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.

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.  

April 28th

It has been twenty years.  

Twenty years since David left his place. I remember the crab tree was white with flower and the sky blue as only Calgary skies seem to be.  I remember coming home from school to find everyone at home, gathered in my mom and dad’s bedroom weeping because David was gone.  David, who I admired. David, who was kind.  David, my cousin who I loved.

Twenty years is an absurd number.  

Time is this widening expanse from everything except the loss that still brings tears to my eyes in this public place where I sit this morning.  David passed through water into eternity.  And I wonder if the Holy Spirit is revealing something, and I want to keep my fingers typing so that the thoughts keep coming even though it makes me cry, smearing the eyeliner that I so carefully applied this morning for no reason.

I woke up thinking about David because the twenty-eighth of April never passes without notice, like the birthdays that you learned as a child never leave your recollection; so too the holy days of loss.  Loss, that jagged possession that stabs and draws blood and tears when you think you finally have a handle on it.  That lump in your throat that can’t possibly be swallowed, but must be in order to survive.

I read the first couple of chapters of Genesis this morning because my fingers turned there, conscious and unconscious in the grey light of a clouded day that doesn’t look anything like that blue day, except that the crab tree is white with apple blossoms again.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep.  And the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

It dawns on me that the Spirit of God still hovers over the waters.  The waters that wash over us when we are formless and empty with loss that feels bigger than the Earth as someone’s place at the family table sits vacant. The Spirit of God hovers over the saltwater tears that burst forth when the worst news comes.  

When the precious are lost at sea the Spirit of God hovers over us. 

We are mostly water.

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.  (John 3:5)

Jesus says some difficult things to understand and I feel as though the meaning of this is almost revealed, but lies hidden so that my fingernails are grasping at the edges of it, looking for a way in.  Last Sunday, I saw twelve people baptized.  I heard them declare their faith in Christ and then pass momentarily through water to the applause and tears of witnesses.  

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. (Romans 6:4)

Water never meant death for me until it buried my much loved cousin. 

“But God raised him [Jesus] from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.” (Acts 2:32)

It is impossible for death to keep its hold. 

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:5)

David left his seat among us.  Wreathed in love and memory, his earthly place rests vacant because he has gone ahead, the first to take his place at the real table where the former things have passed away and the imperishable have been raised.

And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.  (Eph 2:6)

Since then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. (Col 3:1)

In the elapse of these twenty years others have joined David at that Table.  Auntie Judy.  Grandpa.  Their faces don’t grow dim in my memory because what I recall is faces filled with joy and delight.  Every shadow gone.  Every tear wiped away.  The children of God fully revealed.

If God Had Let Me

[The following was published in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Live Magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com]

Six years ago I gave myself six months.  “Six months,” I thought, “is a real shot.”  Six months would be enough time to finish the comic book mini series that I had already been working on piecemeal for three years.  Six months of focus and I would know whether I would make it or not.  Besides, didn’t God remove the obstacles for me? Didn’t He put the words, “I think you should quit your job,” unprompted, into my dad’s mouth?  That alone was a miracle. Starting out was exhilarating and if my life had a soundtrack it would have been full of orchestral swells in those days. I remember being two weeks into writing full time and thinking that this was the life I was meant to live. I was a seed unexpectedly planted in the wild fullness of the stuff of which my dreams were made.  Six months soon lengthened to a year; to two years and more. The sprouting of many small green shoots pushed up through the soil of my imagination and stories, articles, poems and speeches all amassed in a clot of documents on my laptop; filled notebooks and random papers scribbled with notes to recall lost ideas.

But the invigoration of the new dissipates when the the harvest doesn’t follow in due time. I sent off armloads of submissions to deafening silence. Determined to improve, I got critiques to find out what my problems were. I overhauled and edited, but still the results were not forthcoming.  Doubt crept up to the margins of my thoughts.  “Maybe God didn’t plant you here.  Maybe you just spiritualized coincidence.”  When the road got harder and the climb more intense and still there was no reward, I began to listen to doubt and then spoke the lies to my soul--thinking I was being pragmatic--only to free fall into despair.  

I would have been a coward if God had let me. I was looking for a way to run; to turn back. I was murmuring against God with my own version of, “Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought me out here to die?” I tried to replant myself. I applied on jobs all over the place but the silence from those applications twinned the silence of my writing submissions. I began to get tense about money even though God had kept me inexplicably solvent all along. Ignoring this provision, I wept and complained and beat myself up and cried out to God in an extremely tiresome manner.  I did this for a time frame that is best tallied in years. Despair is an ugly muse and my inspiration dried up. What had once been a joy became an indictment of my failure. I was hemmed in on every side and my life felt shrinking and small.

Deliverance came in a flash of revelation, not a rush of success. It was in the midst of one of those conversations with God in the middle of the night that He interrupted my litany of personal dissatisfaction. 

“Why don’t you ask me who I say you are?”  

This little question was the whisper that caused an avalanche of change. My fears were exchanged for hope. My criticisms melted like wax next to the flame of my Creator speaking over my life.  “Who do you say that I am?” is Jesus’ question to every person.  But then He invites us to ask Him who He says that we are; and we can trust the answer like it’s good math, because what God speaks is always true.

It is inconceivable to us that God might have us labour in a hard place for a really long time before He uses us for anything. God told Joseph who He was and then had him learn obedience in hardship, slavery and prison before moving him into position. Moses was effectively exiled from Egypt and the Israelites for forty years before God raised him up a leader. David was anointed king and then was on the run from Saul for years before actually being crowned. It is the wisdom of the world that teaches us to judge by immediate and visible results.  God’s word shows us time and again that He works a different way.  

All this makes me think of the Church and how often we get discouraged by hardship and the lack of visible fruit. We look to escape to better churches where the road isn’t as perilous and steep, or the people aren’t as irritating. In doubt we pronounce failure rather than declaring God’s faithfulness and steadfast love and asking Him to speak over our identity and circumstances. The danger of not doing so is twofold. Roaming from place to place robs us of the experiences that will refine us for the position that God wants to place us in. And, when we uproot ourselves from where God has planted us, we cheat the Body of Christ. He has arranged each member exactly as He wants it, but we voluntarily amputate limbs to suit our own will, rather than His. It is little wonder then, why we so often stagger. We have crippled ourselves.  Difficulty is not a sign that you are in the wrong place. I gave myself six months. That was the time line that I--in my ignorance-- imagined was appropriate. Only God knows what truly is.

What We Won’t Search For

“ ‘Little did he know’?  I’ve written papers on ‘little did he know’.  I used to teach a class based on, ‘little did he know’.  I mean, I once gave an entire seminar on ‘little did he know’.   'Little did he know' means there is something he doesn’t know”.  ‘Little did he know’ means that there is something you don’t know--do you know that?” 

(Stranger than Fiction)

The other night I locked my keys in my car. I had the terrible foreboding that I had done just that as I pressed the lock button on the outside of the door.  But still, I frantically searched my purse and my pockets for something that I knew was beyond my grasp.  Sometimes, the thing that you most need is out of your reach.  It is locked away.  It requires a lot more effort to lay hold of.  It requires searching. 

It’s interesting to me that when the Bible talks about wisdom it is often personified. It isn’t likened to the state of being smart.  It talks about befriending wisdom; calling her your sister. Wisdom is the voice that cries out on street corners while the world goes by unaware progressing toward destruction. Wisdom has to be sought, like the thoughts of a friend have to be asked rather than guessed.  Wisdom has to be searched for, not selected from a multiple choice list.  It is a hidden thing.  It takes effort to find it, because if you’ve ever lost something, you know that finding isn’t so much an intellectual exercise as a perseverance game. It is a treasure hunt with a paucity of oblique clues.  It is turning your world inside out until you find what you are looking for. But we want our answers faster these days, and we want popular answers most of all.

Culturally speaking, I’m not sure that we’re much willing to search out wisdom anymore. I think mostly we are happy to take on the set of opinions that endear us to the kind of people who appeal to us and then move on without following the thinking to their inevitable conclusions.  We don’t really want to think about things too deeply.  We don’t want to be disliked.  We don’t want to walk hard pathways because usually we find out we’re going to walk down them alone while a noisy crowd heaps mockery from the sidelines.

Wisdom is an intangible treasure, but its outcomes are not. The absence of wisdom should be felt keenly--but like that old friend or family member that you never see--eventually you get used to it. Eventually, you forget to miss them. This is more dangerous than anything: losing wisdom and forgetting to miss her.  This is the ‘little did he know’ that will be our undoing.

We live in sensationalized times with a megaphone media and a collective soundbite attention span. We need to be willing to search out wisdom no matter how long or uncomfortable the task.  We need discernment.  We need the Spirit of Wisdom--which is the Holy Spirit-- to show us what to do and believe.

“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears and he will tell you what is yet to come.” (John 16:13)

Wisdom is the ability to perceive the truth and judge accordingly; and as Christians we have access to it. But we have to ask.  We have to seek. We have to knock.  

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” (James 1:5)  

We have to believe expectantly that God is going to answer and provide the discernment and wisdom that we are looking for in every situation.   We need to be looking for it.  We need to be watching.

That Doll is an Albatross

[The following article was published in the Nov/Dec 2015 issue of Live Magazine under the title, "Gratitude is a Position". Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com]

One year when I was little, in the weeks before Christmas, I saw a commercial advertising a doll that came with special pens that changed the colour of her clothing. I wanted that doll so badly.  It was like a gnawing hunger that I couldn’t satisfy. I had no money, but Christmas was coming and so I wrote to Santa with my request naming the doll by name. But, hedging my bets on the kindly old elf’s existence, I was shrewdly certain to show my mother the letter before asking her to mail it. I showed her the doll in the store when we were there buying presents for others. I prompted her with all the subtlety and ingenuity my seven year old self possessed. But when Christmas morning came and the abundance was revealed, I hadn’t received The Doll. 

I had been given a different one. It was sweet--a true baby doll--but I wasn’t satisfied. I remember moping because want was still gnawing at me. I was disappointed because what I had received wasn’t what I had requested. It seemed second rate. My mother noticed my deflated expression and asked what the problem was. I am ashamed to say that somehow I communicated my discontent. My mom was hurt and disappointed in my reaction to her gift. In an uncharacteristic move, she returned the sweet baby doll and purchased its garish replacement. I learned the deceptive nature of advertising that day.  The Doll was a clunky and an inadequate imitation of what my desire had built it up to be. The pens barely functioned and trying to use them was an exercise in frustration. I didn’t like it. I had hurt my mom for nothing and I wanted the baby doll back. 

For years I kept that gaudy doll--the object of my desire--in its original box in my closet; an albatross of my discontent hung disconsolately around my neck. Whenever I caught a glimpse of it, I felt sick. I had been disappointed before I received it, and I felt disappointed afterwards. It was a powerful lesson. Gratitude is more than just thankfulness. It is about position. It is about who we are in relation to the Most High. My mother could discern a better gift for her child than I could for myself. She knew about deceptive advertising and poor construction. She knew what was a good gift and what was just junk.

In the last few years I haven’t been content with where God has planted me. I wanted something different and it gnawed at me and killed my creativity and made me unhappy and hopeless as I lay awake at night. I have been like Eve in the Garden and spent too much time staring at the one tree He hasn’t given me for food; obsessing about how amazing that fruit must taste, that I have ignored, or disdained all the trees He has given.  I’ve been ungrateful, but I never would have called it that. The source of my discontent seemed justified and so I deceived myself into thinking I knew better than God. If I truly recognized my privileged position as His child, I wouldn’t have spent the last few years making sure He saw how disappointed and discontented I was.

I’m a slow learner when it comes to lessons that apply to my own fears and pain. I hide them tightly, preferring only to whine at God rather than letting Him reveal what He wants to give me. And, if I’m being horribly honest, a lot of the time I don’t even want Him to reveal what He wants because I’m afraid I’ll think it is second rate. I’m afraid I’ll feel disappointed like I did that Christmas morning. But the lasting sting of the whole doll debacle was not in the disillusionment that it brought. The pain that still clutches at me is that my ingratitude hurt my mother. I don’t know if I had ever realized that I had that power over her before, but once discovered, it was a horrible burden.  The horror of that burden magnifies exponentially when I realize that I’ve been doing the same thing to my Heavenly Father and I’m not seven anymore.  (Mercifully, there is nothing to stash in my closet to emotionally cut myself with for years to come.)

God is good and as I reject the pride of thinking I know best, that gnawing feeling of want begins to weaken.  As I submit to His plans, He reveals that what He wants is for me not to be afraid of disappointment; not to hoard pain.  He wants to reveal more of Himself so that I can gladly proclaim that a greater share of God isn’t second best, but the best in every case. He wants me to get the message that contentment and gladness are never about what I have, but about to whom I belong.

Bread from a Stone

“All I know is I’m losing my mind,” Franny said. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting --it is, it is.  I don’t care what anybody says.” […] “Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right.  I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of splash.”  (J.D Salinger, Franny and Zooey)

I have, at times, ungratefully wondered if maybe God has a pacing problem.  One of us was doing something wrong.  Since that seems irreverent; I figured that the problem was on my end.  Like those elementary school soccer games I used to take part in, I was off picking dandelions and trying to turn blades of grass into music makers while the ball (and those who were ‘on it’ ) were-- well, wherever the ball was taking them.  I was a daydreamy kid with little interest in chasing round objects when I could have been pretending anything else.  So, I figured that the pacing problem in my life was on my end.  I was doing something wrong.  I needed to stop with the dandelions and the daydreams and start figuring out how to play the game.

Since my first story, my fiction writing has unintentionally surrounded the question of personal versus divine agency; which is really just a fancy way of asking, “God, are you going to bring this about, or do I have to?”  This is a question that I’ve been struggling with for years and it bleeds through my thinking in a staining flood.  Am I responsible, or is He?  The abundance of opinion seems to be saying that if you want to achieve anything in life, you have to be willing to do the hard slogging to get it done.   “God might get you the job but you have to apply for it in the first place…”  I’ve been pulled back and forth on this subject for years.  

That first story I wrote was about a character, let’s call her, ‘Jane’,  who was dissatisfied with her life and set about changing it. She was bored. She was educated. Her career was unfulfilling and she had no real purpose. She had no relationships that were made to progress into something greater and she didn’t know why other people seemed content when she just felt the gnawing question of, ‘Is this it?’

I related perhaps a bit too heavily, and it seemed to me that if I wanted things to change, like my character, I had to set about changing them.  I had to pursue relationships.  I had to pursue writing.  I had run after the things that I wanted out of life.  So, I began writing that kind of a story. And, it felt powerful at first.  Jane’s realization that she couldn’t just wait for life to happen to her because the cold sweat of fear made her worry that waiting might yield nothing at all.  She was haunted by that unsettling line by Michel Houellebecq, “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.” She dreaded the nothing and so, she made drastic changes.  She tried to be different than her personality would dictate.  She threw herself into situations that usually she would have avoided.  

And, like me, she hated it.  

But I didn’t want her to.  I wanted her to be better than me.  I wanted her to achieve something. I wanted her to go from the weakness of dissatisfaction to strength and purpose.  So I kept trying to write it, but it just didn’t work.

Besides Jane’s total lack of emotional cooperation, there was a fundamental flaw that I couldn’t get past.  No matter what, I couldn’t make the things that happened to Jane entirely the result of her own actions.  There was always the invisible hand of author intervention trying to make the story more interesting.  If everything that happened to her was a result of her own doing, then the sum of her story was going to be very small indeed. She couldn’t even meet anyone new without having arranged it herself. 

Even more to my own dismay, I kept discovering that I was sabotaging my own intentions through the inclusion of deus ex machinas I had written in order to advance the plot.  I was like Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, “Here’s our own hand against our hearts…”    

The details kept preaching the opposite message to the one that I intended.  I wanted my Jane to succeed in changing her circumstances.  I needed her to succeed because I wanted to change mine.  But even poor Jane didn’t exist in a vacuum.  There is really no such thing as making it happen all by yourself.  Jane couldn’t meet someone in an elevator without my arranging for it to happen.  She couldn’t have a conversation with a shop clerk unless I created that clerk and put her on shift.   If she was the arranger of her own fate, then there was nothing of meaning that could happen to her without her orchestrating it. There wouldn’t be any surprises.  It was a narrative dead end.  I had to abandon Jane because it was too depressing to me. 

Lack of contentment feels like hunger rumbling away down deep.  Sometimes you are the only one aware of it, but occasionally it roars so loud that others can take note.  The desire to change circumstances in order to feed that hunger doesn’t seem wrong.  After all, what good is being hungry? And we feel as though we should be able to feed ourselves and meet our own needs.  I didn’t realize I had fallen into one of the first temptations that Satan tried with Jesus.

“The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”  (Luke 4:3)

“You’re starving.  You have the power.  Turn these stones into bread. Feed yourself.”  It’s a taunt and a solution rolled into one.  Show the world who you are.  Perform a miracle.  Change your circumstances.  Don’t be hungry anymore.  God isn’t coming through.  Maybe He wants you to do it?  You’re starving now. Turn these stones into bread.  That is, if you are who you say you are...

In all my wrestling with the question of God’s role versus my responsibility, I never thought of this temptation of Jesus.  I wasn’t suffering physically from hunger, but I was hungering for something that I thought I might be able to achieve if I worked hard enough.  I thought I could turn some stones into bread and feed myself.  I even thought maybe that was what God was asking me to do.  So I worked really hard at it.  But, quelle surprise, I couldn’t do it because a supernatural act requires Someone super natural to accomplish it.  

And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’”(Luke 4:4)

I was more like Jane than I realized. There was nothing that I had that I didn’t receive.  There are no circumstances that I have orchestrated.  The ‘turn these stones into bread’ taunt wasn’t about Jesus’ ability, it was about his obedience to the Father.  It was about being led by the Spirit of God rather than His own appetites; be they physical, or a desire for vindication, or a demonstration of power and agency. Jesus spells it out for us constantly, and yet when I focus on my hunger I miss the point.

So Jesus explained, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing.  Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.” (John 5:19 NLT)

I yielded to the taunt. Turn these stones into bread.  But no matter how much mental energy I spend on figurative spoon bending, the stone won’t be turning to bread any time soon.  It is a exercise in frustration. I wish I had understood the lesson from Jane years ago.  There was nothing she did that I--as the author--didn’t do for her.  She could only respond.  She was reactionary.  But her inability didn’t make me despise her.  I created her; I was rooting for her. I wanted her to grow. I wanted her to overcome.  I wanted to write good things into her life.  Sometimes I think we get this wrong idea about God that He despises us because of our weakness and inability to change.  But it is just that: a wrong idea about God. 

“For He knows how we are formed, He remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:14 NIV) 

Like Jane, there is nothing I have that I didn’t receive.  There is no such thing as a self-made man. There is no such thing as pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.  There is nothing that I have that I wasn’t given.  The irony of our self-made claims of dreams achieved is that we forget that the dream itself stole into our minds in the night while we were unconscious.  If we can’t even claim to know the provenance of our dreams, we are foolish to think we know how best to bring them to life.

“I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5 NASB)