Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Hidden in the Open

(Previously published in the Sept/Oct issue of Live Magazine www.baptistwomen.com)



“We know what we are but not what we may be.”
(Hamlet, William Shakespeare)






Some time ago I found a wad of twenties I had hidden in a small aluminum tin decorated with cats. Over the course of a few years, I had tucked away the periodic bill into that unassuming receptacle; amassing a tidy sum which I eventually forgot all about.  The tin sat ignored on the shelf amid well worn paperbacks and ceramic cat figurines. I got so used to seeing it that I ceased to see it all, let alone the money it contained.  Years passed with my treasure hidden in--well, not quite jars of clay--but a small cream coloured tin adorned with dancing felines. It wasn’t until much later when I was cleaning out my bedroom and having a stone cold truth discussion with myself about my girlhood cat decor fixation (and perhaps how it might be hindering my future) that I noticed the tin once again and vaguely remembered something to do with both it and money.

“How could you forget about four hundred dollars in cash?” my friend asked incredulously when I told her of my nifty discovery.  


How, indeed?



The thing is, I never knew that I had four hundred dollars.  I just had a twenty dollar bill that I tucked away here and there whenever I had more than one. I was ignorant of the wealth I had at my disposal. 

The greatest danger of tragedy exists when we don’t know what we should know.  It is for this reason that we often miss laying hold of by faith the attributes of Christ available to us as children of God.  We forget what we know by faith and habitually choose to rely on our own abilities and wisdom instead; valuing and regarding as true the conclusions based on subjective experience over what God reveals in His Word.   We need to remember what we know.

Virtue is discovered in affliction and developed into a treasure hoard collected one small victory at a time. The transformation of faith--of trusting the truth of Scripture enough to obey it--is like saving one twenty dollar bill at a time.  Sometimes it seems like a lot to save, a hardship; while in other moments of abundance, it is almost inconsequential.   This is the humility of faith, that we surrender the right to our own wisdom and trust God instead. 

Sadly, I think I have spent much of my life with the mistaken belief that by taking God’s view of things, I would somehow be impoverishing myself. Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is only in God’s paradigm of faith that His child can be pressed and not crushed by circumstances that would destroy anyone else.  The world and the enemy will do everything in their power to deform and mutilate us into their likeness, but we are being conformed into the image of God’s own Son. We are more than conquerors through Christ.  Greater is He who is in us, than he who is in the world.

But here lies the most deceitful trap of all: it doesn’t feel that way.  When hard pressed on every side and suffering acutely, I feel like I’m drowning, not conquering.  Trusting God when the stakes are mountain high has often felt like wishful thinking and a fool’s hope not grounded in reality.  My feelings--particularly my feelings amid the storm--cannot be trusted for they are generally based on reactionary emotions, hunger, sleeplessness and fear. It is in those moments more than ever that I need to cling to what I know to be incontrovertible truth.  It is the Truth that makes us stronger than we are; braver than we are; better than we are.  It is the Truth alive in us by faith that overcomes the world.  

I had four hundred dollars at my disposal but I didn’t remember it.  We have riches available to us that allow us to conquer in life but we forget we tucked them away in plain sight; one battle at a time.  We are made in the image of God who is eternal and while our bodies will wear out, we were made to endure, to thrive, to be victorious.  It is not our identity to be crushed when pressed on all sides but to retain the shape of Christ; to spring back into the form and pattern of Jesus no matter what the world or the devil throws at us. 

Resilient.


An Embarrassment of Riches

(Previously published in the July/August issue of Live Magazine. www.baptistwomen.com )


(This is not my church.)


My church split painfully in two when I was in the fifth grade.  Between one Sunday and the next all the girls my age seemed to evaporate into memory with only their family portraits in the pictorial directory giving evidence of their former presence.  While God had preserved a remnant of peers--my cousins and another boy our age--I was suddenly bereft for female companionship at church.  Potlucks were ubiquitous in the post-split period as the remaining members of the congregation drew together for a sweetness of fellowship that can only be attributed to the presence of the Holy Spirit; a balm to the wound of fracturing.  But for my pre-teen self, many hours were spent wandering through the empty Sunday School rooms while the boys played floor hockey in the gym (hitting balls disturbingly hard to my way of thinking) and the adults talked downstairs.  I wanted to be a part of what people were doing, but the gym was echo-y and downright dangerous in my tights and patent leather shoes and the adults were talking, talking, talking about things that only made sense to me in retrospect.


I wanted a friend like a parched plant wants water.  One Sunday while I wandered through our now roomy building, I found myself sitting in the balcony of our hushed sanctuary and crying.  I prayed that God would send me a friend at church. If God had sent me a friend the following week, I doubt I would remember my prayer or His answer.  Countless Sundays passed without the arrival of any families with girls my age.  In a desperate play against my total isolation, I pushed myself to understand and participate in the adult conversations. I got to know my cousins better and grew comfortable in Sunday school, and then youth group as the only girl among the boys who were all like brothers.  I invited my school friends to come on Wednesday nights, but the seas of adolescence are tumultuous and none of those friendships survived the raging storm.  Like Anne Shirley, I longed for a kindred spirit. 

(But these are my friends.)

 Five years passed as I watched for God to answer my prayer for a sincere friend.  I expected He would send a girl my age, but God has repeatedly revealed that all my expectations are too small for the kind of answers that He delights to give. God made me wait for my friends so that I would undertake the challenge of conversing with adults and befriending those more mature than myself; so that I would learn to appreciate the boys as cheerful and forthright companions; valuing the community that God had placed me in rather than the one I thought I wanted.   Then, He began to send His answers.  Friends came from corners I did not expect. These women were not my peers, but grew to be my dearest friends.  If I hadn’t had to ask and wait and stretch myself, I probably wouldn’t have been able to appreciate them, indicating that I wasn’t ready for the friends God had for me. The waiting years weren’t meant to be idly passed as time arbitrary ticked away.  Like waves on a shore, God has been faithfully adding to my friends ever since.  My little church has become an embarrassment of riches to me.  Just when I think that God couldn’t have answered that old prayer more completely, He multiplies His answer again.  


One of our most profound hungers is for that of connection, but our human nature desires it through the easiest of pathways.  I wanted a friend partly to occupy and shield me from having to exert myself in groups in which I felt uncomfortable.  By delaying His answer a little while, God grew in me a love and appreciation for parts of the Body of Christ that I might have ignored otherwise.   Many Christians have forsaken church for a gallimaufry of reasons.  As a result, they wander as exiles looking for a utopian community that meets all their needs, not recognizing that perhaps God showed them the gaps so that they could pray and see Him answer above and beyond what they could think or imagine.  

Lingering in the Light

(Previously published in the May/June 2016 issue of Live Magazine www.baptistwomen.com)



 The Town and Country station wagon my parents bought second hand was a two-toned cream and wood paneling affair and is the first car in which I can remember a family trip.   New cars--even ‘new to you’ cars--have a unique smell; like adventure and hope and upholstery.  My dad would navigate that boat of a car onto the TransCanada West while it was still dark; my brother and sister would determinedly fall back asleep, pillows cold against the windows while I watched the mountains grow larger.   As the trees grew thick and the city lights fell away behind, I watched; I wanted to catch sight of the wild things that live in the expanse between people; hopeful that a momentary flash of delight would punctuate the tedium of hours on the road.

God made us for delight.  If you go way, way back to the beginning--to the genesis of it all, if you will--you’ll find He made man and woman and placed them in a garden He planted and walked with them.  He made them to delight in Him and in one another.  He made them to delight in their surroundings and the manifold other creatures He had made.  He placed in them an awe for beauty. No other species on Earth writes poetry and yet the poets include all of creation in their verse; prompted by our delight for such splendor as the regal stripes of the tiger or the a delicate lace of a web slung with dew in the first light of morning. We alone glory in the bending of light over the horizon; find water falling from a height to the earth below a sight to be cherished.  There is no instinctual imperative to explain humanity’s appreciation for loveliness; it serves no survival purpose.  We delight because delight is His way and we were made in His image.


But delight seems hard in these days of ours where bombs explode with astonishing regularity. Where life is not a miracle but a parasitic inconvenience to be removed. Where we hurry to self-identify rather than rise to the mantle God has given us. Where people campaign for healers to be complicit in suicide. Where truth is subjugated and intemperate feelings guide morality. Where fools and tyrants are celebrated and the eyes of the people drift closed in a somnolent haze of anesthetizing narcissism.  

We almost cannot bear to look at all that there is to see. 

But beauty is always worth opening our eyes for; and we are not satisfied with a single look, either.  We long to behold beauty again and again. To immerse ourselves in it. To possess it, but we live as though it is a transient emotion; a flash of fur moving through the trees sighted from a car traveling a hundred kilometers an hour, rather than our God-given inheritance.  As though joy and delight were only ever a passing fancy.   

And if we look no further than the reflected images of glory, our delight will always be transitory.  Creation is subject to the frustration of passing away and so we feel the forlorn desperation of flowers wilting and summer ending and the whirling spin of the Earth on its axis counting out our years inexorably to their conclusion--so that even our delight wears a forlorn melancholy like a veil. This is the shadowed delight of the World.

This is not our fate, though.  We the Redeemed are invited to stare into the face of Beauty Himself and linger, Son-bleached and golden in the effect of His presence.  True delight has no beginning and no end--eclipsing time by higher authority--and transforms the beholder by glory. As the active footsteps of faith, invite and expect the Holy Spirit to speak to you constantly; in prayer, through Scripture, in sermons, through the natural world, circumstances, stories, people, dreams, science, art, music--everything. What He reveals always spurs delight because He is speaking to you.  Like the rising of the sun increasingly reveals the lay of the land, so delight in God reveals more and more of God--which in turn, delights in a marvelous feedback loop.  Do what the Word says so that nothing will hinder your desire to be with God, for it is disobedience that causes us to hide from Him. Obey and leave the outcomes to God.  But with Him our wounds are fully healed and forgotten; the grime of sin washed away and our true nature, the one born by water and blood and the Spirit shines forth in harmony to delight the Creator who formed it.  For who we truly are is revealed in the perfect light of God’s presence and that identity--the one He gives--is the one that overcomes the world.













Monday, September 19, 2016

I'm Reviewing the Situation: A Lament for Bonnie (by Anne Emery)

I recently finished reading, A Lament for Bonnie, by Anne Emery.  The story--as the title suggests--is about a missing girl from a large musical clan in Cape Breton and touches on the lives of a sprawling cast of characters that populate some of Emery's other mystery novels.  The book helpfully contains a family tree for reference.  Unfortunately, those of us who read the electronic copy only know that the family tree would have been helpful if we had been able to flip back and forth to it as the narrator changed from chapter to chapter.

Alas.  Long live the printed book with its easy page turning. This was the first ebook I have ever read and when mulling over my thoughts at the end of it all, I realize how amorphous the story seemed.  I am not sure if this is the fault of the electronic medium or the author.  Perhaps it is a little of both.  But when two hundred electronic pages stand between the present page and the family tree, you just push through hoping that clarity will be forthcoming.

 Emery certainly writes in clean, readable prose with an obvious understanding and knowledge of police procedure and criminal law that felt a little too expositional at times.  She weaves a believable tapestry of Cape Breton history, culture and music and the sense that the missing girl exists in a real community.  The weaknesses, however, I felt were threefold: pacing; character development and narrative leaps.  That said, Emery's technical capability as a writer meant that I didn't mind finishing the story even when it seemed that the pacing lagged in the lead up to the quickly completed climax of the story.

But the real trouble I had with the novel was that after a while, I just didn't care.  I didn't care about Bonnie since as far as I was concerned she was likely a goner from the get-go and even her bereaved family seemed to be handling her absence with a surprising degree of equanimity.  No parental breakdowns at the thought that their preteen daughter was raped and murdered.  No family strife despite characters mentioning that there had been rifts in the past.  Instead, everyone participated in benefit concerts for Bonnie and got together for kitchen ceilidhs.  As a result, I didn't particularly care when the RCMP's glare of suspicion was cast over red herring characters because I wasn't invested in anyone.  If each of these characters were developed, I think it happened in one of the other novels.  

Most frustratingly for me, however, were the narrative leaps that made the story feel like the author needed to take another pass at the manuscript and fill in the weak places.  The rule of thumb for writers is to show, not tell; but it seemed I was being told a whole lot of the time.  When the police inexplicably decide some characters couldn't be guilty despite suspicious circumstances because so-and-so 'simply didn't have it in' them, but zero in on another character that was barely mentioned in the first two thirds of the novel over something that happened in the past, it gives the reader the sense that the police--for all their procedure--are more akin to palm readers or judicial commissars than detectives following where the evidence leads.  I never worried that a favourite character might be the guilty monster because I had no favourite character.  I didn't know any of them well enough.  If a book must be read in sequential order as part of a series in order for the characters to have depth that should be clear to the potential reader on the book jacket.  (I mean--if I'd had a book jacket…)  I couldn't shake the feeling that these were either the most undeveloped characters ever, or else Emery was resting on her published laurels with the assumption that readers already knew and were invested in her cast of characters.

The catch-22 of multiple narrators--and I have run into this problem myself-- is that while they offer  multiple angles on the story, they can only convey to the reader what they themselves know. As a result Emery gives us a look at the missing person case from multiple family members, a lawyer, as well as the local RCMP.   But when one of your narrators is the investigating detective and yet the actions  of the police during the rising action of the story are totally incomprehensible, it seems like the mystery author is asking the reader to accept the whole direction of the story resting on the reasoning of 'Just Because'.

Despite these drawbacks, however, I have learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. I should never buy eBooks. They're obnoxious in their claim of supposed ease while in actual fact they're useless to the power of ten.  Maybe all of these problems listed above would have evaporated if I'd had a printed book that would have allowed for me to hold my page and flip backwards for reference. 
2. Actually, no one should buy ebooks.  They are an insult to the art form.  


I Wouldn’t Answer Me Either

“He does me double wrong that wounds me with the flatteries of his tongue.”   -William Shakespeare, Richard II,  (Act III, Scene II) I ...