Jesus isn't your Wingman

"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."

-Leonardo da Vinci

It is mid August, but already it smells like autumn; like dying leaves and bruised apples beginning to rot.  Even for Calgary, this is premature.  Premature because the air isn’t crisp and the nights are not yet cold, but still there is the scent of what is to come. The aromas of autumn are present because of what we’ve suffered, not because the time has come to change seasons. For two days last week violent thunderstorms moved over the city and what the first hailstorm didn’t kill, the second finished off.  The raspberry canes, once flushed with crimson orbs and leafy with green now typify their name with barren stalks.  The climbing scarlet runner beans were beaten into a sad, battered tangle. Even the apples that managed to stay on the trees are bruised and beginning to attract the wasps.  It isn’t just the fruit--the harvest--that is destroyed.  All the flowers not sheltered under the eaves of the house are nothing but naked stems, shorn of leaves and blooms by the violence of the storms.  Even the things that are meant for beauty are broken.

It’s depressing.

I remember looking at my life a couple of years ago and feeling just like this.  Every dream planted, every hope sown was mown down, battered and broken.  There would be no harvest.  All that remained was a wasteland and a monumental clean up job that I couldn’t bear to contemplate.  Hail was the analogy I identified with the most.  A pelting from the heavens that I couldn’t avoid.  I related heavily and bitterly to Joel 1:4. 

“What the locust swarm has left the great locusts have eaten; what the great locusts have left the young locusts have eaten; what the young locusts have left, other locusts have eaten.”

There is nothing to be done about a crop that is destroyed.  Within minutes the time and work of a whole season is devastated.   Anything with life in it takes time to grow, but destruction is the work of an instant. Time is the one resource we always feel impoverished by.  Once passed, it is gone forever.  But when everything is devastated and the hail storm or the locust swarm passes by, there is nothing to be done but clean up the dead pieces and wait for the next planting season.   You have to wait to try again.

And, you almost can’t bear to try again because it seems that having no hope of harvest is preferable to the crushing disappointment of a harvest stolen.  And I felt so mad at God about the whole thing because if anyone could have stopped my allegorical hail, it was Him.  He is the last line of defense and He let the side down--or, so I begrudgingly thought.

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten--the great locusts and the young locusts, the other locusts and the locust swarm-- my great army that I sent among you.” Joel 2:25

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Joel.  Hold up a second, here.  God sent the locust swarm?  It was His great army? So, it wasn’t just a case of Him letting the side down because He was busy saving trapped miners or something catastrophic; He actually intentionally destroyed everything I was working toward?  What kind of ally is that?  Why would He do that? Weren’t the things I was working toward in line with what He wants?  I certainly thought they were, but what becomes more and more abundantly clear all the time is that I don’t really understand God at all.  

When experiencing an existential crisis it is easy to miss the wider point that God might be inviting us to understand.  Jesus isn’t our wingman.  He’s our master who calls us to trust Him even--and, probably especially--when everything has been pounded into the ground.  This is weird terminology in our context.  We are people who hold democracy as high ideal.  Everyone being equal before the law.  But that isn’t the relationship we have with God.  He isn’t our prime minister or president. We don’t vote for His agenda.  We are invited to live fully within His presence.  We are invited to partake of His goodness.  We don’t set our agenda and then send it to the Most High for His seal of approval.  But for me that begged the question, if I thought I was doing what He asked, why would He send the hail?

“There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.” 

(Proverbs 14:12 NLT)

“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the ends it leads to death.” 

(Proverbs 16:25 NIV)

Seems.  Appears.  These are the words of deception; of slight of hand. It was so true that Solomon wrote this same statement twice two chapters apart.  It wasn’t like he’d forgotten he’d already written this proverb down; repetition in the Bible usually means the author intended to add emphasis.   The thing is, usually when I read that kind of verse, I think of it as applying to other people; not me, because I really am trying to do what God puts in front of me to do. Aren’t those kind of verses about people who don’t care at all about what God wants? The people who aren’t--you know--reading the Bible?  Maybe.  But it would be a little odd for God to fill the Scriptures that His people are to follow with instructions and cautions for the people who will never read it.  I guess that means it applies to me.  There was a way that seemed right, but wasn’t. 

But sometimes I think we get so far into the planting season that we don’t want to know if there is a problem. We want to justify ourselves and all our time and effort because it is expensive and heartbreaking to have been so wrong.

It is God’s mercy and love that reveals the deception; even if He uses a hail storm or locusts because it might just be that He knows that if we could salvage any shred of the deception we would rather do that than turn the rudder of our lives against the current.  We would rather not believe that we’ve been deceived for so long.

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten--the great locusts and the young locusts, the other locusts and the locust swarm-- my great army that I sent among you.” 

There is promise in the face of disaster.  God is faithful and even though He destroyed the harvest, He promises abundance.  He promises the restoration of lost time. Lost effort.  Even though I was the one that was deceived, He--in His goodness and mercy-- more than makes up for the loss.  It is the kindness of God who sends a pelting from heaven to save your life.

'Painting outside the Lines', or as I call it, 'Ruining the Table'.

"An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." 

-G.K Chesterton

I’ve taken up poetry lately and it has quickly become a favourite writing medium.  This is a surprising turn since the poetry unit in English class was always a bit of a snooze for me.  But here I am writing poetry and not feeling a bit self-conscious about it.  I don’t have to worry about character development or plotting. I can splash wild emotion across stoicism. I can remain merely observational. I can be coy. I can be mercurial. I can change my mind. 

Sometimes a poem tells the truth, or it only seems to. Often it lies out of the side of its mouth, as though it wonders just how much you’ll buy of what it is selling. Writing a poem can be a way of hiding in plain sight, or running naked and wild across a page. Some poetry is so dense it is written in a code only the author can understand. This variety makes it one of the most liberating forms of writing.   I've found I love writing poetry that rhymes (I'm not ashamed of it.) and I enjoy reading it aloud; feeling the cadence of a juggernaut rhythm that builds and builds until it stops in a sudden thunderclap.  

It is also freedom from the grind of querying in pursuit of publication.  If you are a writer, you know that omnipresent pressure to publish can kill the creative impulse and make writing a nemesis to be bested instead of a companion in your solitude and a vocation worth pursuing.  Poetry is writing for pure enjoyment and catharsis. No one imagines that poetry will pay the bills (unless, perhaps, you are Leonard Cohen, but even he has to set it to music). It allows you to write without pressure to be anything or do anything. Rediscovering it has been a consolation. You can just marry interesting words and ideas together as though they were born that way; making unique creations out of peculiar words and unorthodox grammar and not be bothered about anyone’s response to it.

For example

you can’t 

watch time thickening 

anymore 

than you can

predict 

your own body language

on a date

or

the events of

a hypnogogic dream

that seems

to 

mean 

something

More than any other form of writing, poetry is more like life and yet, nothing like it at all.  A novel--though sporting crackling dialogue, vivid character development, shrewd plotting and thorough world-building-- is a tight highlight reel that (ideally) shows nothing of the winnowing process that is redrafting and editing.   Actual conversation when transcribed is full of "um's", "you know's" and a lot of dangling thoughts.  Life is filled with sentences that run ahead to nowhere, impossible interruptions; talking over your companion and zoning out because periodically your thoughts are more interesting than they are.  Our brains--magisterial creations that they are--filter out the filler and deliver solid understanding and a coherent memory of what would have been one hell of a mess on the page.  All of these competing signals and intentions can make for interesting lives, but you cannot write that way and expect any kind of coherence.

A character always needs a purpose for what they are doing or saying.  This is true of acting as well, randomly strolling around the stage for no apparent reason is amateurish.  People always have a reason for the moves they make.  Maybe it is expelling nervous energy, maybe it is to lean against a more comfortable area of the kitchen counter.  Writing scenes in which the characters have no apparent purpose is a dead giveaway of a greenhorn.   Even using narration to advance the plot or reveal important details can quickly prove irritating.  Because the reader is an active participant--a witness to the action--the narrator should only interrupt the flow if what they have to add is of total surprise to the reader.  If the reader can surmise the character is sad, it is nothing short of tiresome to be told that he was.  (One shouldn't assume sociopathy on the part of their readership…) So, writing in a realistic and comprehensible way takes a lot of work on the writer's part.  First you have to invent something out of nothing.  Then you can't just transcribe conversations as they really are.  You have to filter and edit and be the brain and the memory without feeling smart enough for the task that your own brain performs subconsciously every day.   You have to build stories layers at a time.  Develop character.  Create tension.

You have to write hard so that it reads easy.

But poetry isn't like that at all.  A poem is the art of implication.  She hints at the elements of a story, but keeps her secrets to herself.  It is freedom and the ability to express the raw edges of emotion and thought without having to make every line comprehensible.  It isn't an instruction manual that demonstrates how to move from one point to the next.  It's a beauty thing that is free to soar or plummet.

That being said, what I have discovered about poems through writing them, is that they are more interesting when they have limitations.  When there is a rhyming scheme or a structural confine, it makes for a more compelling poem.  Stream of consciousness writing is only briefly of interest to the person who wrote it.  A poem requires some rule or structure to create the truly delightful surprise of a brilliant turn of phrase.  A rhyming scheme means that not any word will do--and herein lies the magic.  The search for a word that fits the rule can take the poem somewhere the writer hasn't anticipated; because there are limitations, new avenues for creativity are opened wide.  The very existence of the limitation provides greater freedom for creativity, even though on the surface it looks like less.  Maybe that is why I never really appreciated the Poetry Unit in English class.  The rules for sonnets, odes or whatever just seemed arbitrary and hard.  I didn't know that they were the key to beauty.

How odd.

How contrary to our way of thinking to realize that it is the constraints placed on the medium that facilitate the production of an intricate and unique beauty.  Human nature rebels at rules and yet we recognize the need for them in some cases.  We want to drive on roads where everyone knows and obeys the law.  Our very lives may depend on it.  But what about other aspects of our lives? Our morality, our ethical code, the substance of our character?  If our lives are poems and stories that God wants to write, it follows that the constraints He has created are the parameters of beauty, not the shackles of oppression.   "Painting outside the lines" is a cliched anthem for freedom of expression, but if you don't know what you're doing, all you've done is stain the surface you're working on.  What if we looked at the moral law God has given for us to write our lives with and saw the variables of creative impulse and the unique challenge presented to each one of us with every choice to find the right action that explodes the poem of our life with unequalled splendour.  What if we looked at the constraints as that which facilitates our ability to be unique.  It is the rule that causes the our creative minds to push past easy and ordinary and find the truly exceptional and astounding.  Anyone can ignore the limitations.  It takes artistry to follow them.  Give ten artists the same constraints and equipment and you will find that they have none of them produced identical work.   The limitation is only the framework on which each one-of-a-kind creation will hang.

But it is a lie as old as the Garden that God wants to take things from us, rather than knowing that He is the one who has given everything to us--Including the parameters of beauty.

The Lionheart

In a time of universal deceit -- telling the truth is a revolutionary act. 

-George Orwell

Recently, while wasting my precious time browsing through a clothing store catering to those who wish to hide their clavicles under bed sheet sized ponchos with tags reading XXXS; (you pay a lot for that sizing schematic) I saw a shapeless t-shirt which proclaimed,

"Good things come to those who hustle."

I wanted to buy it because, man, I have hustled.  And gee, I want good things to come to me.  It sounds good on the surface; it sounds right.  If you want something you've got to work for it and all that.  You can't sit around waiting for life to happen to you; you gotta go grab it by the horns and wrestle it to the ground…   This is the wisdom of the day, and I can't even tell you how many times I have encountered it on blogs and in books about creativity and selling your art.  If you want to get anywhere, you have to hustle. If you want to be a success, you better get out there and sell your stuff.  You have to hustle for the world's respect and approbation.   You have to strive. You have to prove yourself.

Lately, though, has become abundantly evident to me just how often what is proclaimed is the exact opposite of the truth.  The definition of 'hustle' is wholly negative whether it is used as a noun or a verb.

Hustle: Force (someone) to move hurriedly or unceremoniously in a specified direction; push roughly; jostle; hurry; obtain by forceful action or persuasion; coerce or pressure someone into doing something or choosing something; sell aggressively; obtain by illicit action; swindle; cheat; engage in prostitution; busy movement.

-- So -- basically, good things come to big jerks, high pressure salesmen, con men and prostitutes.  … At the risk of dragging Hitler into the conversation too early on, one could argue that he was an artist who hustled.

Ironically, hypocritically, impossibly--then--, we're advised to strive and hustle and then told that the path to peace and well-being is to achieve balance.  Promised that you can have it all, do it all, be it all, tolerate all--if you just balance precariously enough--as though every choice isn't made to the exclusion of others.  Stack the teacups ever higher, and then cut yourself with the shattered shards of the mess you made when it all comes crashing down.  Balance, for the sake of balance is just a yoga move.  Sure, you can manage it for a little while if you are devoting all your thought and energy to maintaining that position.  But people like to practice yoga on the beach or a mountain top, not in the middle of a hurricane.  And some seasons are plagued with hurricanes.

The world strives for balance because it has no ballast.

A ballast, according to the dictionary, is: a heavy substance placed in such a way as to improve stability or control such as in the draft of a ship; to give steadiness, to keep steady. 

Actual balance in a seaworthy ship is created by having something heavy--a ballast--deep within, below the waterline.  A ship is balanced or isn't depending on what has been placed inside it.  Interestingly, a ballast is often a tank of water that can be filled or emptied depending on the size of the cargo load. So, balance is bestowed by what you carry within you--what you are filled with--not by the careful stacking of burdens so that your life resembles an inukshuk that isn't meant to go anywhere or do anything.

The question begs to be asked: What are you filled with?  What keeps you upright when the waves would capsize you?  A quick google image search of "capsized ships" presents a eerie array of true stories.  All manner of vessels from cruise ships to cargo haulers to sailboats to ferries are subject to the danger. Every intention of a ship's designer founders when the ballast tank isn't filled sufficiently for the circumstances and the load that the ship will carry.

"If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small." (Proverbs 24:10)  

This verse isn't meant as a condemnation for our lack of strength, but rather a reminder that if you are feeling faint, you need to grow stronger.  We need the continual filling of the Holy Spirt and the Word to be able to withstand what comes at us.  The very next verse gives an idea of just the kind of loads we are meant to carry in the storms of adversity.

"Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter."  (Proverbs 24:11)    

A half filled ballast tank might have been sufficient when you bore less weight, but it simply won't cut it now.  A half filled tank won't be able to withstand the adversity of rescuing those taken away to death, or to shore up the weak knees of those who are stumbling to their slaughter.

I see the family members of those Christians murdered within their church in Charleston extending forgiveness to one who only showed hatred and violence, and tremble at the transformation that God brings when His people seek to see the fulfillment of the promise that He works all things together for the good of those who love Him.  What is impossible for man is possible with God.

We were made for so much more than to hustle for temporal success in a ridiculous and meaningless balancing act.  We were made to run the race set before us with endurance.  We were made to bring light into the darkness. We were designed for nothing less than the heroic rescue of those being led away to death; to hold back those stumbling toward their destruction. Our purpose is valiant and great. Our design magnificent.  We are the Church and we have the heart of the Lion of Judah.

I see the pictures of those 21 martyrs on the beach whose faces weren't hidden like those who wielded the knife, but who, like the first martyr looked to heaven to see the face of the One who conquered death, and know truly who fears whom.

"The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion." (Proverbs 28:1)

 We are the Church.  I know of no greater courage.

The Cheshire Cat Grin

In the beginning, God spoke and everything that exists in the universe sprang into being.  He said, “Let there be light,” and light burst forth at 186,000 miles per second, both a wave and a particle.  He formed molecules to become water and flung the cosmos into space.  He set everything in place and set everything in motion.  He filled the earth with life; plants and animals.  From the smallest microorganism to the largest beast on the surface of the earth.  He filled the depths to the heights with the wonders of His creative power.

Then He made us.  

He breathed His own breath into our nostrils and made us more than the elements--the dust of the earth--from which He formed us.  He made us more because He made us in His image--to our infinite perplexity.  And, He makes us individually.  No assembly line construction.  No mass production.  An Artisan creating each individual piece with purpose in mind.  

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 139:13)

Almost as if we could remember back far enough, we might recall hearing the Spirit of God whispering over us in the womb and the very strands of our DNA knitting together in joyful response to His creative Word. Our very first cells dividing and multiplying at the divine voice singing into existence an identity which had previously only existed in the very mind of God.  An identity that was written in heaven in the annals of the works of God--if we would only be willing to be what He intended us to be.

“My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:15-16)

It is an astonishing discovery to realize that there is a biography written about each one of us taking its place in the great library of Heaven.  They are stories about God’s intentions.  It is about the me that I could be; not the me that my rebellion might choose.  Because I always get a choice.  I can choose my own will. I can choose the ‘freedom’ of something else than what God intends.  I can choose to write an autobiography and turn away from what the Author of Life wrote for me before the stars were born.

“What sorrow awaits my rebellious children,” says the LORD.

“You make plans that are contrary to mine. 

You make alliances not directed by my Spirit,

thus piling up your sins.

Isaiah 30:1(NLT)

I have done this.  I have looked for my own solutions and tacked on a ‘thank-you-God’ at the end to add a spiritual garnish to the meal of my making.  I have groped around in the dark to find the limits of my personal sovereignty.  I could continue to choose my own way; to write my own poky story.  But even with the greatest of intentions, even if I work really hard to be good--it is just so small.  Trivial to the point of inconsequential.  My view is too limited, my resources too meager, my story too insignificant.  To say nothing of sin and the death that it brings--my way is just too small.  Too broken and foolish.  Too frail and given to selfishness and fear.  My way is a small, stunted story that doesn’t need telling. A story that feels like a humiliation in its meaninglessness.  It is the despair of MacBeth in his most famous speech:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is here no more: it is a tale 

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. 

(MacBeth, Act 5. Scene 5)

The story that the madman tells is not worth hearing.  The idiot’s tale is much ado about nothing.   All sound and fury. Chaotic and meaningless.  But somewhere else--somewhere much more else--there is a different account.  There is a story about me worth telling.  And more than that, there is a story worth living. I can resist God’s call to be more, and diminish to the pygmy stature that I choose for myself and harvest the consequences.  

The World offers fortune telling soothsayers to read signs in the entrails of slaughtered animals or in the swill that follows a cup of tea because deep in the heart of Mankind, we want to find meaning in the story.  We want direction to know that we are going the right way.  That is why fiction offers its protagonists the convention of a spirit guide.  We need the wise old fellow in the pointed hat, or the cheshire cat grin to point us in the direction that advances the plot.  In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice has the following exchange with her enigmatic guide.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“Oh, I don’t much care where--” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

As an author myself, I can tell you how difficult it is to make characters and circumstances intersect in a strategic way that advances the story.  It involves holding a hundred different strands in your mind and keeping track of each one, weaving them in and out of the narrative with just the right amount of tension; just the right amount of exposure, and at just the right time. It requires identifying which strands are dead ends and need to be discarded before you spend months trying to make them work. It is complicated and nit picky work that involves a wide view for the big picture and precision attention for the smallest of details. In the best stories, there isn’t any bloat.  Everything that happens, everything that is said or done, happens for a reason--it contributes to the overall picture.  Nothing is pointless.  Everything has meaning. It always strikes me, then, that Scripture describes God as the Author of Life; and here is the natural world thriving in a balance of synchronization, woven together in a mighty design of epic proportions.  Each life a strand with a story in heaven--a story of what could be--but so often isn’t.

For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”  

(Matthew 7:14)

Life rarely feels like stories do--the intersections are much further apart and we can’t see how people have been strategically placed or the role that they play.  Suffering always feels pointless.  We want meaning but we balk that Someone else might have expectations that we follow His design.  So, we--like children--figure we’ll go anywhere but there.  Alice’s Cheshire Cat--exasperating as he is-- reveals the flaw in Alice’s thinking. Getting anywhere is easy.  Getting somewhere requires direction and a purpose.

“Only a few find the way, some don’t recognize it when they do --some--don’t ever want to.” 

- The Cheshire Cat

But if God is the Author and there is a story written for me to live (if I’m willing) then it follows that it is possible to live a life of strategic intersections; so that the you see plot, instead of a random aggregation of matter + time + chance.  If there is a story written in heaven about you, then it is possible to have everything that happens go somewhere-- mean something--build toward the purpose of the grand design, rather than the feverish tangential trail of someone who doesn’t care where they end up. 

These are all lovely thoughts, but if we don’t know how to do it, it is still just the the aimless striving of a rodent on a wheel.  I’m not really interested in behaviour modification.  I’m interested in transformation. I’m interested in being a dynamic character who is not the same at the end as she was at the beginning.  I’m interested in discarding the bloat of an aimless autobiography in order that I might live God’s biography of me.  I’m interested--desperate, really--to hear what He has to say; to have the Holy Spirit actually speak to me.    

 “Your hands made me and formed me; give me understanding to learn your commands.”

Psalm 119:73

In John 16:7 Jesus told His disciples, “But the fact of the matter is that it is best for you that I go away, for if I don’t, the Comforter won’t come.  If I do, he will--for I will send him to you.” (The Living Bible)  It boggles the mind to consider that Jesus says there is something better for us than to have Him physically present with us on the earth.  What is better--He says--is to have the Holy Spirit.  But the Holy Spirit gets held at arms length because we’re worried he might show up and be weird. But God didn’t call us to weirdness. He calls us to holiness.  He called us to be like Him.  

Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, 

“This is the way; walk in it”. Isaiah 30:21 (NIV)

And He promised that He would show us how.

Advent: Waiting for It

To wait idly is the worst of conditions. 

-Robert Falcon Scott

When I was little our advent wreath was not a wreath at all. Ours were advent logs which stretched the length of my parents maple kitchen table and were still rough from their life outdoors and sticky with sap. The logs held 25 candles between them, counting the seemingly interminable number of days until Christmas.  Each night during Advent after the dishes were cleared away, we would turn the kitchen light off and set flame to another purple candle as my mom read from our advent book about how advent meant 'coming.'

As we read about different aspects of the Christmas story we ate sugar cookies in the shape of the Bethlehem star, wise men, or a shepherds crook.  Great sugar cookies; decorated with coloured sprinkles and those little silver balls that are so hard they might as well be made of titanium.  I loved Advent. I loved everything about December and the waiting in anticipation for Christmas.  I loved candy ribbons and the ceremony of lighting candles and gathering around the piano as a family and singing all four verses of 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel'.  I loved tree decorating and Christmas pageants and carols which are only sung once a year.  I loved the waiting and I didn't want to rush it.  I didn't want to miss the anticipation--as though Christmas would somehow be less exciting without laying the groundwork of active waiting--of preparing to receive the one who was coming. Advent is waiting at its finest because we already know the end of the story.  We celebrate the waiting because the Saviour is already come.  We commemorate the waiting because the waiting was important, too.  It was the frayed edge of faith that God was going to do something.  That God was coming to save us from the mess that we had made.  That God was going to keep His word.

Those long ago Christmas Eve's would arrive and my mother would take out my green velvet dress that was only for very special occasions and I would pull on white leotard stockings and black patent leather shoes and bundle off through the dark to church for the Christmas Eve Candlelight Service.  There would be carols and Christmas oranges and the excitement that we were all watching for what was about to happen.  Our family tradition was to open one present on Christmas Eve before going to bed.  I always know it will be pyjamas--new flannel ones usually decorated with cats--but it is always my favourite gift to open because Christmas will steal in at some point during the night and last years pjs just won't cut it; even sleeping is an occasion.

It arrives with the parting of eyelids.  The world is strangely silent in a deep breath before the realization of what day it is and an outburst of Joy to the World! and running into my sister and brother's bedrooms declaring, "It's Christmas! It's Christmas!" like some farmyard rooster who never misses his cue.  Seeing the stockings which hung limp only hours before; lumpy and filled to overflowing and the presents under the tree and lights twinkling and coffee percolating and my beloved family sleepy and disheveled in their new pyjamas as they unwrap the tokens of love that someone else gave them.  I never wanted the presents to end, not because I wanted more things, but because I wanted Christmas to keep going.  Then there would be turkey dinner and cousins and the adults exploding into laughter in the other room over jokes I couldn't understand.  It was a feast.  It was a banquet.  It was Christmas Day and it felt like Heaven.

In most other circumstances waiting is less exciting.  There are no candles being lit to track the days, no special cookies, no songs around the piano or special decorations that are only admired for one month out of the year.  There are no snow globes of the nativity with wind up music that plink out the notes of Silent Night.  There is just the day in-day out of waiting for something that hope tells you is on its way.  Hope whispers it, really--but she never mentions when you might expect it to arrive.  Will it be tomorrow? Ten years down the road? Will you see it with your own eyes, or like Abraham--only as a  shape appearing on the horizon?  Waiting is the worst.

Waiting is an active job to the one who waits but it always looks like nothing to the one who isn't. Waiting is emotionally exhausting and if you wait even a few moments longer than you expected, inevitably, doubt creeps in.  Maybe you are in the wrong place. Maybe the other person forgot about your appointment.  Maybe you imagined that something was going to happen but it won't.

Maybe it was all in your head.

I've been waiting for a long time.  For specific things to happen like wanting someone to want to publish my novel; waiting to hear back from stuff I've sent off, hoping that maybe this time it will be an acceptance and not rejection, or worse, indifference.  I keep waiting for things to happen that will feel like Christmas Day--the culmination of everything that I've been waiting for.  Sometimes it just feels like I am waiting for some kind of vindication for all the choices that I've made that pushed me out into deep waters alone.  Not that the deep is bad, but it can be scary--especially when no one else has come with you.  I've hated this waiting for so much of the time.  I felt like I was just in a holding pattern and that there wasn't anything to do in the meantime except try to justify myself to myself.  And really, what was the value of any of the things that I was doing?  Doubts--like chicken pox--rising out of my skin to itch and keep me awake at night.

Lately it has dawned on me that I've been missing out on the treasures to be found in this period of my life that seems characterized by waiting.  I've fought it. I've resented it. I've tried to get out of it.  I've lost people and things along the way.

Waiting is costly.  But it has its purposes and it has its own beauty--if you are willing to look for it. If you are willing to submit to it.  And, once you start looking, it is hard not to see it.  This past summer while walking at the off leash park, I was stunned by the variety and abundance of the smallest of wild flowers.  They bloomed only a few days but they were exquisite.  I have walked those trails over a hundred times and never noticed them like I did this summer.  I'm not the only one who walks there.  Dogs trample them unaware, tails waging like a metronome.  People keep walking, eyes on the ground to avoid tripping over a protruding stone or tree root.  They watch to avoid trouble, not see beauty.  I know, because I'm tempted to walk that way, too--only seeing potential obstacles and missing out on the beauty that decorates even the grass.

"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time.  He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NLT)

Anticipation lays the groundwork for the satisfaction of a longing fulfilled. What is a celebration if not the marking of a change?  It carries with it the eager expectation of hopes that cannot help but be fulfilled.  And, maybe the satisfaction and celebration that I am longing for isn't the kind that is found in the activities of mortals, like books published.  Maybe it is Eternity set in my human heart that I am yearning for-- but for now, I want to see everything that is beautiful in this time.  I want to celebrate the waiting like Advent because the coming joy is as inevitable as Christmas day.

You Only Go to Church

I recently had to write out my testimony for a class I was participating in at church and, like any of us who became Christians early in life, and have lived relatively tamely, I dreaded the task.  I dreaded it because I was afraid to find that there wasn’t much of a story to tell.  I was afraid I’d be that inevitable bridesmaid at the banquet crying and boring the crowd with her interminable speech about a series of nothings.  (Better to decline the opportunity to speechify altogether, or, if you must, raise a glass and say, “You rock, Betsy Ross!” (Or whatever the bride’s name happens to be.) Then just sit back down.  The crowd will thank you.

That approach wasn’t going to cut it for my testimony, though, as much as I might like to charge a glass, point to the heavens and give Jesus a shout out.  I was supposed to be telling a story with a turning point.  Problem was, I couldn’t really think of one.   There was no stark before and after photo to say, “Look at the mess Morgan was making before Jesus showed up!   Look at how awesome she’s been since! Where does one sign up for the Lamb’s Book of Life?” 

While I made a confession of faith and prayed a prayer asking Jesus into my heart at the age of eight while perched on the edge of a hide-a-bed on a sunny summer morning; I have no recollection of a time in my life when I did not have an awareness of God.  I knew who Jesus was, that he was born in Bethlehem to Mary and Joseph; that a host of angels rejoiced while shepherds and kings worshipped.  I knew He died on a cross to pay for all the sins of the world and rose from the dead on the third day.  I feel like I’ve always known this.  I have always had an awareness of His omnipresence and that the Bible is how people would know Right from Wrong.  I knew this like I knew my grandparents and that I lived in Calgary.

I come from a family of smart people and I was a “good kid”.  I heard that cigarettes were bad for you and so I never had any desire to smoke.  If someone, be it at school or church or my parents explained that something was bad for me or wrong, I appreciated the tip.  Why fall into mistakes that could be avoided? 

“Just say no?” 

You got it.

For instance, lacking desire and the prerequisite ethnicity, I never joined one of Calgary’s Asian gangs. I never experimented with drugs. I never had a teen pregnancy (or, let’s be honest, was ever in danger of having a teen pregnancy).  I was a good girl.  I was smart. But when faced with a testimonial task, I worried that because I had avoided some major catastrophes, I was boring.  I had not teetered on the brink of destruction and been pulled back from the abyss; ergo, my testimony was a dull litany of doing the right thing one monotonous time after another.   In fact, a number of years back, I even had the following exchange with a rather blunt, but well-meaning, immigrant lady.

Her: (disgust barely disguised by a thick accent) “You only go to church.”

Me: (startled) “I...I go other places…”  Granted, we were at church at the time.

Her: (incredulous and dismissive.  Both at the same time.) “Really... Really?  You only go to church.  You need to go to a sports club.”

I think she was actually commenting on my opportunities to socialize with the opposite sex rather than my physical fitness levels. (But to be perfectly honest, that interpretation held some water, too.) But it doesn’t exactly feel amazing when the septuagenarians think you might be kind of lame. 

So what do the rest of us say?  Those of us who only go to church? Those of us without the definitive before and after lifestyle changes that make for gripping testimonials of what Jesus has done.  Where is the big moment that will explain our life choices; demonstrating why we’ve chosen to throw our meagre selves on the transcendent God of the Universe?  What is the difference that He has made?

I realized a couple of weeks back when hyping my workout regime to a friend that I was probably more evangelistic about that program than I am about Jesus Christ.  … This struck me as a bad thing, like I probably have some screwed up priorities.  But the unfortunate truth is, I have way more conversations about the Tracy Anderson Method and the difference it has made to my body and my fitness level than I do about the ongoing process of spiritual transformation that Jesus is working out in my life.  It isn’t that it isn’t happening.  It’s just that I don’t talk about it much because no one really asks.  Maybe they’re afraid that I would think them impertinent; but I sort of doubt that is the reason.  I think it is because they can’t see it.  

This realization has been chaffing my thoughts ever since but I think I’ve begun to put my finger on the problem: the ever important before and after photos are missing.  For those of us who never really went sideways--at least not in obvious ways--the spiritual before photo looks a lot like the after photo, only younger.  Whereas in the realm of physical fitness, all people have to do is see my ass kickin’ ass (Just kidding. … not really...) to know that something is different. Something is working.  

And, the thought that something would actually work?  That prompts questions, despite the fact that most people have just as much psychological baggage associated with food and fitness as they do about God related stuff.  But the acute crises of self-image that arise in those moments in the change room are harder to dull than a pervasive sense of being alone and aimless in a potentially meaningless universe.  Ever heard a woman having a meltdown in one of the adjacent change rooms at Swimco? You’d have to have a heart of stone not to weep with her a little bit, wishing you could encourage her that she doesn’t have to be this way.  She doesn’t have to feel this.  There are solutions that actually deliver.  The problem is that offering the solution sounds like judgement; as though I am agreeing to the assessment that her thighs are indeed thunderous even though I am only in the other change room listening to her hopeless disappointment, never seeing.

But I don’t see people when they find themselves lying awake at night or crying in their car for reasons that are unclear even to them.  And, even if I did, I’d be all hung up on my fear issues about whether people would think I have some bizarre agenda in wanting them to convert to Christianity.  The problem with the term Christianity is that it has come to mean a religion (which is just a prescribed way of going about your business) instead of being changed because you’ve met someone awesome and fallen in love with Him and you don’t want to behave in a way that is an affront to His character because you’d rather be more like Him, than less.

The truth is, for most of my life I couldn’t have explained that to anyone.  I was like a toddler who could speak the words but had no real comprehension of what they actually meant. I once told my mom that I didn’t have to make a mistake firsthand in order to learn.  I could learn by watching someone else.  That statement made such an impression that I began fashioning an identity for myself that was predicated on being wise.   And I wanted to do the right thing--because God was watching and while He talked a good grace game with Jesus, He seemed to have some smiting moments, too. So, I thought the best thing possible was to be right.  It was the ultimate cheat sheet for life, not to mention a hidden opportunity to develop into an excellent modern day Pharisee.

And as a result--though certainly, no one ever taught me this (and I would have disagreed with it if someone had stated it)--I somehow developed this subconscious belief that if I were ‘good’ enough I could sidestep pain.  Emotional, psychological, spiritual--whatever--I didn’t want any.  And sin led to pain, ergo, sin was a dumb idea.   So, obeying God would, ipso facto, mean He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me because I tried so hard to be right.  And, for a while, my experience confirmed this totally faulty notion. The truth was, it just hadn’t been tested yet.   (I’ve pretty much come to terms with the fact that I am a quintessential late bloomer. The last rose of the summer, that’s me.  Right before the frost.)

This wild rose is too eager to represent me.

What I have learned in the mean time from the various storms of life that have come and gone is that God is a whole lot bigger and cooler than whatever weirdo assumptions I had about Him being up in heaven biting his fingernails about whether or not I was going to take up smoking.  While it seems silly to me now, I remember the huge swell of relief I felt when I realized that God wasn’t going to be disappointed in me if I didn’t want to be a missionary.  Somewhere along the line I developed this notion that if something was good--but I wasn’t at all interested in it--God must want me to do it and just turn my frown upside down.  Clearly, it was His desire for the people He loves to be putting their shoulder to the wheel on tasks that they hate.

Thankfully, mercifully, God got that idea out of my system.  He would have been perfectly justified in being totally offended in that misunderstanding of His character.  But really what He was revealing was that I didn’t know Him very well.  I knew some stuff about Him.  I knew what was on the list of right and wrong.  The things I feared about Him were unjustified and the things I thought I understood about what He does often were as well.  I knew a lot with my intellect but it was sort of like the difference between knowing that Robert Downey Jr. is a funny guy in the movies, versus knowing Robert Downey Jr. well enough not to have to say his three names together.  

Being smart and knowing a lot of stuff about someone is great (or stalkerish--don’t be creepy), but it isn’t enough.  Someone might hear any number of details about me, but that doesn’t mean they know me.  It doesn’t follow that they would have a sense of my character and my emotional engagement.  They wouldn’t know why I make the decisions that I make or what is important to me.  They would have to actually spend time with me and listen to me; they would need to watch what I do and when they didn’t understand, they would have to ask me why I made the decisions that I made in order to begin to understand me as a human being, let alone the One who calls forth each of the billions of stars by name.   Spending time with God is about as ephemeral a concept as anything because it often felt like generating something out of nothing.  But sometimes when I stopped focusing on myself, or the problem for a moment or two, there would be glimpses of something real.  Something transcendent.  Someone.  There would be flashes of realization that I wasn’t just leaving God a voicemail and maybe He might get back to me with a present or something--if I had managed to tread that fine line of acceptability.  

As a result, I realize that my testimony is mostly a story about how God has systematically been shooting down all the false impressions I have had about Him.  I used to read the Bible so that I knew what to do; so that I wouldn’t make any mistakes.  It wasn’t getting to know God’s character.  Prayer was more like a wish list for Santa, but instead of asking for that doll with the dress that changed colour, it was stuff like, “Help this person get better, help that person to stop being such a tool…”.  (Inspirational stuff.  I wonder if God was as bored listening to me, as I was praying it.)   Gradually, the truth has dawned and dazzled me, that the more time I spend with God, the more I trust Him and the less frightening and random the world seems; the less I am concerned with being right.  Suddenly, it is just about being comfortable in His presence and agreeing with Him about what He says about things.  

Maybe humans are just natural pessimists, but we focus on the bad stuff and wonder how a good God can even exist if planes are shot out of the sky and infectious diseases rage and children are violated and murdered.  We don’t see our lives as full of joy and beauty and opportunities to be heroic.  We don’t even stop to wonder at why we even believe those things are inherently wrong.  We don’t even question our conviction that we should experience good things.  Instead, like Stalin, we shake our fist at heaven and declare that nothing good can come from these bad things.  And certainly, from my human point of view, that does appear to be the case.  But God has a different view; a wider lens with which to view the whole panorama of life.  And, if coming Himself to die for our sins doesn’t demonstrate His desire rescue us and heal our hurts--then, really, it’s just another misconception about who He is.

Scary Big

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver.  Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good.  He’s the King.” --C.S Lewis, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”

Sometimes, in order to understand something, you need to be looking at it from the inside out.  Faith is like that.  I can talk to you about Jesus and how I know Him, but unless you know Him, too--it won’t really mean that much to you.  You’ll probably assume I mean that I know of Him in an intellectual kind of way.  Sort of like me telling you that I know Abraham Lincoln because I studied the American Civil War and read a biography or two.  That’s nice.  He seems like he was a good guy.  Or, like when someone says that they love a celebrity.  They might love the idea of him, but they don’t love him--because they don’t know him.  They’ve just created an image in their mind to admire and attributed worth to it.  To know someone, to truly understand them, is to know them from the inside out.  Unfortunately--due to a lack of omnipotence--we can never fully know another human being.  We might get close to them but we can only know them to the extent that they are open to being known.  We can only know things about them.  We can only know what they show.  I think this is why we love books because we get the chance to glimpse inside someone else’s mind and feel what they feel; even if they are only fictional.  

But, mystery of mysteries, there is the opportunity of being fully known ourselves.  Even parents scratch their heads and wonder what is going on inside that kid of theirs.  That child who came from their own bodies, who was raised in their home, whose experience has largely been shared--is still enigmatic.  So, in order to be truly known, there is only one choice.  There is only One other who shares all your experience and who knows the thoughts and emotions that duke it out for dominance in your mind.  There is only One who looks at everything and sees you from the inside out.  

He’s scary, though, if you really think about it; scary like a tornado is scary.  Dangerous.  Big.  Too powerful for comfort.  Out of our control and fully capable of ending everything.  In the face of a tornado, all we can do is crawl into a hole in the ground and hope it doesn’t pass too close by.  In the face of God? There is no hole deep enough.

If you attempt to grasp the size of the known universe and your mind blows a circuit because it can’t comprehend something that big and then you read that the universe is only a handbreadth to God; well, effectively, your opinion means bo diddly compared to what the Big Guy says.  You may not like the fact that a tornado can uproot your house and obliterate it from existence, but your feelings on the matter have no effect upon the reality of the weather situation.  If a tornado can make you feel small and powerless, imagine--if you can bear to--the power of the One who’s name is I AM.  He doesn’t need another name.  He just is.  He speaks and things burst into being.  He is light.  He is both wave and particle. He is truth because what He says is.  He is emotion and intelligence.  Math and physics.  Art and beauty.  Joy and anger.  He is.  And we were made in His image.  But we don’t last like He lasts.  We exist for a page of history--if we manage to make a real big splash--but most of us only make it in as a footnote.

We want so desperately to matter, though.  I know I do.  I want my life to have the permanence of purpose; of a mission accomplished.  I want to matter to the One who outlasts everyone.  And, the mind-blowing thing is, I do.   He invites each one of us to be on His side.  He invites us to meet Him and never be the same again.  And, when we meet Him, we realize that we are fully known.  That we always have been.   Paul, (before he was renamed Paul, but while he was still the Church persecuting Saul) met Jesus while he was traveling to Damascus and was asked why he insisted on going against the grain.  Why was he fighting God?  “It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” (Acts 26:14).

Why are you fighting my intended purpose for you? 

Have you ever tried to use the wrong tool to accomplish a job? Used a butter knife instead of a screw driver? Tried to haul something big with a sedan instead of truck?  Something is going to get damaged in the process.  It is hard for you.  I think Jesus was speaking with compassion even though His first question to Saul was, “Why are you persecuting me?”

Saul believed he was doing the right thing, but in actuality he had set himself up against the One who spoke the Universe into being.  It isn’t hard to imagine that battle being exhausting to the point of painful.  It isn’t hard to imagine because I’ve done it myself--not hunting down Christians and throwing them in prison exactly--but I’ve certainly made a lot of mistakes and injured people all the while thinking I was doing the right thing.  We just wear ourselves out on the wrong purposes; fighting the wrong battles.   We use machetes to spread butter and wind up with cut hands, destroyed bread and wasted butter.  We waste our purpose because we think we know better than God even though we barely know who we are.

But Jesus knew Paul all along.  He knew him while he was still the flinty Pharisee named Saul who had made it his life’s mission to squash out the followers of Jesus.   He knew the what and the why.  He knew Saul as he was but then He spoke a new identity over him; a new purpose. A mission to be accomplished. When Saul beheld Jesus he was never the same. He knew who he was in relation to God and that changed everything about him from the inside out.  He was fully known and he was fully transformed.  God is the measuring line.  God is the permanent standard by which we--the impermanent image bearers--circle around like electrons and gain purpose and definition.  We are who He says we are; even before we know it ourselves.