparkling in my eyes while they gazed up to the pedestal upon which I</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’d placed Steven, his every quirk endlessly endearing, his every utterance rife with </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">coruscating</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> wit and his flatulence odorless. My three co-workers, all late middle-aged and married for twenty years or more, were markedly not trembling in love’s dulcet thrall like I was. Somehow we’d begun a conversation about love and marriage that had deteriorated into me passionately defending love, marriage and love in marriage while they rolled their eyes and muttered things like “just you wait”. My rose-colored glasses were being snatched off, dashed to the ground and soundly stomped upon, and I was not taking it well. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Then one of my co-workers, </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Alberta, turned to me and stared plainly. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Love doesn’t last,” she said. “It doesn’t last.” My eyes filled with tears and I pushed back from the table and hurried to the bathroom, where I let my tender hypersensitive tears fall and in my head pledged undying love to Steven forever and ever, no matter what these crusty old cranks said. I daubed my eyes and marched back into the meeting.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Later, Alberta gently expounded on her statement: “The infatuation, that doesn’t last,” she said. But her original statement rang in my mind and heart and deeply troubled me. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Being newly married is sort of like being newly pregnant in that so many people - including strangers - love to offer opinions, advice, horror stories and admonishments on your condition. But why, I asked. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Why were these people so cynical? </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">At another temp job I’d held before marriage, a middle-aged single co-worker had waxed one afternoon on her ideal romance. “Why can’t I just have a torrid six-month affair with a pilot whose plane tragically goes down in flames?” </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Beate</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> asked </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">moonily</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">, her eyes glittering with the prospect of a love frozen in time and enshrined by tragedy. Meanwhile, the closest thing to romance in her real life was a longtime close friendship with a man named Patrick, a biker with a ponytail whose image contrasted sharply with Beate’s </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Iowa </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">farm girl pedigree. She talked about him constantly and I wondered why their obvious attraction hadn’t breached the platonic walls of their friendship yet. It seemed to me that while she dreamt of tempestuous liaisons truncated by aviation disasters - love that never lasts long enough to become real - her best chance at real love languished beside her, relegated to neuter companionship because of fear or timidity or… something. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">What is that something? Marriage is a very particular choosing, a narrowing, a decision to go deep and risk everything. There is no guarantee of success or protection from rejection or promise of a </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">plane crash</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> to get us out of the whole thing. While tales of new lovers who meet tragic ends might make for highly sellable 2- hour cinema, our absolute exaltation of the dopamine-riddled phase of fresh love only makes us shallow, and yes, it does end. Sort of. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I learned eventually that Alberta was telling the truth. But the thing is, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Maybe she knew it, deep down, but her preference for stark statements and unadorned speech got the best of her. Maybe her long, depleting walk with a husband stricken with Alzheimer’s had obscured it. Maybe she just couldn’t resist knocking me off my high horse (really more a majestic Lisa </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Frank</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> unicorn). The truth is that the whole story of marriage gives the infatuation its meaning. The acute infatuation doesn’t last, true - but it is </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">subsumed</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> and contained within the story of a marriage. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">As a kid, I remember once being dazzled by a rainbow array of shirts on display in a store. But after my mom bought me one and I got home and the lustre of cleverly designed visual marketing wore off, the single color alone seemed - well - kind of boring. And lonely. Once isolated from the full spectrum of color, it wore out. After the first year or so of our marriage, I frantically strove to hold on to the love-high even as it faded. I thought it was everything - love itself - and I didn’t know it was just one season. And it wasn’t gone forever. I wish I had known then that I could trust the story to unfold as it should. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I believe God intended marriage to be a prism, a bedazzlement of colors and phases and seasons, each made beautiful in its time and each intoned in the others, sparkling through in mysterious darting glints and glimmers. That early stage of oceanic infatuation is lovely in its own right, but it only achieves its fullest beauty when it’s framed by the full story of a marriage. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">After almost 9 years, I have discovered that when you stay in the story and love when it’s hard and abide when it’s boring and keep your vows even when it hurts (Ps. 15:4), the sweetness of that first infatuation - when no romantic overture is too </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">saccharine </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">and every cliche about love rings so true and L-O-V-E all caps in vivid neon blooms profusely and spills over and saturates the whole spinning world - springs up when and where you least expect it to delight you anew. The person next to you is again a delicious mystery to discover, a revelation made even more resplendent by your shared history: the peaks and valleys, the sickness and health, the pleasure and pain. Because it is really His story, and the dying and rising again that reverberates through this cosmos which lives and moves and has its being in Jesus Christ also echoes throughout and sustains our marriage, if we only let it. Marriage can be a </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">lilting </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">melody in the resurrection song He is always singing. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">In many ways, the old romantic in me </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">did</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> die. Marriage did her in. Good riddance, though, </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">for</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> she believed that true love lived only on the mountaintop. She believed love required no sacrifice and asked very little of her while giving continuously. She believed love made ultimatums and kept record of wrongs and bore nothing. She didn’t know that true love could hurt, could fail in major ways and still endure, still be true love. She didn’t see how full of selfishness and arrogance she was. And she believed that a mere mortal (albeit a wonderful, magical, devastatingly handsome and stunningly </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">virile</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> one such as Steven Lande) could bear the burden of being a savior. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out that Jesus is the mediator of all relationships, whether we acknowledge that reality or not. (God said it first, of course - John 1:3, Colossians 1:16-17) Our failure to acknowledge it is disastrous, while with our acknowledgment of it comes a kind of death - death of pride, of wrong and covetous ownership. But then the relationship is gently handed back to us, fresh and new and illumined from within with a sparkle it didn’t have before when we believed it a closed circuit between us and the other. Our human relationships flag, wilt and ultimately die when the reality of Jesus Christ - and the Christian saturation of God’s cosmos, created through Jesus - is resisted and rejected. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">So here I am, after nearly nine years, still a romantic, but of a new breed: one that, by the grace of God, is stepping into an understanding of love’s high cost but also its invaluable worth. I’ve read marriage “experts” smirkingly deride the Beatles’ line “all you need is love”, saying a marriage takes far more than that to survive and thrive. But it’s actually true - all you need is love. Authentic, vulnerable, co-suffering, collaborative, magical, wonderful love. It doesn’t come from you, but from the source of all love, the Trinity. Yes, you also need extraordinary patience, endurance, astute money management, all that practical stuff, the mention of which sends an artist like me into a sweaty-palmed glazed stupor. But what does all that flow from but love? Seek the kingdom first, and all these things will be added to you (including a spouse who actually seems to take pleasure in practical matters such as packing for vacations and budgeting). </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I am still a romantic, yes - but I am a chastened, humbled, disillusioned and restored romantic. Could this be something of what it means to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves? I remember yet another incident from my temp days. I was working at an engineering firm when Steven and I were very new newlyweds, shortly before the gig I mentioned at the beginning. Making my rounds about the office delivering mail and invoices and various documents, I encountered an older woman who worked there as a structural engineer. She had to be in her fifties but there was something buoyant and young and girlish about her. She was beautiful. I didn’t really know her but I was giddy over my new status and when I mentioned to her that I’d just gotten married, her eyes came alive. “Oh!” she exclaimed, sighing dreamily. She clasped her hands at her heart and looked at me with wide earnest eyes and said “I’ve been married for 35 years. Isn’t marriage </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">wonderful</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">?” </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Oh, it is. It really is. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-18588521288233806272017-07-12T14:43:00.003-07:002017-07-12T14:52:41.555-07:00Rejection and Redemption<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">From my embarrassing photo file, which includes any photo taken between the ages of 9-14, none of which, I vowed, should ever see the light of day again. I make this weighty sacrifice for you, dear readers!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.” - 1 Corinthians 1:26-28</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old is gone, the new has come!” - 2 Corinthians 5:16-17</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.” - Simon and Garfunkel</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">He literally couldn</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’t wait. As soon as I put the car in park, he was gone, leaving the car door open and forgetting to look both ways across the (blessedly small) parking lot in his haste to get inside. “C’mon, mom!” he yelled as he held the door open and waved frantically to his sister and I. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">As he weaved through the tables, holding his Pokemon card binder excitedly, his eyes searching for an opening, I watched anxiously, wondering if he</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’d find a spot. His eyes were so eager, his posture so unjaded and hopeful, his zeal palpable and undimmed by any desire to be ‘cool’ and indifferent. I knew I should just go sit down like the other parents who had sunk comfortably into the leather couches or milled around the library with smaller children, but it was difficult to look away. Even though he obviously wasn’t nervous, I was. And I realized deeper questions troubled my heart than whether he’d successfully trade a basic Vullaby for an evolved one*.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">No, the real question that lurked beneath as the subtext, the ground of all the others, was this: will he be accepted, or will he be rejected? Can his inherent sense of worth as God’s beloved withstand the gauntlet of social negotiations that is childhood and adolescence? Will his innocence be crushed? Or, if I’m being honest, the real question that I harbor, the one that fills me with dread, is this: </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">when</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> will his innocence be crushed?</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I think of Severus Snape and the mosaic of memories contained in his dying tear, the ones that formed and shaped him - particularly the bitter formative ones, the ones of rejection and teasing and relegation to the outer darkness of the social hierarchy, where the pariahs and misfits and not-good-enoughs languish. I was lucky - if it can be called that - to fly under the radar most of my school life. I avoided decampment in that outer ring, but deep down I knew it was where I’d end up were I to actually be myself, let my vulnerabilities show, stop tailoring and censoring my every word and action according to the very avoidance of that rejection. By high school I’d decided to forgo any efforts to fit in and instead intentionally cultivated weirdness and a foreboding reticence to speak, both of which conspired to exude an air of alleged intimidation that was totally incongruent with my inner life and rampant insecurity but hey, I took it happily so long as it pre-emptively staved off the beasts of rejection. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">My own agonizing memories of the times I was singled out rise and float like a black miasma on the surface of my own personal Pensieve. Although when I’ve recounted them as an adult I’ve always made a joke of them, the truth is that they still carry an acute sting, a cutting and acid reminder of just how lonesome and desolate rejection feels. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">The three worst ones that have stubbornly rooted themselves in my psyche are all from middle school. Ah, the miserable crucible of middle school - when the desperate need for peer affirmation and the scarcity and volatility thereof both peak, it seems. The first: In social studies I was sitting next to my friend, Lauren, who was being badgered as usual by a boy named Cole who had a crush on her and thought the fastest inroad to her heart was relentless pestering and coercion. Today, she’d had enough. “Cole, why do you even like me?” she asked exasperately. “Because you’re cute,” he answered. “If you looked like her” - he pointed to me - “ I wouldn’t bother.” Ouch. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">The second: in the same class, but later in the year, if memory serves me right. I was fervently hoping to be accepted within a group of kids who were slightly bad and totally rad. I sat directly behind them and laughed at their jokes and said stuff like “totally, me too” and periodically interjected asides into their conversations. Half the time I wasn’t sure I was even heard, but undeterred, I kept trying and eventually mistook their lack of response or paying attention to me for provisional acceptance. Until one day, when the ringleader turned around abruptly in his seat and half-yelled at me “why are you always trying to talk to us and act like you’re one of us? YOU’RE NOT!” Message received, most pointedly. I slunk down in my seat in horror and made sure never to besmirch their ears with my speech again. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And, the third, the real coup de gras: I spent all of my eighth grade year pining after a boy in gifted class (see how I did that? Subtly made sure you knew I was in gifted class? See?! I am special!). I was obsessed. When he invited me to his birthday party I nearly had an aneurysm from joy but sabotaged my appearance by vomiting from nervousness before my mom even pulled me up to the entrance in our minivan. Anyway, on the last day of school I was feeling bold, feeling like playing fast and loose with my dignity, feeling uncharacteristically courageous, the middle school caste system be damned! So, naturally, I did what any self-respecting 14-year-old would do and I asked my friend Emily to call him and ask him out for me. I gripped the phone in her kitchen, one hand clamped over the receiver, while she dialed him from the upstairs phone. The question was asked… and he laughed. And said no. But let me tell you, it’s really the laughter that sticks with you.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">How painful it is to be assessed with a passing glance and found wanting. Perhaps even more painful, for the question of your worthiness to be laughed off as totally ludicrous after a year of pining, a year of fluttering pulse rates whenever he was near, a year of interactions endlessly parsed and analyzed and scoured for any iota of reciprocity. I watch my son’s easy sense of worthiness, his unquestioned belief that he is welcome in the world. He hasn’t learned to hesitate and wonder if acceptance or rejection is coming, and I mourn for the loss of that restful way of being as though it’s inevitable. But what if it’s not? Is there a way to form a child in knowledge of his or her belovedness, to form them in Jesus Christ, so the stings - which perhaps are inevitable - are not as penetrating, not as piquant, not as scarring? </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">My story is a redemption story and, of course, Snape’s was, too, in the end. I met a man who was the sum of all my crushes over the formative years and who, wonder of all wonders, loved me back. Then I met Jesus and learned I was loved from the start and loved all the more miraculously and steadfastly where human love failed, or, worse, marred. Truly, he heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. And I learned that to be sat upon, spat upon, ratted on, to be a lowly thing of the world, is blessed, perhaps because it puts you in a place where you can no longer deny your own weakness and the utter inadequacy of your efforts to earn love. Yet I can’t help but wonder, watching my son’s (usually) easy way of moving through the world, his acceptance of God’s enveloping love as a foregone conclusion, is a taste of what Edenic Kingdom Life is like. And I don’t want it to fade or, worse, be broken by the fickle vicissitudes of human popularity. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Jesus was clear, though, that the kingdom has no exclusivity except repentance and faith in the One He sent. The homecoming court, the socially anointed, the luminous popular, the glitteratti and literati and even the Illuminati are all welcome. But I think inherent in repentance is the ceding of whatever worldly power we hold, the recognition that His power is made perfect only in our weakness. And power is easier to surrender if you don’t really have any. Still, it’s not like being a dork made me sinless in this way. We humans have ingenious ways of inventing our own power where the world gives us none. And maybe in some cases, being powerless in the world makes us grasp more desperately for whatever small tyrannies we can create. But if we allow it, there is truly something blessed in persecution, however mild.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I tend to covet popularity for my children, if subconsciously, the way I also covet a trouble-free, pain-free life for them. I should spend more time praying that the love of Christ takes root in them, that they don’t fall away, that their love endures for the One with whom and through whom they can endure anything. That, like Jesus, they’ll move toward the wounded, the strange, the ugly, the things which are not, in the service of helping the kingdom burst forth. That they’ll be able to say to all forms of death - physical decay, rejection, failure, ‘loserdom’ - where is thy sting? </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">* Please don’t think my Pokemon vocab is this advanced, or that I am fluent at all - I am not. I had to go look at his cards so my reference would sound more realistic. Pokemon is by far the most difficult thing I’ve had to pretend to be interested in as a parent. </span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-20173136179220517862017-06-07T14:27:00.000-07:002017-06-07T20:29:29.884-07:00The Gospel of Mary Magdalene<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mary Magdalene by Tintoretto.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I wouldn</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’t have even noticed the display as we hurriedly passed by it, late as usual to one or another of our homeschool co-op engagements. A regimented row of pink-hued covers beckoned, adorned with swirling cursive letters and glittery accents designed to lure the gaze of my five-year-old daughter who now cried out “Mommy, look!”, arresting me in my pursuit of the exit to which I’d been half-dragging her. I’d unwittingly chosen the route out that took us straight through the gauntlet of toys, and now trying to make it out with both her and my son was becoming a prodigious undertaking.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I turned, exasperated, and looked at the display toward which she, flat-footed and smiling, was now pointing. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“A Love Letter to My Princess,” I read, almost silently, from one of the covers. “The Beautiful Princess Bible,” another read. As my eyes lingered over the saccharine designs, so flagrantly pink and so gleefully sparkly, something that felt suspiciously like anger stirred in my belly. It was as though something from some deep calcified stratum in my heart was being piqued and prodded and drudged up into the light and I didn’t like it. So, I ignored it. I dismissed the display with a “hmmph” and tried again to impress a sense of urgency on my children, with little success. (It’s as though they want to just enjoy life and live in the moment or something!) But we left and got to our engagement in our habitually late way and I truly didn’t even think of that display of Bibles again.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">A week or two later, I couldn’t sleep one early morning and got up while Steven was still home. He requires a draconian level of silence in the morning, so I did my best to be quiet and we each read and drank our coffee. But as I randomly flipped to the Old Testament and read a passage about God giving away someone’s wives to foreigners, I felt the incipient anger that had been fomenting in me deepen and take a shape and life of its own. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">You see, In some distant lock-and-key subbasement of my heart, a false god lived, a hideous phantasmagoric beast that was a Frankensteinian pastiche of my own creation - a compilation of the spectacular failures of human love, the hurts inflicted on me by myself and others, the lie that I was only worth the amount of sexual interest I could garner from men, the times I’d believed all the lies the world tells about sexuality and the emotional devastation that invariably followed. All this I had pasted over God, superimposed it on him instead of surrendering it to him. It was the lens through which I been reading the Old Testament, gleefully exclaiming “a-ha! I knew it!” each time I found apparent confirmation of my bias. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I couldn’t keep quiet. “I don’t understand,” I began. Steven peered up from his reading, valiantly concealing his annoyance, at least for the moment. I continued. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“It says here that God is giving away wives, as though they were property, as though they were so much chattel. Didn’t the wives have some kind of say in this? And why did he routinely allow and, apparently, tacitly condone polygamy anyway? Obviously a crap deal for the ladies. I don’t get it.”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Steven sighed. “ I have no idea,” he said. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“But God doesn’t think of women as… chattel? What the heck does that mean? Can’t you just use words people actually know? Why don’t you pray about it?”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“I did!” I insisted. Did I? With a broken and earnestly seeking spirit? Probably not, but I was mired in my rightness now, my conviction that God was a blatant woman-hater. I would not be moved. And then, suddenly, the stagnant sewage of all the false beliefs, all the ossified lies and treasured wounds, all the years of looking for the wrong kind of love (or at least, a stunted, compartmentalized piece of love that became poisonous when excised from its whole) in all the wrong places came gushing forth and met with that dang pink Bible cover. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I wept. And I wept, and wept, and wept. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Steven’s confusion registered through my vale of tears and I choked out, “It says… It says… It says ‘For My Beautiful Princess’, but -” I gulped and a sob arose again - “It doesn’t feel that way!” And he held me and I cried and the snot and tears comingled on the shoulder of his work shirt and he didn’t even say anything, bless him.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Wow,” I said, when I’d reasonably collected myself. “I didn’t know </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">that</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> was in there.” And I didn’t. But God did. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I love how relentless God is. I love how he doesn’t let us die in sin, in unredeemed pain, in hiding and pretending and shallow, arms-distance relationship. In the days leading up to that early morning death and rebirth, I had become obsessed with a staggeringly beautiful a cappella version of Bon Iver’s “Heavenly Father”. I watched the video over and over again. It has profanity, which I’d prefer wasn’t there, but it’s such a profoundly raw and authentic lament and psalm and prayer and dirge all rolled into one and it was reverberating in the wildest reaches of my soul and giving form to the struggle I couldn’t yet name: </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">No, I don’t know how you house the sin</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">I never knew how much of you I could let in</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">How </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">does</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> he absorb the sin, take it upon himself, bleed for us, lay himself to be disfigured and maligned and humiliated? How does he house the sin? Grace is the most profound, vast, and beautiful mystery that exists. He not only houses it, he forgives it, erases it, makes us whole and new and infused with life and tender as babies with the wonder of that grace. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">I never knew how much of you I could let in.</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> I never did, never trusted that something could be </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">that</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> good or that someone could love me </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">that </span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">much even as I stumbled through my late teens and early twenties, gorging from the hideous buffet of coping mechanisms that promised oblivion: drunkenness, eating disorders, drugs. I was betrayed and I betrayed; my heart was broken and in my cataracted selfishness I broke hearts. I didn’t believe God’s love existed, yet my restless heart wouldn’t stop looking for it. The dissonance reached an unbearable crescendo as I couldn’t divorce the act of physical intimacy from emotion as it grazed the very crux of my aching heart. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Darkness visible, c. 2007</div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I’ve been married for almost nine years now, and I thought my grieving over those days was over. But God knew it wasn’t. God knew, somewhere deep down, I still wondered if he loved me, wondered if he cared about women at all, wondered if he could ever truly love a Mary Magdalene. And I cherry-picked passages out of Scripture that buffeted my deepest fears and the lies I still carried with me. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">I’ve been up here for [all these] years</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Filling up holes with [all these] fears</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Well I know about it, darling, I’ve been standing here. </span></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Jesus. He was standing there all along, through the sojourns in hell and the interminable nights when the room spun or flowered in fractals, the mornings of hangovers or unbearable coming-downs when I’d realized I’d gone loping across the cosmos and yet my heart remained unchanged and my wounds grievous. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When I languished in the agony of break-ups that seemed cataclysmic, certain I was unlovable and worthless, <i><b>He was there</b></i>. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When I turned away again and again and again to chase some other hologram that promised the world while it siphoned my soul, <i><b>He was there</b></i>. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">When I’d finally exhausted nearly every other avenue, sprinted down every road that seemed to shine only to return bereft and more broken than before, and found myself one Sunday morning sitting in the backmost pew of a church sobbing during the worship music with my mind straining to explain away this sudden humiliating deluge while simultaneously my heart whispered maybe- just maybe - there was something to this whole “Jesus thing” I’d been hearing so much about. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">And when I look at Jesus, I see the precious and honored place women have in our Creator’s heart. Jesus came into the world through a woman. Mary Magdalene was the first to see him after his resurrection. He revealed his identity plainly to the woman at the well, something he didn’t even do for his disciples. When I read about Jesus and women, all I see is perfect compassion, mercy, and grace. And Jesus is God. As Brian Zahnd says, Jesus is what God looks like and is what he has always looked like - we just haven’t always known it.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I think wrapped up in repentance, inexorable from it, is the full realization of the true gravity of what we’ve done. We have to suffer the full weight of what we’ve done to ourselves and others - how we’ve desecrated these temples and strained gnats and missed the whole point over and over again - in order to be truly free. It’s not karma. It’s mercy, because compassion can be formed no other way. But with it comes grace - torrential, extravagant, amazing grace - making us new creations in Christ. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i><b>This love isn’t too good to be true- it’s the only thing good enough to be true, and all other truth originates from it. </b></i></span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have to confess, though I love Mary Mother of God, I’ve always identified more with Mary Magdalene. During a nadir in the midst of my lost years, when it felt as though my very soul was disintegrating and the tenuous center of self could no longer hold, I decided to go to church one Sunday morning. Any one would do, so I picked one and I walked in and immediately felt an agonizing psychological tension as the demons to whom I’d given clearance warred with my primal yearning for healing, for relief, for the name above all names that I simply couldn’t yet utter. I left abruptly after about ten minutes after someone spoke kindly to me during the greeting time. I was so close to the precipice, to having a full-on Damascus style conversion, and I turned and ran. As I listened to a sermon years later about Mary and her seven demons, my heart sighed with relief. Although sin has a high cost, it is also true that where it abounds so does grace, and often when you’ve been forgiven so much, it’s hard to forget you are and always will be, as Brian Zahnd also says, a beggar at the table. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Something in me still resists the idea of a princess bible. It’s too maudlin, a voice within says, too trite, too reductionistic. But is it? Why is it so hard to rest in God’s radical love? I remember one of my favorite movies as a child, The Little Princess. At one point, the mean girl (don’t remember her name, you know the one) is mocking the idea that Sarah is a princess. “I AM a princess,” Sarah responds with great conviction. “All little girls are!” Well, that’s a little silly, I protest. I mean, I read theology! I’m trying to move on to solid food here! Yet there are these love-malnourished iterations of me - the chubby little girl who sincerely believed if she could just wear her sister’s Calvin Klein logo t-shirt, she would finally be among the anointed in the social hierarchy at school; the acne-ridden, still chubby, too-tall teenager who was always left on the wall at the school dance (that is, the few she mustered up the courage to attend), the rudderless and desperate young woman; - they all just want to be a princess. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">They - she - just wants to rest under the gaze of a Creator who is pleased with her, whose love is pure and adoring and free of exploitative desire and in fact embodies the opposite - love that is assured, sacrificial and unfailing, love that knows how to mend the deepest wounds, love that calls the sinners chosen and the last first and the cross worth it. So I’ll let the grown 33-year-old woman be that princess, sometimes. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-29808170833162365532017-05-27T20:52:00.001-07:002017-05-27T20:52:39.992-07:00The Velveteen Mother <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“My mom ALWAYS cries when she reads this story to us,” my son loudly proclaimed to the librarian as we stepped up to the desk with a movie adaptation of </span><i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Velveteen Rabbit</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">. The librarian nodded and looked at me with a knowing smile. “Yep, it gets you right in the feels, doesn’t it?” she asked. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Oh, does it ever. We get about three pages in, to the part where the Velveteen Rabbit is learning about becoming real from the wise old Skin Horse, and I</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’m gulping and sniffling and struggling to keep reading while the tears blur my eyes and my kids are patting my back and saying “mom, it’s okay! It’s okay!”</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Whenever I cry in front of my children, my daughter always asks, “Mommy, are you crying because you’re sad or because you’re happy?” And when she asks in the midst of one of my Velveteen Rabbit meltdowns, I never know how to answer. Well, </span><i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">am</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> I happy? Or am I sad? I’m just not sure. The answer is… both. It feels like a polyphonic deluge of feeling with the beauty and the sadness so intimately intertwined as to be inseparable; two sides of a single emotion. All I know is, it’s real. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I think the story pricks so many tender emotions because it tells our story, or rather the story God wants to tell in our lives. For us to become </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“real” and embrace </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">an even more majestic future, something must be lost, often something precious but something whose time has passed. Loss and gain, surrender and persistence, nostalgia and hope - these pairs can</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’t be divorced. But we resist. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I told a friend once that when I</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’m feeling pessimistic and </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">overwhelmed by the bigness and ruthlessness and sometimes outright badness of this world and I gauge it against the tenderness and vulnerability I see in my children, I wish I could just fold them back into myself. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Oh, well, THAT’S healthy,” my friend sarcastically exclaimed, and we laughed. But it’s true. The tension is real. When my kids were really tiny, I remember spending entire days feeling filled with dread about the passing of time, days when the cliche “the days are long, but the years are short” rang so true and I’d project years ahead and my heart would cry “no!” and ache at how everything changes. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">In those moods, it felt like everything was being</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> irrevocably lo</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">st. Gone, gone. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">When I tried to stay on top of the flow of time rather than let myself be subsumed by it, panic and melancholia and a feeling of things constantly and irretrievably tumbling into the chasm of the past, despite my desperate efforts to hold on, poisoned my days.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> Memories of hazy spring days spent at the park, memories once lucid, grew faint as they receded. My children’s limbs kept lengthening and those baby fat creases kept fading and time kept rolling on like a river, like water over the palm. And I finally learned that if you clench your fists and try to stanch the river, it seeps through your fingers and pummels your knuckles with its relentless onslaught. You drown. But over an open, receptive palm it flows untrammeled, pooling for a moment before being replaced by new streams. It’s living water, not a stagnant pool. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Seasons crest and ebb. We are always feeding out more rope to the tether that binds us to our children. One day it will become gossamer-thin as we watch them eagerly venture out into the world alone. And we’ll still be able to see the baby, the toddler, the child echoed in features and mannerisms and we’ll feel terrified and accomplished and nostalgic and fulfilled and emptied all at once. So I hear.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">We can</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’t stop the flow of time. We can’t predict the future. We can’t, by force of will, keep things the way they are forever. Our children will grow. Things will change. But we have a good God who holds it all. He has made and is making everything beautiful in its time, and we are being invited into greater trust with every passing moment. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Will it hurt? Yes, it will. It’s bittersweet, this mothering business. There’s no point pretending it isn’t. The delight of witnessing them learn and grow and become is tempered by the yearning for days gone by, for sweet kissable baby cheeks and quiet moments in the still of night when the whole spinning world seems to revolve around the silent, sacred sanctuary that is you and your baby. It will hurt, the constant letting go that motherhood demands. But the fruit of letting go, of holding the flow of time in an open palm and trusting God - is joy: magical, flowering, overflowing joy. And joy isn’t pain-free. It isn’t safe. It isn’t shallow. It’s not a one-dimensional kind of happiness but a prismatic bounty full of texture and complexity that nourishes the wild wordless places of your soul. And it makes you real, and draws you into a life more deep, more rich and more lush than a life clutching to any illusory sense of control ever could. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And when you’re real, as the Skin Horse so wisely says, you don’t mind being hurt.</span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-83750124134020043652017-04-30T20:21:00.001-07:002017-05-02T07:56:36.831-07:00Well, I NEVER...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">From the scene of the infamous Santa-Cali-Gon incident recounted in the postscript.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Fun facts: </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">On our first date, Steven asked to use the bathroom in my apartment before we went out. He spied a small cardboard box in my bathroom trash can and he told me years later that my thoughtless disposal of a fully recyclable item gave him serious pause about asking me out again. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Well into our 1.5 month engagement, I learned that Steven had in his possession a book he</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’d checked out from the library and kept because, well, he wanted it and it was out of print and it cost too much to buy. Aghast, I momentarily considered breaking off our engagement.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">To both of us, the other had committed an unpardonable sin worthy of excommunication. Yet love (or, perhaps for Steven at that early juncture, more just physical attraction) transcended and made us question our most dearly held “rules”. The ways we divided people into categories - good versus bad; wanton, styrofoam-burning earth destroyer versus pious recycler; evil saboteur of the magical institutions known as libraries which are designed to benefit the commonwealth and provide literary education and pleasure to all which only works if EVERYONE FOLLOWS THE RULES versus respectful library patron - suddenly didn’t hold up to the reality and complexity of another human being. (To be honest, it’s probably for the best that the library book revelation occurred late as it did in our courtship. I was in way too deep by that point).</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Relationships in general, and marriage in particular, have a way of composting our most dearly held “rules”: our absolutes - our </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">can’t</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s, </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">won’t</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s, </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">don’t</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s and </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">never</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s. As the rules we use to delineate, to divide, to map our world into clear-cut categories collide with the reality of a flesh-and-blood, sinful, broken human being with whom we’re desperately in love, we can either save our rules and shrink our world and calcify our hearts more and more, or surrender our rules and stay and love. Before I met Steven, I would say that I never wanted to get married or have kids and furthermore I didn’t understand what compelled people to want to do either (yes, I was totally insufferable and out of touch with my own yearnings). </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Then suddenly, here was this magical man who was convex in all the places I was concave and concave in all the places I was convex: who just fit me. He loved order when I tended toward chaos. He was brave when I was scared. He knew just what to say and how to say it in the way I needed when I was stammering and wordless. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And then, when he invited me to his family’s picnic on our third date (we move fast), I witnessed the way he interacted with his niece and it was so beautiful and touching that it began to excavate some deeply buried longing of my heart that had been tamped down with cynicism and fear. As I watched him play with her and heard her darling toddler giggles, the thought popped into my head, startling and unbidden: “he’d make a really good father”. It both terrified and exhilarated me, striking out into this particular uncharted territory of daydreaming. I didn’t even know how to hold a baby, and yet some of the oldest magic in the book was enchanting me and beginning to erode my </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">never</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I remember our courtship and the way I was entranced by his laugh - so uninhibited and earnest and real - the easy way he moved, the way he made up little limericks on the spot and made me laugh more often than anyone I’d ever met, his complete lack of pretense and how he knew how to push the boundaries of decorum just as far as they needed to go to disarm and charm people. In short, he was perfect. Except when he wasn’t, and my </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">can’t</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s and </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">won’t</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s and </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">always</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">es and </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">never</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">s butt up against this person I loved, this person I was covenanted to, and I had to choose. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">God delights in surprise, in subverting our manmade kingdoms and our dimmed expectations. I’ll never have a baby, said Sarah. I always outwit everyone, Jacob thought (I imagine). And then there’s one of my favorite moments in the book of Acts: when God asks Ananias to go see Saul, lay hands on him and restore his vision. Ananias’ response was quite measured and contained, and he didn’t even ask God to repeat himself or exclaim “say WHAT? You want me to go see WHO?” He did, however, essentially say “Lord, you do know who this guy is and what he’s been doing… right?” Of course, this moment doesn’t represent so much the dismantling or an absolute as the presentation of a command that is so outrageous, so far out of the realm of plausibility that I doubt Ananias had even ever given it the consideration that would lead to the formation of a “won’t” or a “never”. Inasmuch as he thought of Saul it was probably to grieve the violence and loss of life that Saul perpetrated and assiduously avoid running into him. And now God is asking Ananias to intentionally seek him out! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Recently I was thinking about Paul and his murderous, Christ-hating past and I laughed out loud, wondering “who would hire that guy?! God would!” God would, because he didn’t look at Saul and only see an enemy and someone who was venomously and diametrically opposed to his purposes. He didn’t see the lost cause of all lost causes, like we would. Instead (I believe), he saw a passion for God gone horribly awry under the jurisdiction of human terms and rules, but a passion which, once brought under the ownership of Jesus Christ, could yield fruit 100 times what was sown - fruit of hope in the boundless redemptive promise of Him. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">God delights in showing us how far his mercy and grace and redemption goes - and it’s always way beyond our human boundaries. We say things like “I could never forgive someone if they ____”. God says he would rather sacrifice everything than not forgive</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; font-size: 10.0000pt;"> or follow the “rules” of karma or retaliation. We say perfectly reasonable things like “I’ll forgive, but I’ll never forget,” a not-so-clever ruse to actually not forgive and instead continue to remind our trespasser of his trespass. God says crazy stuff like “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18) and “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor 5:17) and "love keeps no record of wrongs" (1 Cor 13). We crucified Love Himself, we denied Him three times, we held people’s coats while they stoned one of His anointed, and yet still God delights in pushing the boundaries of what we think is possible. We, the prodigal sons, come home to a lavish banquet.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> What a preposterously unfair equation! What an outrageously unbalanced scale! What a scandal! But even more: what a beautiful, great God. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; font-size: 10.0000pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Is it wrong to say that I understand the Pharisees? I do. I can see in them my own anxious attachment to the rules as they gape at Jesus’s flagrant disregard of them. “But you can’t just --- !” “Who do you think you are? We have </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">rules </span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">around here!” I had rules around here, too, once. Big ones. I was pret-ty proud of them and they made me feel awfully self-righteous. But God is dismantling them one by one as He pulls me more deeply into trust and obedience and faith that following His Son is enough. More than enough. It’s everything. The yoke of my rules, my absolutes, my self-righteousness, my hypervigilance is hard. Cumbersome. His is easy. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">God is not safe. He will take us far beyond our self-imposed brackets and the circles we’ve drawn around the things we think we can control. He’ll never lead us into sin, but He will take us past our man-made rules. Sometimes He’ll take us to a place where it feels like the bottom is dropping out and the center will not hold and where our white-knuckle grip yields nothing but greater and greater pain until we just let go. And there, watching our kingdoms fall and our once dearly-held rules demolish, we’ll realize they were no treasure at all. He is our treasure. And He chooses us. Miraculous.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">P.S. God has a delightful sense of humor. The best ever, you might say. In addition to the “nevers” and “won’ts” I am also cautious these days about strong declarative statements concerning things that I dislike, I.e. “I HATE (insert band, food, etc.).” I find whenever I do this I have to eat my words or end up in curious situations such as one autumn evening when Steven and I were riding one of those rickety, jerky traveling carnival rides where the veil between life and death is thin and bolts seem to be working themselves looser with every turn and I thought as I listened to the Nickelback song blaring over the tinny loudspeakers “You know, they’re really not so bad!” True story. Be careful out there. God loves a joke!</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-12084930361232074582017-04-05T08:05:00.005-07:002017-04-05T08:05:34.687-07:00The Genesis of Hope<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The run-of-the-mill childhood illness had given his sister only a fever for three days and an itinerant rash on her torso. But in him, it bypassed the fever entirely and poured all its virulence into an angry rash that</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> distended </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">his cheeks, swelled his eyelids and</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> pilled </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">his smooth skin to a swath of angry red bumps. He sat on the sink, his feet in the basin, and stared sadly at his reflection in the mirror. Then he hung his head. The words were flat, his voice weak and downcast, and I barely heard him, but I did. Oh, I did.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b>“God didn’t answer my prayer. Instead he just gave me a silly face.”</b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">The night before when the rash had first appeared, creeping its way up his cheek, he’d prayed so simply and directly, in his</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> blithe </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">and innocent way, to be healed. Hands clasped and eyes squinted tightly shut, he offered up his request, so sweetly and earnestly. He had been so sure in the asking, and so certain of the deliverance. And now, here we were. </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><b>God didn’t answer my prayer. </b></span></i><i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">My heart broke, hearing it. My hand went to my mouth and my eyes started to sting. Not now, I thought. Not this weighty theological dilemma that is way too complex even for me to understand, let alone simplify and codify into some teachable moment for my child. And the timing, oh, the timing. My frustration in prayer had crescendoed to a huffy resignation just the week prior. My prayers, it seemed, had been fluttering to the ground like forlorn confetti at a wedding where the groom had gotten cold feet; my words falling unheard into a formless void. Hearts were getting harder (mine included) and people were getting divorced and getting sicker anyway. I didn’t feel like running any race. I felt like sitting down in the middle of the road. When I did try to pray, it felt hollow, as if the bitterness on my tongue poisoned the words before they even left my mouth. Maybe there isn’t even anyone there to hear, I thought, which seemed an even more incredible and terrifying alternative to the idea that God was indeed there but silent. And in the space between doubt and nihilism, I languished, feeling like a fool: a fool to believe and a fool to disbelieve. </span><b><i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Instead he just gave me a silly face.</span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">So I just held my son and stroked his calloused cheeks while I let the tears come down my own. “I know. I know. It feels that way, doesn’t it?” I said. And in saying those words I remembered the last time they were spoken to me, and I was back there again, pulled over on the side of a remote country highway, desperately trying to make it to my parents’ house 300 miles away in a state of almost complete disintegration. Darkness closed in on the periphery of my very being and threatened to swallow me whole. I was pretty sure my marriage was over and now a terrible misunderstanding blunderingly handled by me meant that my husband might lose his job. It’s a long story, for another time, of how I arrived at the side of that road, sobbing into my phone to one of my dearest friends, clinging for dear life to her words as though they were my last remaining tether to hope above the pit of chaos that loomed beneath me, belching meaninglessness from its rotten belly. And truly, they were just that. “Everything’s falling apart,” I cried out in between the convulsive sobs that held my body in thrall. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">“Yes,” Stephanie said. “I know. Yes, it feels that way.” That was the medicine I needed. In that moment I didn’t need platitudes, I didn’t need facile reassurance, I didn’t need someone lying and saying it was okay when it so obviously wasn’t at all. I desperately needed hope, yes, but I needed that validation first. I needed my lamentation to be real to someone else. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">I think sometimes before we can authentically hope, lamentation must come first. When our story doesn’t turn out how we wanted or expected, the temptation to meaninglessness, cruel opportunist that it is, slithers in and taunts us with its blackened barbs. We start to wonder if this is it, if this is where our story ends. We start to wonder if there is a story being told at all, or rather if the welter of disintegration that swirls around us is the truth: that there is none, that entropy reigns. The most profound refrain of despair resonates in our bones: </span><i><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Why? Why have you forsaken me? </span></i><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Out on that lonely road, I cried harder. But my friend wasn’t finished: “But it’s not true. And it won’t always feel that way,” she said firmly. I couldn’t believe her in that moment, but I let her hope for me, even though it seemed so distant and so absurd. I couldn’t beli</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">eve it then, though I came t</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">o in time. In the midst of pain, it seems untenable, even ludicrous to see beyond the pain, to believe that dry bones can come alive again. But they can. I’ve seen it, and tasted it, and known it with my own eyes and tongue and heart. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">A couple days after my son despaired over his reflection, the swelling receded and his face began to return to the handsome little boy I knew. I was fearful, though, fearful that the incident had planted a seed of doubt that would now grow unchecked until he’d eventually abandon any semblance of faith at all. I thought just because he was little, my son’s faith was fragile. Deep down, I condescendingly thought his hope was sweet but quaint and naive. And I thought it had been crushed. I was so wrong. He smiled at his face in the mirror now, and turned toward me. “See, mom? God healed me. It’s a miracle!” </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">Tears stung my eyes again, at his untarnished wonder. Hope isn’t always just a specific wish for something to happen or not to happen - it’s also an unwavering belief in an ultimate good ending and a sense of awe at the beautiful, bewildering gift of life. Because if we allow it, if we want it, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, God infuses everything with meaning. Every thing. Sometimes we have to pass through meaninglessness to get to the meaning, but it’s there. There are (or at least there will be) no meaningless or profitless dangling threads, none at all, in the end. No ultimate tragedy. Death, in any of its forms, does not have the last word.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;">That’s the genesis of hope. And so we hope, even when everything seems to point toward the chasm of chaos, even when the collective voices of cynicism and despair growl “don’t bother”. We hope when it’s irrational, when it doesn’t make a lick of sense, when the void of meaninglessness yawns before us and the storm assails us. And when we can’t hope, we let someone else hope for us. My husband didn’t lose his job after all and eventually, after months of the hard work and pure grace of healing</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, our m</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">arriage was restored. But even when this or that leg of your story doesn’t end the way it should because our world is broken - even when hearts harden and the sick don’t get better - it’s not over yet. Your story - our story - is good, and it isn’t over. </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i>This article originally appeared in the spring 2017 MOPS Magazine.</i></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-13727013635432181002017-03-08T16:46:00.002-08:002017-03-08T16:46:18.919-08:00Cynicism: The God of This Age<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was only 9 years old, in Mrs. Hagedorn’s third grade class, and to cap our economics unit at the end of that week we watched (on Laserdisc, no less - the technology of future past) a series featuring a jaunty character named “Econ” and catchy song and dance jingles designed as mnemonic devices for concepts such as supply and demand and compound interest. It was a little hokey, sure, but I can still recall “opportunity cost, opportunity cost, iiiit iiiis your opportunity cost!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the tender age of 9, however, I thought it was a lot more than hokey. As I sulked behind my desk, I made snide comments under my breath until one of my classmates, Amanda, turned around and yelled at me “Some of us like it, OKAY?!” Effectively shamed, I sank down farther in my desk, at once baffled by the idea that someone could genuinely enjoy something <i>SO totally lame</i> and jealous of her ability to do so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How, I wonder now. How did I believe myself so debonair and jaded at the age of 9 that I, a child, was unable to enjoy a children’s program? I believe it’s because I’d already, if not necessarily intentionally - more by osmosis - absorbed the spirit of the god of this age: cynicism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cynicism saps the color and joy from life because it robs us of our capacity for hope. Cynicism is just nihilism with a sense of humor - albeit a mean-spirited, spiteful, ugly one. If, as Paul E. Miller says, pride is Satan’s basic game plan, the spirit of cynicism achieves that end with remarkable efficiency. You know it all, cynicism whispers seductively. You already know how the story ends and so you know enough never to hope, never to try. It may look like spring now, but winter will be here soon enough, it says. And you know everyone who does is just pitifully naive and will be crushed soon enough but is worthy only of mockery and scorn in the interim.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cynicism pervades and saturates our culture even more thoroughly now than it did twentysome years ago. It’s the subtext, the underpinning, the ground from which we operate. We mock, we scoff, we endlessly parse the motivations of other people and project crude innuendos on everything. We simply no longer have any framework for earnestness or innocence. Postmodernism, which promised a laminate ideological field of equal validity for every belief, has in practice eroded both our ability to believe in anything and our ability to allow others to believe. As Tim Keller says of postmodernism, the demon is in deep. And yet, and yet… like me, sulking and shamed in that third grade desk, we both frantically justify ourselves and - if deep down - mourn for what seems irrevocably lost. Earnestness looks like freedom, yet we’re so deeply entrenched in the mire of cynicism that we can’t see a way out that doesn’t look like total inauthenticity. Playacting. A fairy tale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I know the way out, though: Jesus Christ. When I’d exhausted the world, run recklessly down every deceptive cul-de-sac just trying to mute the agonizing howls of pain, alienation and unworthiness that refrained through my heart on a daily basis with varying volumes… suddenly, vividly, miraculously, there was Jesus Christ. And with his presence, the scales fell away. I could <i>see</i> things for the first time, untainted by my fallen projections. You see, cynicism dumps on the world the pain it feels within. It’s essentially this: if I can’t be happy, no one can be happy. If I feel like a broken, forsaken, rejected fraud then everyone else must be a fraud, too. If I can’t be earnest, than true earnestness must not exist and anyone who pretends to be must be doing so for manipulative reasons. If I can’t believe, then no one must actually believe. Cynicism believes it monopolizes true insight. It’s a Satanic perversion of true seeing through Jesus Christ. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> I believe part of being born again is realizing - for me, in one cataclysmic fell swoop - that your way of looking at things, your eagle eye on the world that you believed was so piercingly and shrewdly perceptive, is - pardon the expression - radically bass-ackwards. It was both an excruciating effrontery to my ego and the sweetest relief I’d ever known, this death: to realize while I believed I owned the truth, and luxuriated in smug self-righteousness, the clue and the way home - indeed, The Truth - was right in front of me, and the people I thought were hopelessly clueless were on to it before me. So, finally, I saw. I had been brought blessedly low, and I saw things now. I saw crystalline, shimmering beauty all around me. I saw God’s hand at work, saw his radiant, overflowing, absurdly profligate yet somehow perfectly apportioned grace and mercy. And I saw the crowning beauty of all creation, Jesus Christ, and the immense weight of the burden he bore for me that somehow, mysteriously, brings me perfect freedom. WOW! How about that? (I actually typed “how bou dah” and erased it because that is terrible and please never let me do that again). God is AWESOME! Always surprising. Always unexpected. Always loving. And always, always beautiful. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I remember the first time that, as a newly converted Christian still bearing the residue of the world, with one foot still in it, to be honest, I experienced the bizarre magnanimity of a Jesus freak. We became acquainted with a couple who were interested in my art and with whom we had some mutual friends. We had them over to dinner one night and had a very pleasant evening - only the second time we’d met in person. We’d shared with them that I had an art show coming up in LA and mentioned that we wished we could attend but were obviously unable to do so. A couple of hours later, around 11 p.m., the husband - a devoted Christ follower who’d been a missionary in New York City - called Steven to excitedly share that he’d had a brilliant idea. He was going to start a Facebook page for the purpose of ‘crowdfunding’ our trip to LA, and was happily contributing as well. I was floored. Why would he do this? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cynicism gets used to searching restlessly for ulterior motives, certain of their existence. Nothing can be as good as it seems. And this seemed unprecedented. I remember that in the course of our conversation that night - on an entirely different topic that I can’t remember - he had said “Oh, I have no problem asking people for money.” At first, I was a little appalled. But now I see why. Anyone who knows M. Bryce Olson knows he could sell ice to an Eskimo, yet he uses his skills in service of Jesus Christ. Money is in its proper place for him - it isn’t a god, and doesn’t create invisible chains of obligation where it is joyfully given and joyfully received. He isn’t naive about the ways of the world, but subverts them to the glory of God. As Michael Frost says: be so countercultural that people ask ‘who the heck are you?’ Bryce and his wife, Natalie, had me asking that question. I was intrigued, and drawn deeper to the person of Jesus Christ. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So here we are, called to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Of the swamp of cynicism, some of us were wise enough to never enter in the first place; some of us visited for a time to see what all the fuss was about and hightailed it out; and then some of us (like me) languished in that rotting belly that dresses itself up as sophistication, with its ravening lies and acid sarcasm. We’ve breathed its putrid air, and we ain’t goin back. As the beauty of Jesus flushes the cynicism from your life, space is made for joy, for childlike wonder, for awe, for mirth. I still backslide to the way of the world, quite often, but God has a way of rebuking with beauty. I expect the worst from someone, and then get the best. I expect drudgery, and then discover laughter and delight in the most unexpected places. I expect maintenance, status quo, survival, at best; and then get resurrection beyond my wildest imaginings in the person of Jesus Christ. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-70614895732478402412017-03-02T21:03:00.000-08:002017-03-03T04:01:44.536-08:00How Can It Be? (Lost in the Cosmos)<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">c. 2008. Very lost. Jesus is in there (upper righthand corner). He always was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“I will be glad and rejoice in your love,</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">For you saw my affliction</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And knew the anguish of my soul.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">You have not handed me over to the enemy</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">But have set my feet in a spacious place.”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">-Psalm 31:7-8</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’ve been frustrated in my efforts to share the Gospel lately. My most passionate words seem to be filtered through the lens of what people want to see, the entrenched judgments they made long ago. As the Father has carried me to mountaintop heights where I truly tasted and finally fully believed that His love is better than life, heights where I realized yes, yes: I would die before I would deny the absolutely transcendent, ineffable, prismatic beauty of Jesus Christ and the infinite font of joy that is His love, and I was left stuttering and weeping, on my knees, stultified by the sheer deluge of it all, I’ve felt fortified by Paul’s words: Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold (2 Cor 3:12). Yet my most earnest, impassioned appeals seem to have fallen on unhearing ears lately (at least apparently, at least for now). Although I know there may be a harvest in time, and with prayer, enthusiasm has sometimes yielded to frustration: You don’t hear what I’m saying! </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Why can</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’t you see this?! It’s right in front of you! I want to cry. Why are you so blind?! </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And I remember my own desperate blindness before I knew the pure beauty of Jesus Christ.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I remember distinctly the moment I finally believed there was a reality beyond this world, when my stony empiricism, vanity and selfishness was cracked wide open and I was left dumbfounded, newborn, knowing something monumental beyond monumental had occurred but utterly unable to grasp it. “There’s so much more than I ever thought there was,” I repeated again and again, through a veil of snot and tears. I’m not proud to say drugs were involved… but He will truly travel anywhere to reach us, and my insular, self-obsessed, compressed world would never be the same. Truly, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but only the beginning, and only if we submit. I didn’t. Or perhaps I pretended to. Like Israel, I remained hard-hearted and quickly turned to other gods and began to cobble together a cosmology of my own authoring that professed belief in God yet was really only a smorgasbord of new age and yogic philosophies, and which kept me in control. I still believed The Bible was regressive claptrap. I was on to the good stuff, the deep stuff, the high and mystical stuff. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">As much as God’s presence had been real to me in that earlier epiphanic moment - a presence at once fearful, thundering and chastening but also tender and somehow more familiar than anything of this world - God became a reality to be accessed and manipulated, whether through yoga, meditation, or drugs, rather than a gloriously relational and real and infinitely holy yet astoundingly merciful and loving Lord of all creation. I demanded heaven yet refused the Gate, and unsurprisingly it wasn’t long before I found myself in hell.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I remember one night after I’d dropped acid by myself in my apartment. I was in my early twenties, and convinced I was plumbing the depths of innerspace, or the endocosmos, as I liked to put it. Certain I was spelunking in the outer caverns of Paradise, drawing closer and closer to God, I watched molecules dance before my eyes, beautiful glittering prismatic geometries blooming and receding, overlaying one another in a gluttonous visual feast. But I was losing my mind. It was like I’d sieved myself through a honeycomb and now the disparate pieces were drifting out on a sea of chaos, the waves carrying them farther and farther apart from one another. There was no anchor, and, in my personal cosmology, there was no one to help. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I remember what happened next so clearly to this day. As I sat there on my couch, looking out my window, idly watching the transformed street below, in which swam a million rainbow lattices, the softest, gentlest, most compassionate voice resounded through my mind.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">You don’t have to keep doing this to yourself, you know</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">, it said. God said. It could have been no one else. I was convinced I was on the right path, even as a thousand demons settled into their new home within me, whispering silibant lies at opportune times.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I began weeping. No one had ever spoken to me so kindly. I realized how desperate, how thirsty I was for a kind word, for living water. But the demon was in deep. The drugs went by the wayside as I met Steven and we had our beautiful children, but still I clung to lies and arrogance. I was devout, almost obsessive, about practicing yoga. It was nearly catastrophic for me if I had to miss a class. And a while ago I read Arrow’s birth story and cringed at the pretentious, ridiculously solemn blather about chakras and the Hindu goddess Kali I had included in the narrative. Not long after her birth, we’d traveled to Topanga Canyon for an art show. I was elated - I’d always revered Topanga as a mythical epicenter of hippiedom, and it didn’t disappoint. Roadside crystal shops abounded. Mandalas decorated the sides of houses and a city festival promised all the green juice and new age healing modalities one could imagine. You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a certified Reiki healer. And yet during our whole trip I felt a fundamental unease, which would often mount into near-panic attacks. What was wrong with me? I wondered. I’d finally arrived!</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">As a family, we’d been dabbling hesitantly with attending a Christian church in that season - Steven more than me, but I’d begrudgingly followed his lead. During the Topanga trip he suggested that we attend a Sunday morning service at the only Christian church in Topanga. I reluctantly agreed, but was embarrassed about it as we informed our hosts of our plans. At the church we met a tiny ragtag congregation of about ten people, most of them over 50. The pastor and his wife were stunning paragons of blond SoCal beauty, and suddenly I was overcome with shame and fear and panic that was totally incommensurate with my surroundings. What is wrong with me? I asked again, as my nervousness erupted into a full-blown panic attack. Now I know: demons don’t like to be in church, and everything in me was compelling me to run out the door as fast as I could. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">But I knew I couldn’t. I excused myself to the nursing room with Arrow where I wept profusely as the service went on. I was so terrified and lost, but I didn’t know I could cry out to God. I don’t know that I believed there was really anyone there. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Somehow, I got myself together, and after the service Steven and I chatted with the pastor for awhile. He was from Santa Monica, but was traveling up to Topanga every Sunday as a kind of interim pastor to try and help the church grow, he said. I tried to nod politely and follow the conversation, but I was still desperate to just get out of there, and my mind drifted away. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">When it returned, the pastor was discussing Topanga and how it was a hotbed of new age beliefs, and he said “I’ve had so many people come to me for help and they’re just tormented. They’re just </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">tormented</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">,” he repeated. “But they can’t accept Jesus Christ.”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">That’s me! I screamed inside my head. THAT’S ME! YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT ME! HELP ME! I nearly cried in desperation. But though my heart was crying out I kept silent and nodded in faux sympathy. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I could write so much more about my long journey to Christ - made long and arduous only by my own resistance and pride - but those were pivotal moments, brought to mind when Steven asked me the other night what I would say if someone asked me why I believed in Jesus Christ. Because I tried nearly every other conceivable path and they all led to death, I said. Because only in Christ have I found the fulfillment of all my heart</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’s yearnings. And I was able to offer this analogy to respond to those who say there is truth in his teachings, but one needn’t give their life to Him or declare Him their Lord and Savior:</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">It</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’s like an extract of orange flavor versus an orange. The extract holds a residue of the flavor, but none of the body of the orange - the texture of the rind, the way the fruit breaks apart, the juice contained in tiny ovoid chambers, the way the oil scents your fingers for hours after you’ve consumed it. The extract contains what can not even necessarily be reasonably termed a part of the whole; it just contains a shallow, hollow echo of some distant memory “orange”, bitter on the tongue, which has nearly lost all meaning instead of the glorious multisensory experience that is holding and peeling and eating an orange. The br</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">anch is off the vine.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">In many ways, I believe the indiscriminate, confused Brahmanic pastiche that is the new age / yogic world of thought is the ideal “spirituality” for a postmodern West, as it was for my postmodern, cynical mind. It requires no real commitment or sacrifice, and is committed to a kind of false humility / gullibility that is offended by truth claims yet is open to </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">nearly </span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">any idea (dolphins are hyperintelligent, highly evolved beings from outer space? Sure! Jesus Christ? Oh hell, no!). It purports to exalt an ultimate goal of evolution and love, yet is muddied by a million differing ideas on how this is to be achieved. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Jesus Christ offers us One Way: Him. It’s so beautiful and simple yet neither naive or flat, as I had scoffed in my new age days. Instead, following Him is full of infinite complexity of ever greater heights and adventures. The new age, on the other hand, is labyrinthine and complicated, with a thousand gates that lead nowhere. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">There’s a difference between complexity and complicatedness, to my mind. Complexity is patterned, ordered; like the unfolding of a fractal. There is a Creator behind it, a good God who holds it all. Complicatedness has no creator, but is manipulated into being by Satan; it is our sin, our turning away from God, our distortion of things, our pride. We think we know the way, can forge it on our own, but then we pull desperately on a thousand tangled strings which turn up empty in our hands, leading nowhere and untethered to anything. New age folks love to substitute “The Universe” for God, crafting an idol that is vast and impersonal, yet strangely capable of granting wishes and telling you things. It gets weird. What a profound relief to realize I wasn’t alone in the world with only this vague, unfeeling “Universe”, but held and loved and redeemed by a God with a deep investment in me individually. Yes, God’s love is oceanic and fearfully vast - yet it is also highly, almost absurdly particular and personal. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">But the god of this age blinded my mind. I saw Christianity as an absurd regression, a crutch, antiquated and unsophisticated. I, on the other hand, was plumbing the depths and heights and hidden places of the universe. I was a mystic, a cosmonaut, one of the courageous, in my mind. Thinking of the mask of arrogance I wore then makes me weep now, because the truth is that I was absolutely lost, terrified and alone, assailed on every side. What a merciful God we serve. He is patience is truly beyond our comprehension, as he wants no one to perish but everyone to come to repentance.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">How can it be?! How can this lavish love exist, so full and sumptuous and warm and radiant and astounding, this love which hangs itself on a cross and endures that which cannot be endured for someone who spit in His face?! How can it be? And yet it is. I promise it is. It is better, sweeter, fuller than you can ever imagine yet feels like home. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. I pray that you will believe me and believe the one He sent. Come home. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-14621574401846635272017-02-16T20:14:00.001-08:002017-02-16T20:31:17.548-08:00Thy Kingdom Come.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Eyes to see.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.’ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” - 1 Corinthians 1:18-20</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“It is always that way with the kingdom. It is so strange, so low; it is seldom recognized. It looks like a mistake.” - Paul Miller</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“She’s read too many books, she’s got nails inside her head.” - Bob Dylan</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I like books. I like them a lot, in fact. Okay, I love them. I love them with a rhapsodic and rapturous love and I feel safest and most relaxed in libraries, enwombed</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> by rows upon rows of of the things.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> I approach ecstasy when leafing through one and practically huffing the synesthesiastic bouquet that is Fresh Book, or Old Book, or even Musty Library Book. I love the promise of a new title, which is the promise of escape and transport and knowledge and edification. I love the objects of themselves, their heft in my hand. My mom has been trying to sell me on a Kindle for years. Not gonna happen, though I suppose I’ll have to (very begrudgingly) concede when print breathes its last, if that happens in my lifetime. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">As with all things we love, we have a unique and perverse flair for turning them into idols, salvific vessels that hold some magical power to deliver us. We make things into little gods because we can control and manipulate them. Books can be transcendent, yes; but they are only transcendent because they point to that which transcends. Everything - every piece of art, every book, every bit of wisdom or writing only insofar as it reveals Jesus Christ. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">GASP! Such a sentiment would have been absolute anathemic tripe to the cataracted eyes and stoppered ears of my 20-something atheist self. I prided myself on the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge through books. I prided myself on being “smart”. I remember a heated argument with my dad one morning as he incredulously marveled that I believed there was nothing beyond this world. “But what do you have to hope in?” My eyes full of tears from the emotional intensity of arguing with my dad - both of us impassioned and with a flair for rhetoric and a love of debate that too often turned into a prideful need to Be Right - I gestured toward the stack of books next to me. </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Weak</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">, a voice in my own head retorted. Truly, no one can see the kingdom until they are born again. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">The months that followed turned into a frantic search for justification and some thread of knowledge that would save me. I pored over Dawkins and Hitchens and my search for justification turned into a kind of desperation for something, ANYTHING that just rang true and resounded in the eternal soul that I refused to acknowledge. I distinctly recall throwing “God is Not Great” down in disgust one night in my apartment. Rationally, I believed what I was reading. But why, then, did I feel so gray? So leaden? Why wasn’t it fulfilling? Why did it seem so </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">ugly</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">? </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Brian Zahnd, in the excellent “Beauty Will Save the World” (yes, a book), says that the story of the life, crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most beautiful story in the universe. Our souls thirst for beauty and truth and love and there is one and only one font that will fill us, only one name above all names. And intrinsic in beauty, inextricable from it, is mystery. Jesus said that the coming of the kingdom cannot be observed. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, has Father Paissy observe that “… the learned ones of this world have absolutely nothing left of what was once holy. But they have examined the parts and missed the whole, and their blindness even is worthy of wonder.” </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">My blindness was, and is, certainly worthy of an absurd kind of wonder. Yet also therein is the mystery of lavish mercy and grace. I have been so wrong, and </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">proud</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> of it for most of my life, and yet He loves and has always loved me! </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">As I pursued a loveless “truth”, examining minutiae and collecting big words like a deranged crab hoarding metallic seajunk, I think my unspoken premise was that I would collect all the information I could and sift through it and if someone could present a convincing enough intellectual argument perhaps I would reconsider my atheism. But oh, that isn’t how God works at all, and thank Him for it. Faith isn’t the antithesis or opposer of knowledge, as it's so commonly postured in our world and as I believed. It’s the soil from which the only true knowledge can grow. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Knowledge is never an end in itself. It’s valuable only in whether it draws us toward God.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">When the humbling came, the holy epic smackdown, the Stone Cold Stunnah (as Steven would say), the flash on the road to Damascus, it was terrifying and beautiful and the knowing and being known-ness that flooded my inmost parts erupted in the most cleansing tears I’d ever shed. There’s a reason God invented baptism. Water has some kind of inherent rebirthing power, I’ve decided. At the swimming pool, whenever my children’s badgering overrides the universal mother’s refrain of “I don’t want to get my head wet” and I plunge underneath, much to their delight, I always feel a sacred sort of freshness afterward that lasts for hours. Yes, even in public pool water that you </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">know </span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">has some pee in it. Water - it’s magical. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And it’s still like that, even now, when God’s grace pours out on me anew - the words, the knowledge, the arguments and counterarguments fade away. And there is mercy, and beauty, and love, all of them so deep and abiding. There is the bread and the wine, the body and the blood. There is a person, the most beautiful person in the world, at the crux of the universe. I was struck by a verse in Galatians today - Paul was actually scolding them for their waywardness, but the first part of the verse says this: “But now that you know God - or rather are known by God…” </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Or rather are known by God. </span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Paul almost seems to think that’s primary, our being known. God calls us by our names, he floods us with his knowing, and Jesus says the kingdom is in our midst if we will only repent and believe. I love what Paul Miller says about it being so low and and so strange. We have to bend down to see. We have to get strange, to let God turn things on their heads and turn us on ours and confound our hard-won wisdom. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">But here, right here, God is calling. The kingdom is coming. I know it is because the waiter at IHOP had a supernatural glow about him, a cheerfulness that didn’t jibe with the packed restaurant and the beads of sweat on his forehead and the children running perilously close to his legs as he hurried over the tiles and when he laid my plate in front of me the tattoo on his forearm in cursive script read ‘Jesus Forgive Me”. I know the kingdom is here because the night before I’d kept my friends up way past their bedtimes talking about God and He was there, where the three of us were gathered in His name, and it was holy. I know it is here because earlier that afternoon I’d sat next to my dad at his birthday dinner and decided to start peppering him with bold questions: Are you afraid of dying? What’s your favorite memory of your mother? Your father? What’s your greatest regret? What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done? And this relationship, the one I’d fretted over and worried over and tried to analyze into submission was suddenly pervaded with a sense of wonder and delight and curiosity, and though it had been fractured in a hundred places was healing in a thousand more, there, in that moment, in that restaurant. I know the kingdom is coming because as we drove home after all this, back to Leon, I listened to my favorite music and its notes and harmonies somehow threaded through me so I wasn’t just passively listening to the music but was bathed in it, and Steven was sitting on the porch waiting for us and he jumped up and I ran into his arms and it was the sweetest homecoming hug ever and I saw him anew, fresh, like a newlywed. I was Home.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">That whole weekend, God was revealing himself to me, weaving his goodness through everything in that simultaneously subtle and extraordinarily vivid, joy-saturated way that makes you want to both laugh in delight and cry and fall down on your knees in gratitude. You think you know? God asks, tenderly. You think you see? You don’t. Surrender. Get low. “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up, do you not perceive it?”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><b>Repent, and believe. Easter is everywhere. Let Him love you. </b></span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">P.s. Craziest thing he’s ever done: He and an old girlfriend and another couple decided to break into a stable in Brea Canyon at midnight to joyride some horses. They successfully carried off this caper until my dad’s horse suddenly made a break for the stable door, only the bottom half of which was open. He tried to rein the horse in, turn it, anything, but realized it was futile and laid down as low as he could just before the horse went through and barely cleared the door.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-11529034319478864352017-02-02T09:44:00.002-08:002017-02-16T07:32:44.393-08:00On Community and Belonging<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I had finally arrived, I felt. This was it. This was the community I wanted, the community to which I yearned to belong. Babies crawled bare-bottomed over the grass, pulling up clumps of it with their tiny fists and watching wide-eyed as the same fists slackened, as though the fists were not under their power, and the blades fluttered back down. Other babies flopped happily in natural-dye wraps and carriers, and toddlers were free to follow a butterfly</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">’s path or caterpillar trail with the mild caveat that the creek bed was awfully steep. “Animal carcasses” were strictly prohibited foodwise but a vegetarian feast arrayed the folding tables under the copse of trees that sheltered a picturesque rope hammock. Nipples were freed liberally and many had a baby, toddler or preschooler latched on. There was a lovely clear-running creek nearby and it seemed to be a tacit rule that swimsuits were verboten and belonged to a shame-saturated, prudish world outside from which this peaceful enclave of divine feminine empowerment was absolutely unshackled. A majestic teepee stood in the center of the field. And everything was so green, </span><span style="font-family: "calibri";">was that deep rich succulent green that abounded here in the Missourian equivalent of the tropics. I had stars in my eyes. These are my people, I thought. I have arrived. And on the surface, it was perfect, this community built around natural home birth and all the concomitant practices.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">But the hostess, a revered midwife, terrified me. I regarded her with a sort of holy awe. She was petite, but energetically and emotionally occupied an imperious berth. A chestnut French braid, threaded with silver, fell halfway down her back. She bore the sort of regality that demanded her respect be earned, as it wasn</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">’t about to be freely given. I don’t know if it was me, unworthy as I felt, or her, or a combination thereof, but I felt sized up and found wanting. Politesse was not her game. The friend who had brought me to the gathering introduced me to her and effused about what a privilege it was to be there. “It IS a privilege,” the midwife said emphatically, sending a pointed and lofty gaze in my direction. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">We soon gathered around the campfire and space was offered to share whatever one felt moved to share. The friend by whom I’d been invited encouraged me to tell the traumatic story of my son’s birth. Although it had been 19 months prior, the wound was still suppurating and as the narrative slipped stutteringly from my mouth the tears came too, unbidden but inextricable from the story. I was also twenty weeks pregnant with Arrow, so, you know, hormones. But the pain was still fresh enough, and the feeling of profound violation and assault: how the doctor had ordered the nurses to hold me down while she forced her hand up into my uterus and scraped Israel’s placenta from my screaming body. I blubbered and sniffed and someone kindly handed me a tissue. “They should NOT have done that to you,” one woman sweetly offered. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">When I got myself together and cleared my eyes enough to look up I saw the midwife staring at me stonily, unmoved. I felt like she found my weakness distasteful. She quickly rallied the other women around me and insisted that I crouch in a birthing squat and imagine pushing out my baby triumphantly. She stood behind me and braced herself against me, her arms hooked under my armpits. She breathed heavily into my ear, a rhythmic bellows into which the rest of the group weaved their own breath, peppered with grunts and moans, the guttural dirge of childbirth. “Your baby is crowning! She’s crowning!” the midwife yelled. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I tried, I tried. But even the simulation of giving birth again in this tribal ceremony into which I’d suddenly been swept gave rise to an irrepressible sorrow within me and as it erupted I sank to the ground limply, sobbing, my very essence possessed by defeat. A giver-upper. A weak one. A loser. I was back on that hospital bed, torpid and dazed, washed up on the shore of something resembling life from the raging sea of Israel’s birth. Dead-eyed, hollowed-out, raped, left for dead. My own strength would never be enough. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“THAT!” the midwife demanded, slapping the back of one hand against her palm, referring, I assumed, to my disintegration. “What </span><i><span style="font-family: "calibri";">is</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> that?!” </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“I don’t know,” I cried. I was desperate to give her the right answer, but I just didn’t have one at all. “I don’t know.”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">“Well,” she said in disgusted resignation, shaking her head. “I don’t know, either.” She looked straight at me. “But you’re not going to make it.”</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Those words. Her words. They stung like few others could have, maiming my already enfeebled sense of power and self-possession and the inchoate hope that I’d begun reservedly tending since I found out I was pregnant again that maybe I could, maybe I would push this baby out. Maybe I could go into this fire - if not willingly, then at least resolutely. Now I had no hope. If this woman, who’d caught hundreds of babies, coached hundreds of women through birth, didn’t believe I was capable of it, then I clearly wasn’t. She pointedly ignored me and my child the rest of the weekend and I had an odd feeling of being shunned. I’d failed the vision quest she’d foisted upon me. I’d failed the prerequisite for joining. I didn’t belong. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">About five months later, I pushed my daughter out of my body into a birthing tub in our living room. Soon afterward, I felt a compelling need to write the midwife and tell her what I’d done. See?! I wanted to say, if not plainly, then in subtext. I did it! You thought I couldn’t, but I did! She wrote back with a cursory congratulations, and I felt vindicated. A little. Somewhat. Not really. The aftertaste of my excommunication that weekend, based on my performance - or lack thereof- lingered. I had so badly wanted to be counted, wanted to be among the chosen. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">It was more than five years ago, this experience. I learned a lot, lessons which took a few years to spin out and coalesce fully. I wonder: is community that requires certain criteria be met before one can be accepted really community at all? Is a community really a community which is not based on a fundamental ground of acceptance and love? It seems to me that a community built on anything other than the Gospel will be hostage to the fickle shifting sands of power grabs, elitism and fear. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I reread this wonderful but very slim little volume by Jean Vanier yesterday, “From Brokenness to Community”. It’s really just a manuscript of two short lectures he gave at Harvard about his experiences living with severely disabled people in a community called L’Arche. “Community is a wonderful place, it is life-giving; but it is also a place of pain because it is a place of truth and growth - the revelation of our pride, our fear, and our brokenness,” he says. But that growth can’t occur when our belonging is tenuous. Jesus is always inviting us into communion with him, Vanier says, a communion which begins with a call of “Will you come with me? I love you. Will you enter into communion with me?” He never says “meet my standards, and then I might deign to hang out with you.” When we’re uncertain of our fundamental acceptance in a community, when belonging is not assured, but performance-based, vulnerability is too costly. And without vulnerability, there is no real communion and thus no real transformation. A performance-based community is a shallow and fruitless one. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">The older I get, the more I realize that I do not usually choose my community. Community chooses me, or rather, God chooses my community for me. I generally don’t lust after being part of this or that group anymore because I trust God to place me in the midst of life-giving community. It’s not always easy. Just as Jesus called his disciples and invited them to be in community with one another, so God calls the sick, the lonely, the outcasts, the cowards, and the desolate to be with Him and one another. Human love is imperfect and will fail. There will be conflict and destructive forces within and without. But a people whose hearts are given to God, Vanier says, trust that He will defend them. In all things, we trust that God works for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28). </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Perhaps the community I felt shunned by was fruitful for some, I don’t know. But there was just a sense that only the strong, as narrowly defined, were welcome. Only the adherents of certain parenting practices were welcome. There wasn’t space for disagreement, space for weakness, space for the poor in spirit. But the Gospel is different. The Gospel says we must be weak first, we must realize our own dependency and vulnerability and miserable poverty to be gloriously reborn into childlike trust, abundance and the power of Christ, made perfect in that weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Come with me, be with me, you don’t have to be strong, Christ says. My yoke is easy and my burden is light. And that’s Good News. </span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri"; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Postscript: I've felt a little convicted by this post in recent days, because there is a spirit of bitterness and condemnation hovering over it. I had never written about this experience before and I guess there was still some anger in it for me. I thought about editing it or deleting it altogether but decided to leave it with this postscript. I saw a narrow slice of this community and while my feelings about my experiences were real, it seemed to be a place of solace for some. Yet I still feel that Gospel-centered communities aka the church (while imperfect, of course, because they are composed of sinners) are God's kingdom vehicle here on Earth, and the gates of Hell - exclusivity, shame, etc. - shall not prevail against it.</span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-81259045675008209922017-01-25T10:01:00.000-08:002017-01-25T10:01:12.200-08:00An Unlikely Friendship<div class="p" style="background: rgb(255,255,255); margin-bottom: 13.8000pt; margin-left: 0.0000pt; margin-right: 0.0000pt; margin-top: 0.0000pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; text-indent: 0.0000pt;">
<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">I </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">would have </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">stopped just shy of “dilapidated” when describing the house on the corner. The exterior looked as though it’d been threatening to shed its minted green paint for years, and the yard was more dog-trodden earth than green grass. Three black dogs anxiously patrolled the perimeter, making it one of those houses I dreaded passing on our walk, when I knew my dogs – who normally trotted, serene and workmanlike on either side of the stroller – would be stoked into a maniacally barking, territorial frenzy.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">The sole non-canine inhabitant of the house emerged only occasionally. Petite and sheathed in bulky cardigans even in the heat of a Missouri July, she just had a herm</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">itic</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> vibe about her. Yet I was intrigued by the license plate on her hulking SUV – “ALL ONE,” it read.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">It was our dogs, </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">naturally</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">, who initiated our friendship. I was several months pregnant with a toddler in tow, and both </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">my dogs and hers</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> had a wily habit of finding ways out of our </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">respective </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">backyard</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">s</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">. She walked them back several times, and then we exchanged numbers. She worked from home and offered to host a </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">“</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">puppy playdate</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">”</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> for our larger dog, Tinkerpaw, to give me a break. In fact, she offered to do so every day, and, of course, I took her </span><i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">exactly</span></i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> at her word.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">It was the first time I learned a friendship with Susan was a delicate dance that often took two steps back before it took a step forward. She flitted and ducked away from intimacy and social ease like someone who’d been burned, or at least someone who’d never enjoyed the consolation of blending into the majority – first as a black woman who’d acquired an advanced degree decades ago, and now as a middle-aged, childless divorcee. She called me a few days after I’d begun enthusiastically ushering Tinkerpaw up the street each afternoon and rescinded her offer.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">Several months passed during which I gave her a wide berth, waving while walking the dogs but otherwise seeing her only upon the dogs’ occasional jailbreak. On one of these occasions, she’d called me to retrieve them, and I walked up the street without Tinkerpaw’s collar. She hesitantly offered me use of her </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">beloved </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">deceased dog, Eddie’s collar, which I profusely promised to return safely.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">Oh, had I only removed that collar from Tinkerpaw’s neck a few days later when he impatiently scratched at the door to be released into the yard. He leapt over the fence and was off. </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">(We lived in a rental house, or else a new fence certainly would have been in order). </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">We caught him a couple of hours later, and I remembered that he had had Eddie’s collar on, and now it was gone. I panicked, much to my husband’s bafflement. “It’s just a collar,” he said. “Can’t we just buy her a replacement?” “No,” I replied. He didn’t understand. “You don’t know Susan as well as I do,” I pleaded, near tears. As I struggled to make him understand how very nearly catastrophic this was, how attached she was to her dogs – we searched our neighborhood for a good hour, in vain.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">I put off calling her for two days. Finally, my pulse pounding, I dialed her number and awaited the inevitable answer. She was always home. When I explained what had happened, there was silence – an incredibly hefty, crushing silence. Then she said, “I need to go. I can’t talk to you right now.”</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">It felt very heavy and strangely intimate, gravely disappointing someone I hardly knew. As much as I tried to convince my husband he didn’t know her like I did, the truth was I didn’t really know her at all. I’d never been inside her home, I didn’t know anything about her beyond what I saw from the sidewalk gate.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">I am an artist by trade and in an effort to make amends, my husband suggested I draw a portrait of Eddie. I requested a photo reference from a still warily circling Susan. She didn’t say much when I finished and delivered the portrait</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> a few weeks later,</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> but her smile was like a balm to me.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">A few months later, we both spotted the large golden dog roaming the neighborhood. I even noticed Susan giving him refuge in her yard a few times, and this friendly vagrant had a habit of following me about the </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">neighbor</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">hood as I walked my dogs and toddler. One such day I crossed at a crosswalk only to hear the near simultaneous sounds of a heavy impact and a car squealing to a stop. I turned around in horror to see a truck had run over the dog Susan told me she’d </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">nick</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">named “Goldie.” Mostly helpless to assist with two dogs of my own and a toddler, I was relieved when a woman across the street came rushing out of her house, calmly and expertly handling the situation. There was something so tragically sad about seeing this animal, its legs broken and blood pouring from its mouth, struggling to right itself. After seeing the dog driven away to a local vet, I walked on, badly shaken.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">When I turned the corner to walk down our block, I saw Susan standing in her yard. She waved, and I started crying immediately. She rushed up to me, and I explained through my blubbering what had happened. She hugged me. It remains one of the best hugs I’ve received because I don’t imagine it was easy for her to give.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">Shortly after, Susan moved away. She promised to call with her new address, but she didn’t, and I neglected to call her again as we also moved a month later. As we said goodbye she said to me – totally exhausted and hugely gravid, wrestling with a highly energetic toddler and getting to that point in pregnancy where I was simply </span><i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">done</span></i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> – that I was taking the “right” path. She wanted to have children and always told herself she would, but then a career took precedence and divorce dismantled that dream and now it was too late for her. Suddenly my late third-trimester moaning and complaining seemed ridiculously petty.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">Through Susan, I learned friendships don’t always follow the smooth, steadily upward sweep from mutual likehood to increasing intimacy. Sometimes our relationships are marked by fits and starts and awkwardness</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> and uncertainty</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">.</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> And sometimes the ones that touch us and shape us most deeply are the ones that are difficult and challenging and fraught with misunderstandings.</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"> Although I’ve been blessed with a few easy, automatic, fated-feeling relationships – my husband and our three-week courtship as well as my best friend of 16 years come to mind. In my erratic friendship with Susan – one in which none of my customary superficial social graces seemed to work</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">, </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">as Susan simply didn’t deal in small talk or politesse</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">, </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">I was forced to </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">completely disarm and just be real</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;">. And that is the place where I met this meek, unassuming, cerebral woman with coke-bottle glasses that magnified her eyes and a guilelessness that magnified her heart.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; letter-spacing: 0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-54420012601510814862017-01-05T15:02:00.003-08:002017-01-05T15:02:30.464-08:00What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in the light...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Sunlight is like a foreign tongue when you</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">’re sitting in the parking lot of a mental hospital, trying to decide whether to check yourself in. It doesn’t warm or illuminate like it should. It seems invasive, discordant. Insanity is a closed system, an echo chamber where dysfunction and unreality ricochet off the walls like coins in a dryer, gaining velocity as those walls contract, the din eventually drowning out any external noise. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I didn</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">’t look at my husband next to me but instead stared straight ahead, m</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">y gaze empty, trance-like, except for flashes of genuine bewilderment at the families playing in the park across the street. They were mysteriously immune to the reality, so stark and horrifying to me, that just beneath life</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">’s surface yawned an inescapable void which every moment threatened to swallow the universe into oblivion. Sound dramatic? It was. But if felt real. And as far as mental hospitals go, this wasn’t my first rodeo.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">What could have catalyzed this paralyzing existential crisis? In short, the “mommy wars”. It seems absurd to say it now. That phrase, which I don’t even like using, is tossed about glibly to refer to harsh inter-mom judgment on parenting issues. But undergirding the so-called ‘war’, as undergirds so much of human conflict, is both a perspective that says mistakes are absolutely irredeemable, and also a creeping anxiety that seeks absolute certainty</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, an alg</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">orithm that will produce a perfect child and eliminate risk. Wed the two and you get an unholy marriage of venomous condemnation of people who are “doing it wrong” according to your imagined algorithm, and simpering self-righteousness. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I once prided myself on “getting it right”. While pregnant for the first time, I identified the “type” of mother I wanted to be, the club I wanted desperately to join. And I did everything in accordance with that type, at first. My smugness inflated as I got everything “right”, in proportion with my pitying judgment of all those who were scarring their children for life by making different choices. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">And then, I had to make a choice for my child that directly contradicted the dogma into which I’d so passionately and wholly bought. Suddenly, I was on the outside looking in, and I vividly felt the cruel sting of that judgment. With the measure I had once used, it was being measured to me, and it was crushing. Granted, it was largely in my head, and via articles I read while obsessively combing the internet, searching for a voice from “my side” that said this medically necessary choice was okay, but a couple of times it came directly from other mothers. And over a period of weeks the fear, anxiety and dissonance crescendoed until it brought us to that parking lot.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">But mercifully, something broke there. The void still yawned but suddenly chinks in the darkness beckoned, their promise faint and susurrant but perceptible at the margins of my vision. My husband, as much as I love him, didn’t necessarily say anything magical. No angels trumpeted. Yet I have no doubt it was pure grace. And my appetite, which I hadn’t heard from in days, suddenly issued a very declarative order for powdered donettes. We sat in a donut shop and I licked my snow-tipped fingers and started to heal.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">My experience was extreme, of course, its intensity atypical and influenced in part by other factors. But I know almost all of us mamas experience this anxiety, if, mercifully, to a lesser degree. As painful as this ordeal was, it was rife with precious lessons, the most pronounced of which was this: the story we believe in matters. It colors and pervades every dimension of us, every word that leaves our lips and our every action, and it can be balm or poison. And the belief that there is a formula for parenting, that such certainty exists, is toxic. Such a belief renders mistakes irredeemable and unforgivable. Such a belief suffocates its adherents and shames others. It is, as my dear friend Stephanie says, a graceless perspective. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">If we live into any worldly philosophy or ideology or any story at all other than the Gospel - that the Creator of the universe desires mercy not sacrifice, that One died for all and therefore </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">all died, that He</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> loved us so much that he was willing to give up everything to win us back, that death does not have the final say and that this isn’t the end of the story - it makes us sick. I was given the ultimately merciful opportunity to fully live into the logical conclusion of the perspective I’d been embracing, a perspective that masqueraded as comforting surety. It was anything but. And I emerged reborn somehow, tender, fawn-legged and new - but with empathy and humility I couldn’t have gained any other way. To hell and back - there </span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">for</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> the grace of God went I.</span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-75321062353511409292016-12-29T09:53:00.001-08:002016-12-29T09:53:15.623-08:00Wonder<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Life just wasn’t making sense that day. Disorientation and misunderstandings and general malaise hung about, shadowing and distorting everything. I’d yelled viciously at my kids, spoke harshly to my husband, and couldn’t seem to flake off the ugly, encrusted callous of resentment that sheathed my heart. It felt like it would take a sledgehammer this time to break open again. I was so weary, blearily and blindly stumbling and stagnating in a haze. I needed thundering capitulation, fire in my belly, a total rebirth. I needed light in my eyes. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">So I told my husband in my best closed-for-negotiation declarative voice that I needed to go on a bike ride. Looks like rain, he said. I didn’t care. The screen door had barely slammed behind me when I set off, two wheels grinding and skidding over gravel. I pedaled furiously and angrily over the blacktop of the rural county road where we lived. I headed away from town, into the wide open vistas of the eastern Colorado high plains, where brittle scrub brush and the loneliest trees in the world and the most evil weed known to man, the “goat’s head”, scrabbled out a living for themselves. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I could never quite get used to this landscape, which felt utterly alien to me, having grown up deep in the woods of Missouri where I waded in the creek and </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">hid </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">among the trees with a child’s delight for secret spaces. Here there was nowhere to hide, from God or man or coyotes. Every night their howls chorused in a round, piggybacking on one another ominously as their hunt began. I swear I heard the terrified, strangulated cries of something that they’d caught being devoured one night. These plains were somehow more wild and savage than the forest or even the mountains. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">But I rode and rode on the deserted highway. And I started to complain, venomously. At first it was aimless, to no one in particular, just to myself, I suppose. And then I started railing against God. I believe we’re allowed to do that. I believe that even more than praise, God wants Raw. God wants Real. And I believe he loves us so much that he will provoke it out of us before he’ll let us die behind our masks. </span><span style="background: rgb(0,255,255); font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-highlight: rgb(0,255,255); mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">So I railed and ranted and expelled all the acrid bile I’d been suppressing. The sky blackened along with my mood and I rode on, a breeze at my back. Where are you, I asked God? Can you show up just once, tangibly, unmistakably, vividly? Why do I feel this way? Why has the joy been siphoned out of motherhood, my sense of wonder deadened, the color leeched out of my life? </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">A car roared past once or twice, giving me a wide berth, but otherwise I was totally alone. After half an hour of desperate raving into the silent air, which was gravid with the tension of the looming storm, I gave up. This is futile, I told myself. Pointless. I’m going nowhere. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I decided to go back. I turned in a wide arc on the road and suddenly it was upon me: stinging rain propelled by a unforgiving wind, assaulting me as the effort to pedal the bike increased tenfold. Lightning rifted the map of the sky like a phantom white river and the torrent began, as though the lightning itself had torn open the </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">womb </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">of the clouds. It was like I’d turned my face from day and immediately been hurled into the night. I cursed as my leg muscles began to burn and stooped my head and stopped every thirty seconds to wipe raindrops from my glasses before realizing it was a </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Sisyphean </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">exercise. I was going to get sopping, soaking wet, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was nakedly exposed on those shelterless, barren plains, a good 3 miles from my house with torrential rain crashing down on me. My teeth chattered and the wind was relentlessly antagonizing me like a single-minded, endlessly resourceful villain, intent on nothing but my demise. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">And I was taking it all very, very personally. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I couldn’t believe it. Was this my answer? It felt like a challenge, and I was ready to meet it. I was all spite and anger and bitterness. I was Lieutenant Dan hanging from the mast with one arm waving free, cavalierly hurling insults into the storm, taunting and asking for more. I was gloriously hysterical. I laughed at the absurdity of my predicament while at the same time tears of sorrow and futility poured down my cheeks, rivulets quickly swallowed by the glut of rain that already obscured my vision. Darkness visible, darkness</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> risible.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> I’d been wrenched from my finger’s hold at the end of my rope and was in total freefall. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I was so busy squinting at the road ahead of me that I didn’t see it until it was fully formed, vivid and color-saturated but at the same time ethereal and otherworldly. It arced above me, framing a heavenly dome over the road ahead, as though it were heralding the entrance to Oz or Vahalla or the Garden of Eden. I braked my bicycle and planted my feet on either side and stared up in awe. In the space of a few seconds, it seemed, the torrent had been tamed to a fine sprinkle, a refreshing spray.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">There it was: a perfect double rainbow. A perfect curve, linking treasure to treasure, wedding heaven and earth.</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">I stood there for a good five minutes, wonderstruck and </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">stultified</span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">. A few times I looked around for another sign of human life, incredulous that no one else was there to witness this marvel. There was no one. No cars, no one. A few cattle ruminated lazily in the field, a few birds tentatively sang and, invisibly, slugs and ants and insects and </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">voles </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">worked or slept in secret lightless places below the ground. Just all of creation and me: living, breathing, luxuriating in the majesty of the One who made us. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">We are the made-in-the-image ones, the remarkable animals called “human” who can reflect, can know, can marvel, can wonder at the deep mystery and deep majesty of it all. This was</span><i><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> my</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> rainbow. </span><i><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Mine.</span></i><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"> I felt like I had just been baptized again. The world exploded anew with prismatic color and burgeoning beauty and humming aliveness and I knew I had shed the callous husk that had been suffocating my heart. I smiled and laughed and awed at this undeserved extravagant gift, bestowed on me when I’d been nothing but ungrateful. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Lesslie Newbigin said that the ineffable mystery of God is not so much a metaphysical one that arises from pondering the vastness of things as it is a moral one. “It is the mystery of a holiness that can yet embrace the unholy,” he said. The mystery of the vastness is ever present, to be sure - as one of my favorite poets, David Berman, says: “The sea is always there to make you feel stupid.” But it is indeed the sense of lush, opulent generosity - undeserved, unearned, and sometimes even unasked for, yet rained down upon us - that lies at the very crux of the universe. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">Without wonder, our souls grow faint. We desperately need the refreshment of our own personal rainbow. Sometimes it does come from the stars, the sky, the ocean. Sometimes is comes from within our most treasured relationships. And often it comes in completely unexpected circumstances, halting us in our grumbling, head-down, belabored steps. Although it is indeed a gift and we don’t necessarily control when it befalls us, I believe we can cultivate our hearts to receive it. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';">For me, the sense of awe and delight that was so native to childhood barely survived the postured jadedness of adolescence. It was nothing more than a whisper somewhere deep inside me, a rumor of lands of milk and honey long since forgotten. Watching our children’s awe at the most fundamental things - the things we don’t even see anymore because they’ve so far receded into life’s taken-for-granted background - is so pure and delightful and sweet. But I believe we’re called even higher, to a mature sense of wonder that sees the holiness underpinning the world and the people surrounding us, the eternal holiness that animates and fructifies and bespeaks life. And at the core of this wonder is hope - not even directional or specific hope, but pervasive hope, wild hope, indestructible hope. A hope like that can only flourish when we listen to the call of wonder - a call that says stop, be still, look around, listen. There could be a double rainbow right in front of you, calling you home.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><i>An edited version of this article was originally published in MOPS International's Hello, Dearest Winter 2017 magazine. </i></span><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 10.0000pt; mso-bidi-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-spacerun: 'yes';"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-12952981311511654372016-12-19T17:32:00.004-08:002016-12-19T17:33:44.214-08:00Ladies of the Sand and Sage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(I had a hard time finding a suitable visual to accompany this post. Hopefully this particular selection will become meaningful by the conclusion!)</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I don’t belong here</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, I thought to myself while politely nibbling on a store-bought sugar cookie with industrial-strength icing. Across the table there was diabetic Dee, with her cantankerous rants about the endless parade of incompetent doctors she had to see. She’d sent tact packing long ago - probably with some choice words on its way out - and wasn’t afraid to tell me repeatedly that my long-haired son needed a haircut. Then there was petite Elva, whose arthritis had contorted her hands and whose lack of hearing constantly prompted her to ask me to speak up. There was Betty, who yearned for more talk of sanctification and what she called “old time religion”. There was mildly autistic Norma, who was prone to violent coughing fits. She had a historical feud with strong-willed Dee, and current relations were tenuous. There was Susan, who always left early to return to her job at Wal-mart and whose mother had been fighting cancer for years. And then there was Ellen, my dear neighbor, who, in her cheerfully and relentlessly persuasive way, had talked me into coming to what I affectionately (eventually, anyway) called “Old Ladies’ Bible Study”. We’d moved to a completely unfamiliar rural area nine hours from our native Kansas City, and Ellen had quickly gathered me under her wing. She’d invited us to play cards and marbles and taught me such delightful new-to-me sayings such as “show ‘em whose hog ate the cabbage!” and the infinitely wise “even a blind hog finds an acorn sometimes”. Steven and I puzzled over that one - </span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">do hogs even like acorns? </span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">- but we quickly absorbed it into our vocabulary.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">But Ellen had also somewhat strong-armed me into joining Old Ladies’ Bible Study, making a strong sales pitch that didn’t ultimately resemble the actual product. </span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I don’t belong here</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, I told myself again. Weeks of corseted resentment now strained against my very best show of forced politesse. The pride and arrogance that festered beneath my facade of humility began to say terrible things. I wasn’t old, first of all. I wasn’t sick. I belonged among youngish, hip people, I told myself - people who know what kombucha is, at the very least! But fine, FINE, I thought. Maybe there is indeed a silver lining: maybe </span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">they</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> can learn something from </span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">me! </span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(Did you hear that? It sounded like radiant, divine peals of laughter, all melody and light, holy howls spilling forth from the belly of God himself</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">. WEIRD.)</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">So I soldiered on. I kept showing up. And showing up. Biding my time, I thought. Gracing them with my semi-youthful presence. For weeks, my stubborn eyes refused to see and my bitterness relented to a background hum of adolescent-grade ennui. And then something very strange began to happen. I started to love these women. Week after week as they shared their vulnerabilities, their joys, and their sorrows, I started to see them and meet them as God’s beloved. Maybe it was when Dee, still scarred from her husband’s abandonment decades earlier, tearfully shared the story of her high school sweetheart showing up at her door one day out of nowhere. “I forgot what it felt like to feel loved by someone,” she said. Or maybe it was when Susan emphatically pounded the table in front of her and said, as her voice cracked, “This right here is my church. It’s here with you ladies.” Or maybe it was when Norma also broke down in tears one morning, her face grimacing in anger and pain, shouting “Just look at my teeth! I’m ugly! I know I’m ugly!” The next day I mailed her a letter - her favored means of communication - reminding her just how beloved and beautiful she is to God. At the following study, she hugged me, and I knew I’d been accepted into her sphere of trust. The hug was wooden and her eyes averted after she gave it, but it was incredibly precious to me because I knew hugs from Norma were neither profligate nor did they come cheap.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I was ashamed. I’d committed the sin of the Pharisee for the billionth time in my life and been blind to it for the billionth time. Deep down, I had believed I was better than them, and condescendingly believed only I had something to offer them while failing to see how much they had to offer me. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">“Pay attention to the people God puts in your path if you want to discern what God is up to in your life,” Henri Nouwen said. I hadn’t paid attention at all, and instead shut my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears and keened an obnoxious and ridiculous tune of snobbery. Is there anything more laughably bizarre than snobbery? </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">But God, he is so very good. He chose the foolish things to shame the wise, and the weak things to shame the strong. Those who I thought were last were, in fact, first. But God loves us too much to allow us to languish in the hell of arrogance, the prison of pride. The lozenge of humility is bitter at first, but gives way to the richest sweetness. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">And savoriness, if you please.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> We’re talking the Everlasting Gobstopper here. Jesus said those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. I suppose it’s possible to white-knuckle our pride and resist the humbling, but then we lock ourselves out of love. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Now when I think of how often the refrain of “I don’t belong here” flitted through my mind during those early months, I think of </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">that Stephen Stills song “Love the One You’re With”</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">. Yes, it’s overplayed and we’ve all heard it a thousand times but I like it, and yet its lyrics - particularly the chorus - I’ve always found at best inane and at worst downright heretical. Heretical because the ideas of soulmates and destiny have been foundational to my belief system in the past (</span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">If you can’t be with the one you love?! But that’s silly! I shriek)</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">. And in a way, they still are - but I hope I’ve come to a more holy understanding: you can indeed be with the one(s) you love, because t</span><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">he ones you’re with are the ones you’re meant to love. </span></i><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">He works through us to heal us, to give us the gift of communion with him and to feel his presence and taste his mercy. Jesus is here. Not yet in full, but he’s here. I know it, because I’ve seen it and felt it and breathed it. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">I came to that small circle of women believing I was superior, because of my relative hipness, because of my urbanity, because I’d read some theology. How little these things actually mean! I’m thankful for the</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">merciful </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">humbling, thankful for the privilege of sharing with these women, for receiving</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> such</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">unconditional </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">kindness and hospitality and</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> warmth and</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, finally, being able to give it in return. I’m thankful I was granted a measure of seeing - real seeing - that broke through the darkness of my ignorance and pretension. But that’s grace for you - even a blind hog finds an acorn sometimes</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8112932977755776892.post-13244303398763333852016-12-14T16:56:00.001-08:002016-12-15T06:42:53.394-08:00Why we homeschool, in too many words<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">First: I’m not a homeschooling zealot. I was dramatically (and, I hope, permanently) disenchanted of my brief love affair with zealotry regarding parenting choices years ago. But that’s another story. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I do believe there are right and wrong choices, yes, but when it comes to somewhat amoral decisions such as how your child is educated, certainty is not really an available posture. The impossibility of knowing the outcome of the choice dislodges certainty and makes it illusory at best. Public school, private school, homeschool… they are indeed quite different. Different formational experiences. We all like to think there’s some kind of level of reason outside of time and space, independent of particularity, to which we can appeal and which issues absolute certainty. That’s our bothersome Enlightenment brain rearing its bewigged, eminently reasonable head again. I’m not referring to trusting God - that’s faith, which is not coterminal with objective certainty, a thing that doesn’t exist, as much as we like to believe it does. I’m talking about the idea that we can appeal to some standard in order to be absolutely certain that a given decision is right, independent of trust in God and the Holy Spirit to lead us. The short answer is that we can’t. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">(panicked shriek of horror)</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">And so, if I belabor my decision too much, I start to freak out. I start trying to use the internet as some kind of oracle to validate my choice (trying to use the internet in this manner is a voidish rabbit hole if there ever was one, because what is the internet but a cacophony of fallible human voices, each vying for supremacy in a neverending welter of grotesquely profligate verbiage? Wait, why I am writing this and publishing it on the internet again?). </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I wince and feel a small bud of fear start to unfurl in my belly when reading testimonies of homeschooled children who are now adults and blame their home education for things such as social anxiety, listlessness and ineptitude. Apparently there are those out there who feel they are socially leperous, anxiety-ridden, malformed and misinformed, yet are simultaneously conscious enough of their inability to function to blame said inability on their homeschooling and seethe with burning hatred for the fools who spawned them into this cruel world. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">But the same fear blossoms when I read or hear victim stories of the relentless, viperous bullying that seems rampant in schools. I fear Izzy and Arrow will be shaped by others’ mean-spirited words, mired in the pit of our hypersexed and useless pop culture, so drawn daily into the drama of the machinations of the school caste system that an education won’t happen at all. I fear they won’t develop independently, won’t have time to develop their gifts, will become overly identified with the “labeling” that springs from good and bad grades or test scores. I worry school would cripple rather than nurture them. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I have thoughtful friends who send their kids to school, and their reasons generally seem legitimate, well-reasoned and good to me. I have thoughtful friends who homeschool, and their reasons also generally seem legitimate, well-reasoned and good to me. I know very devoted public school teachers who work very hard and have a deep and real love for the little souls in their care. I personally had a couple of teachers like that, but also some who were apathetic and did the bare minimum required of them, and sometimes not even that - perhaps because of burnout from overwork and underpayment - but were negligent teachers just the same. It’s a most troubling impasse. So I start pleading with God for a definitive answer and then looking to the skies for a stone slab to fall with either “yes” or “no” engraved upon it. I start wondering where I can find a set of urim and thummim. But nothing can give a definitive answer. Even when I appeal to God in prayer, never does He seem to give me a definitive answer on this question in the way I define and desire definitiveness. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">And yet, and yet… I have to admit the chorus of “Freedom” by George Michael resounded through my head when, en route to that sacred space known as The Library, we drove past the full school parking lot (just a block from our new home) on the first day of school in our district. Freedom, sweet freedom! Freedom from the endless testing, the herding, the distractions, the generalized dread that every school day engendered in me as a child. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">In kindergarten, my teacher was Mrs. Whipple, she of the vivid red lipstick and besequined sweaters for every occasion. I don’t remember learning a great deal in an academic sense - I was already reading - but there was plenty of play and frivolity and made-up words like “conkywampus”, thanks to Mrs. Whipple. We all adored her. Kindergarten was only a half-day, and each morning just before noon my mom would pick me up and I’d ride home to a lunch of Chef Boyardee cheese ravioli while watching Sesame Street. Life was very, very good. It was golden.</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Then came first grade. My teacher was Mrs. Michaelson, of the floor-length and lace-collared schoolmarm dresses and the tensely permed hair. Everything about her suggested an austerity that simply would not humor such things as fun and whimsy. I didn’t jibe with her and yet she wasn’t necessarily the source of my misery. Suddenly, I hated school. I hated everything about it - the constant forced socialization, the lack of reading time, the lack of privacy. There was also something beyond words about it that sucked the joy from my nascent mind and tender little heart. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">An inexplicable dread would begin fermenting in my gut upon awakening and realizing it was not a Saturday or Sunday morning. I would contrive some kind of crisis in order to miss the bus and my mom or dad would be forced to drive me, weepy and inconsolable, to the school parking lot where I’d beg them, in vain, not to make me go. Eventually they took me to a psychologist or psychiatrist and all I remember is that I thought he was handsome like a Disney prince which made the whole ordeal ten times worse and I sat there staring hard at the cumulus of wadded-up tissues in my lap and was mostly silent or gave monosyllabic answers as tears rolled down my cheeks. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Summer came, and once again I was allowed to revel in the freedom of days that were my own. Summer is still my favorite season. But 2</span><sup><span style="vertical-align: super;">nd</span></sup><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> grade loomed, like a doom-portending dust storm on the horizon, slowly, almost imperceptibly creeping nearer. It was only June and then suddenly it was not and you realized you hadn’t eyed the horizon for some time and there it was, nearly upon you, the coming school year, intent on ruining the final vestiges of summer fun with its villainous whispers of imprisoned days and pointless busy work. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">And so it went. Each school year, I became slightly more adept at navigating this world I vehemently disliked. 5</span><sup><span style="vertical-align: super;">th</span></sup><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> grade was notable, not for its educational richness (academics were a mere formality and background to socializing), but for the “dating” that began that year (which was really only in name; I was a dork but as far as I know no one was actually going anywhere together). As for middle school: let us never speak of it again! High school, eh. I made treasured friendships that have endured to this day, and did have a couple of brilliant teachers… but the environment of “school” still felt stifling. I am reminded of one time a couple years ago when we were playing Pictionary with a group of friends in Lamar, one of whom had twin teenaged sons. Steven was drawing something that must have appeared to be an incarcerated boil because one of the twins yelled “zit prison!” which was piggybacked by a retort from his twin: “high school!” Ah, yes. Zit prison, how apt. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I feel I should say at this point that this is entirely my experience as I perceived it then. It may sound spectacularly hyperbolic to some, but it was real to me. I passionately loathed school. My husband did not. I have friends who did not. So, am I projecting onto my children? Possibly. I make every effort not to vilify school to them, though, and have made it clear they’re welcome to try it eventually if and when they desire. Am I imposing my will on my children? Yes, absolutely. That’s impossible not to do, and furthermore would be undesirable. To do so would be some kind of philosophical construct - “neutrality parenting” (an absurd neologism I’ll go ahead and coin) - that would not, and could not, make any substantial contact with reality. We live in a world of particularity and embodiment, and it is good. We make decisions for our children that will be heavily formational. We make them actively or passively, but it’s impossible to avoid making them. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">Inextricable from this decision-making business is cost. There is a cost for every choice, no matter how good, thoughtful, prayed-over, read about, considered, analyzed, or urim-and-thummimed to death. I tend to use excessive weighing of pros and cons as a deflective tactic to avoid actually making a decision. At some point, the weighing must end. And we must rest in our decision - and, if that decision requires further work on our part (as homeschooling most certainly does), invest ourselves in that work without reservation. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">So, we decided to homeschool. Why this decision, above the other? Because of my experience. Because while I believe it’s good to be exposed to many different people, challenging people even, but I’m not sure the right time is ages 5 or 6 is the right time for doing that independently for many hours 5 days a week, as the powers that be tell us it is. Because I want my children to be firmly rooted in their sacred belovedness and worth and the sacred belovedness and worth of every single person that has ever lived and will ever live before they venture out independently into a world that seems bent on belying that truth. Because I believe institutions are by nature not hospitable environments for the human soul; because they thrive only insofar as relationships can grow within - and sometimes in spite of - them. Because most of the time, I love having my children at home; I love learning together and I treasure watching them bloom. Because I am open to change if it quits working. Because I believe in mercy and grace and that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him. Because, over and over again, God has told us to not be afraid. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">I don’t sound very sure about my decision, do I? The truth is I’m not, at least not every single day. Some days sparkle with the crystalline fruit of wonderful books, learning with ease and curiosity and engagement, the immediacy of Christ's nearness and the luminous here-and-nowness which accompanies it. Love is the engine and it makes everything shine. Other days, it feels like nothing is working and we just give up and go to the library. I hope my children will be glad we made this choice, but I have to live with the possibility that they won’t be. And yet, there is nothing left for me but to trust, and test the fruit, and wait, and enjoy the nectar of daily life in the meantime. </span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14pt;">And it is, indeed, nectarous (a word I made up and use here to mean "of, like, or pertaining to nectar" because one of those small handful of great teachers I had told us we have complete and unrestricted license to make up words).</span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Ashleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07278543070586376055noreply@blogger.com0