Beautiful Things

A year and a half ago, at a service at MPPC, I heard a song that made me cry. It was played as background music to a video then. I have completely forgotten the video, but the song is burned into my mind. I remembered it in fall 2011 and looked up the lyric snippet I remembered: "You make beautiful things / out of the dust."

And I found it, and cried again. It was a hard moment in our marriage, and it took hope and faith for me to sing along. Things were not as I had imagined they would be, and I couldn't see a way forward. This song was my cry of pain and my cry of trust.

I bought the whole album by Gungor: "Beautiful Things," the song and the album are called.

 This past Sunday, O. and I were at MPPC together, and what song should the worship leaders close the service with but "Beautiful Things"? My heart was quiet as I listened and joyful as I sang along. Things are so different now than they were when I first discovered this song; things are so much better. God has been faithful and he has made beautiful things in O.'s and my relationship. Our marriage will be a beautiful thing someday, and indeed it is already, and if it ever crumbles to dust, I will still trust that Christ will remake it into a beautiful thing, and make it new--make us new. Make me new.

Welcome, 2013. Come, Emmanuel.

Year end reflections

Seven days left in the year, and seventeen posts to go before I hit 100 posts for 2012. It feels odd to be writing to fulfill a quota, "inauthentic." But a goal is a goal, writing requires discipline, and it peeves me to see the total post-count diminishing each year when I look at my blog.

Why have I been writing less? I know I always write less in the summer, when pools of sunshine beckon me outside. I write less during holidays when my schedule is disrupted. I used to write more when I was upset because I would process through writing here as well as in my journal. But that was when fewer people knew about this blog and none of them were the people who upset me. Now I write less when I'm upset or stressed; I process elsewhere.

For over a year, I had all the solitude I could want. Home alone during the day with nothing assigned to me but housework, and even that assigned only by myself, I expected to write and write. But as it turns out, inactivity makes me depressed, and depression makes me inactive. I wrote little and read less.

Now I have two part-time jobs, pet rabbits, and a stay-at-home husband. I have less spare time, but more energy and more ideas, which inclines me to write more. On the other hand, solitude does not fall into my lap. This discourages me from writing.

Over the next week, expect several (I won't promise 17, but that's what I'm aiming for) short posts. I'm "home" in California, which historically has led to me not writing, but this year it feels like a reprieve from so many obligations, and I am determined to catch up, record, process, describe, capture, share: write.

Territorial

[I've been going through the drafts I wrote but never posted, and found this specimen from 2010, when I was living in school housing with girls I didn't know. Reading this time-capsule account, the scene (or one of a host of others like it) resurrects itself in my mind. I am so glad I am not there any more. I am so glad I am here, in this apartment, in this marriage, in this new time and space, where I the only invasions come through the internet, or come very small, beady-eyed, through holes in the wall, and O. and I can catch them and send them away.]

I came home tonight to find a strange guy lying on the couch, playing with some device from the iPod family. He didn't look up at me when I came in, though I stared at the back of his head. I bristled inside, but held back the desire to bark or growl. I did lock the door though: keep out any other wanderers that might try to invade. And then I marked my territory by collecting my scattered dishes and washing them all, and starting a baking project.

The guy on the couch kept his eyes bound to his phone/toy/iPod, as though so secure in his position that he needn't observe anything in the environment, because there was no way that any of it could possibly have any bearing on him. Nothing would dislodge him, and nothing would threaten him. That couch had become his.

Well, the kitchen would remain mine. I measured and stirred, poured and sprinkled.

A few minutes later, someone knocked on the locked door, and the couch-occupier opened the door to another unknown male, this one an Asian in a red baseball cap. This guy, too, walked in, as though this were his apartment. My suitemates, meanwhile--the people who do actually live here--were nowhere to be seen. I couldn't stop myself from glaring at the two guys, but they didn't seem to notice anyone else was in the room. But the newercomer soon went to my suitemate Y.L.'s door, and disappeared inside.

I returned to mixing. Half an hour later, with midnight around the corner, the guy on the couch was just as well-settled in his new territory. Hostility rushed over me again--rage that my home had been invaded, terror of who this person might be, what he might do--and I spoke.

"Hey, excuse me," (and he finally looked up.) "What are you doing here?" Suddenly anticipating the answer, "playing with my iPod/etc.", I elaborated, "Why are you here? What are you doing?"

"Waiting," he said. "For that guy."

I know how the dogs feel.

Free Time

This is my second week as a homemaker. There are many things to do, but few firm deadlines. I need to buy vegetables and soy milk and a strainer for the kitchen sink--sometime soon. (Today? Tomorrow? It could wait till the day after.) I need to find a laundromat, and haul our dirty laundry and a couple dozen quarters there--before we run out of underwear. I need to research grad programs in linguistics--sometime in the next year.

Astonishing how hard it is to have my schedule completely amorphous. Time is a liquid. It returns, like water, to the lowest place. It settles into low spots in the vinyl floor. It pools under the dusty baseboard heaters. In the summer heat (top-floor bonus), it evaporates and steams up the windows and condenses on the ceiling.

As the days pass one minute at a time, two years stretches before me into eternity. I can't seem to imagine that far in the future. My foresight extends to this weekend, and not much beyond. I have never been so deprived of vessels to pour time into: schedules and meetings and activities. My calendar is a field gone fallow. I wander through it, blowing dandelion seeds and picking wild flowers.

What is this time like? Not like school, though I am learning things. Not like childhood before school's tyranny: I do have responsibilities, and I cross the street without holding anyone's hand. Not like summer vacation: I cannot go to the beach and I am not with my parents or sister (which is no longer to say that I am not with my family); also, if I don't cook dinner, then there will be no dinner. Not like work, where someone else set my goals and told me when to go rest.

If it is like anything I have experienced, it is like writing my thesis last year. My own project: defined by me and executed by me, refined by me and scheduled by me; dealing with whatever interests me, but needing a focus; a source of pleasure and confidence, but also of anxiety and vulnerability; and built around a relationship.

When I read my poems to my mentor, I exposed myself. Criticism stung, while praise surprised me again and again. His approval made me stand taller. It gave me courage to call myself a poet. I prepared poems around the scaffolding of our meetings. I waited for those conversations.

Here, I am not arranging words that will speak into eternity. I am making dinner that disappears within a few hours, I am cleaning a floor that will be dirty again tomorrow, I am emptying a laundry hamper that fills up a little more each night. But here I still have my uncertainties, my fears. Approval still makes me glow, disappointment still makes me shrink. I wait for the reunions. I wait for the connections, the conversations.

I could be a little more stable, more driven, more independent in my heart. But I think this time is about waiting, about resting; about leaning on O. and on God, trusting and depending in a new way; about opening myself wide; about taking down the fences, about letting the wind blow through and plant what seeds it wills.

Time Runs Out

I've seen the days sneaking away in the twilight. They think I'm not looking, that I won't know they've gone, but I see them. They slink away like cats in parking lots. They swoop away like sparrows on a breeze. They dissolve. Silent.

I never counted the days or even the weeks, when they were all here. Now I can't say how many of them have escaped.

I sit inside, surrounded. The tasks are piled around me like Jenga blocks. I keep my eyes focused on the sector marked out by this one hour. When the hour passes and I am still alive and that one region is now clear, I am surprised to open my eyes to the mountain of to-dos in the area of the next hour. Occasionally I peek at the block-towers for the succeeding days. This is invariably an exercise in being overwhelmed.

Eventually my body reminds me: it is time to sleep. I gesture frantically at the things that ought to get done, in vain. I am carried, kicking and screaming, into rest. As the dream-key locks my eyelids shut, I see the tail of a day flicking as the day waltzes away, never to return.

[Some rambling reflections:] Sabbath, fear, trust, humility

From the last page of this article in Veritas Riff about Christian politicians and sex scandals:

"Practicing Sabbath rest is one way of exercising humility, but we do it very, very poorly in this country."

I've never thought about it that way. Sabbath as tithe, Sabbath as discipline, Sabbath as a fast, Sabbath as simply following a rule; Sabbath as gift and blessing, Sabbath as "joy-day" (in John Ortberg's parlance); Sabbath as breaking the bonds of putting faith in work and achievement, even Sabbath as an exercise in trusting God, which comes closer. But not Sabbath as an act of humility.

My relationship to the Sabbath has gone through a lot of different phases. When I was little, I never thought about it. Then there was a long period where I fasted from novels on Sunday (though I didn't think of it as fasting, at the time). Then I went through a phase where I tried to get all my homework done on Friday and if necessary Saturday; then some time after getting to Stony Brook, I started counting the day of rest as being from sunset Saturday to sunset Sunday, with the result that I would end up staying up really late Sunday to get homework done. I was keeping the Sabbath rigidly, in a practice that was still good but definitely tainted by a mix of fear and pride.

Then my attitude changed a lot, because I was absorbing the truth of my freedom in Christ. I think I was reading Hearing God and maybe also Celebration of Discipline or Into the Depths of God, all of which discuss listening to the Spirit instead of being tightly and mindlessly bound by rituals (which is what my personality drives me to). No longer knowing how to motivate Sabbath-keeping, I stopped altogether.

Then I went to IVCF's missions conference, Urbana, and read Mudhouse Sabbath, which talks about how the Jewish Sabbath is a day of celebration and community and good eating (not of austerity and fasting and constraint, as in traditional Protestant practice). That was an eye-opener, and it built the bridge in my mind between the teaching I've heard about taking a "joy day" and the Bible's descriptions of the Sabbath.

Lately I haven't been consciously practicing a day of rest. I have effectively been keeping a day of rest from work, because I spend almost all weekend with O., talking and reading and eating and cooking and sometimes watching movies (and last weekend, our (dating) anniversary, going to the Guggenheim and being enthralled by Kandinsky's colors). But I hesitate to call that time a Sabbath because it's not time devoted to God per se. Moreover, I'm not sure I can even call it a day of simple rest, because this semester, Saturday has often brought some emotional stress. Relationships are not about work, but they do require work. (So many intense conversations: sorting things out, finding out how much fear colors my emotional experience.)

Trusting God: that theme keeps coming back this semester. Trust and fear, the opposites that push me back and forth. I'm afraid of judgment, afraid of failure, afraid of being a bad person--and so I keep the Sabbath as an attempted good work. Or: I trust God to take care of my work, I trust God to know what's best for me, I trust God to give me good gifts--and I keep the Sabbath as an act of intimacy with my Father in heaven.

If anxiety is really about arrogance ("this has to happen my way, and what if it doesn't?" in Oswald Chambers' model), is there an element of pride in all my fear? Is my fear the fruit of trusting my own understanding rather than God's revelation? Maybe all trust is predicated on humility. To trust someone else, even God, is to submit myself to their reasoning and decisions, to believe they know and speak the truth. To trust God means to believe His statements about Who He is ("the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness"), rather than believing the lies about Him that my own faulty understanding spews forth.

Slippery Slope

How do I do this to myself? With a few words, the slide begins. Soon, I've slipped and skidded down an hour, or two. The time melts as I slide down, like snow under a sled (like snow that creeps into my clothes and melts inside). I flail my arms, kick gripless feet, and keep sliding. Past the stark black trees, past the evergreens, I spin and roll. When I finally land at the bottom of the slope, I fall immediately to sleep.

I need Lent

Lent is almost here, and it's good timing because I can feel myself slipping into all kinds of excesses. I need to prune my activities. To clean my mind. To discipline myself. To fast. Lately, I have been squandering time and gobbling cookies and staying up far too late immersed in novels.

The biggest reason my life feels messy and slip-slidey right now is that I have indulged myself by taking on too many things. 25 hours a week of class might just be too many, even if the homework load is minimal. But ... I want to do this. And I want to read, and see this friend and that friend, and have this conversation, and really explore that topic. I am intentional about investing time in schoolwork, people, ideas, work, church. But each thing, like a small but hungry mouse, nibbles away at the twenty-four hours of the day. After so many persistent teeth, the time is ragged and tattered. As my eyelids droop shut, the day droops in shreds in my hand, marked everywhere by tiny incisors. What is this sad remnant? I cannot offer it to my God, and I barely want it for myself. It trickles away, slipping down...

What offering would you have me lay down, my God?

When the torn-up time tapers away, I suddenly realize the time never belonged to me anyway. All I held in my hand was a schedule. But Time has been flowing smoothly by all the while, washing through and around and over. I want to hold my breath and duck under the surface of the time-river, and feel the water rush over me.