Unpopular Opinion

During worship today I communed with God. We sang about nature and his majesty. He named the stars. My heart laughed that this immense creator lives within me! I imagined the two of us looking up at the stars. I was asking him, "What's that one's name?" He was telling me the answers. We're that close.

Then we sang: one thing I ask and I would seek to see your beauty - to find you in the place your glory dwells. I thought of this new one growing in me. This new person is being created to be the dwelling place of pure glory, majestic might, creative love, all things good. Right now as I breathe and move this little life is being formed to hold the One who forms him or her. How can the created contain the creator? This is too wonderful to comprehend - yet it is so.

I am learning more and more of how precious I am to him. He came to earth to buy me back. I gave all he could give to buy me back. He let them tear his skin and his heart. He let them ridicule and degrade him. He did this for me, for us, because we are his bride.

Back at our beginning God breathed his life into the dust and created adam - dust man. We have always been God-breathed, image bearers, friends of the almighty, children for God. God created many animals but we were not animals. We are something else altogether.

I agree with John Eldrige. He says that we aren't afraid of our darkness but rather we are afraid of our glory. We have had many charismatic speakers at our church. I wouldn't say that Ken Fong was the most charismatic of speakers but he received one of the most charismatic responses from the congregation that I have ever seen. And what was his message? We are all Rats! He said that we all try to walk around in our squirrel suits pretending to be cute and non-rodent-like when really we have all sinned and are all really rats. It's an old hook. I grew up with this particular lie and I know of it's insidiousness. What's really so sad is that in all my years of rat living my love for others never grew. I saw myself as a rat, for sure. And yes, I classified my type of ratness as better than other's nastier ratness. But the answer wasn't to see my ratness as filthy and nasty as their ratness. I did try that. It doesn't work.

I have invited Christ into my posturing and into my lack of love for others. My core problem was my own lack of self love. I didn't love myself because I didn't feel loved by God. I thought that God saw me as a huge disappointment - not too different than a rat! I came across the verse in Ephesians that talks about being rooted and established in love. I've been asking for that. God, grow my roots deep in your soil of love. Establish me strong and secure in love. This slow process has an outflowing of awareness both of his loving posture toward me and of his loving posture toward others. I really highly doubt that the Father would have sent the son to die for rats - that's preposterous! He sent his son to die for the image bearers of God. Yes, we were dead in our sins but we were never rats. The verse that Fong used referred to our righteousness being as filthy rags. Notice that the verse doesn't say we are as filthy rags - it's our righteousness that's worthless, not us. God values us greatly!

Is it easier to believe that we are all rats or that we are all full of His Glory? When we see someone degraded by drugs, sex, money or power it is awfully difficult to see their glory, to see His glory in them. But I don't have to go to the obviously degraded places see the unlovely. I can look around my church or neighborhood and have a hard time seeing lovely, loveable, valuable beings. My abililty to hate and despise floors me. But God is changing me. As I have begun to accept his love for me I have begun to see others with that same love. I used to look my church and see brokenness. Lately I've begun to see dearly loved ones. Many, many dwelling places of God.

"Who of you knows that they are a rat?" Not me Mr. Fong, not me. I occasionally exhibit ratlike behavior but my heart is good. I have been made new. I am the dwelling place of the Almighty. God doesn't dwell in rats!

compost

Spring is here. The garden is coming alive. I love to go out and see what made it through another cruel winter. I love planning on what to add this year and how to fill in the spots where plants didn't make it.
This is also the time of year that I place the empty ice cream pail on the kitchen counter and we begin to collect things for the compost pile. I love collecting compost. I love seeing the pail fill up with egg shells and tea bags, orange peels and apple cores, wilted lettuce or a remembered-too-late plum. I love thinking about all the vitamins and minerals I am adding back into my garden.
I think that all Pete thinks about is how gross it all looks and how much he dislikes the fruit flies we have to battle all summer.
I'm not actually all that good at producing really good compost. I can add all of the ingredients but I usually don't turn it and water it often enough. That's kind of a big job that's usually moldy, slimy or smelly and often involves scraped knuckles. I always laugh when I see advertisements for composters that turn out stuff that looks like actual soil - yeah right! My dream is to have one of those double barrel composters that you turn with a crank. It would be so nice to have two stages of composted material and the ease of turning the whole mess with a handle.
This summer the handle I will be turning will be attached to the end of a shovel. So why do I bother? It is so gratifying to see grass clippings, fallen leaves and kitchen scraps turn into something else. Something dark and lumpy with hunks of eggshell still clearly recognizable - but still something new and good.

Tonight

Lately I am reduced.
Tonight I found community in blog land.

Thank you God. Thank you so much.

Gotta love Henri

"We fail to see the place of suffering in the broader scheme of things. We fail to see that suffering is an inevitable dimension of life. Because we have lost perspective, we fail to see that unless one is willing to accept suffering properly, he or she is really refusing to continue in the quest for maturity. To refuse suffering is to refuse personal growth." -Henri J. M. Nouwen

to be willing to accept suffering properly... just how does one do that? What does that mean? I mean, really, what does that mean?

I'm miserable. This really sucks. I want to get up and fold laundry or vacuum or get something done. Damn, this is so hard. I know well how to suffer poorly, but I don't know what it means to suffer properly.

I feel like I'm eroding. My topsoil is washing away.

Death

We're so afraid of death. And it comes in so many shapes and sizes.

I talked with my dad today. He's dying. Three and a half years ago he was diagnosed with MSA (Multiple Systems Atrophy). It means that multiple systems in his brain are shrinking. His particular MSA looks like Parkinson's disease - he shakes and shuffles and has trouble swallowing, etc. My dad is being stripped of his dignity - he feels humiliated. He also feels ignored. That's because we've been ignoring him. I rarely call. I rarely see him. He only lives 25 minutes from my place but being with him is difficult. All the rules have changed. He usually tries to make light of all that's going on - in hopes of covering over his embarrassment. But today I called. And I asked the hard questions, like, "How are you doing emotionally?" It wasn't long before my dad was sobbing into the phone. And then I was. He talked about the embarrassment, the fatigue, the night terrors. He told me that mom is reading to him each night out of a book about the new heaven and the new earth, but we very carefully danced around the word death. I talked with him about how hard it was to be with him and how I wasn't sure how to treat him or what to say. He said, "Sometimes I just need someone to cry with."

So we cried. Together.

Everyone in the family tries so hard to avoid this pain, this death. Pretend. Cover over. We start fights with each other to distract us from this present dark place.

Lead us on, Lead us on,
Into the darkest places, lead us on.

Spirit come, Spirit come,
Into our darkest places, lead us on.

Dad said I could call him any time I want to cry. I'm hoping to do that again soon.

nausea ad nauseum

With my first two pregnancies I fought my "morning" sickness. Despair reigned. Food and sleep were my comforters. I lived somewhere out in the future.

Did you know that time does not go any faster even if you wish really hard that it would?

So with this pregnancy I really wanted to invite God to be with me. I wanted to apply new ways of "being" with myself and others to this new circumstance. To surrender. My friend Jan had mentioned something about some nuns who were letting their illnesses be practice for death. I desire that. Life in death, death in life - weird.

As I press in I hear God say, "Be present to this moment." Simple. Hard. Very, very hard. My old habits of lashing about, fighting, choosing desparation in hopes of getting out of this great discomfort die hard.

please pass the blog jam

"Would you like some toast with that?"

There is something newly present to me. It's in my face, taking up all of the available thought space. And I'm not sharing it with you. I've been wanting to keep it private - not expose my secret obsession.

But that gives me a new problem. Not sharing this large life thing has made me pull back from sharing much of anything. Sometimes I like to convince myself that I am made up of little compartments. The evidence shows that I am really much more like a body of water, a bowl of dough (hey, don't take that too far!), a human person -- something integrated, interconnected. This secret part affects my other parts - a little yeast and all.

So here it is. I'm pregnant. Surprise! (It certainly was for us!) Get ready for blog after blog of pregnancy related blather. Hopefully this will clear up this bad case of blog jam. We be jammin', we be jammin', hey hey!

Of course this makes me wonder about you. and me. in the larger community. I'm wondering about fear of exposing our secret obsessions and how that affects us, affects our willingness to "enter in". Of course we don't have to tell everyone everything but sometimes we become frightened hedgehogs, turning in upon ourselves, hiding. What are we afraid of? What has our experience of community been? My friend Jan described community as "solid". Solid?!? Wow! Her perspective gives me hope. Could a community actually be a place that could help me to stay open to God in places of pain, discomfort, uncertainty? I kept my secret not because I was afraid to share my joy but because I am afraid to share my pain. My experience is that people get weird about other's pain. So to alleviate my own community fears I want to say this: I invite you to be with me - I neither want nor need you to fix this experience for me - which is sure to be filled with both joy and pain. (I still welcome your comments!)

blog log-jam

I need to blog more often. Not because I should but because the longer I wait the more blog ideas get mixed up in tangled nests in my head. Aaaarrrgghh! Maybe I'll post twice today.

This particular blog has been stewing since Sunday. It got tangled with a Psalm yesterday - let's start there and work backwards.

Psalm 8 A David Psalm
God, brilliant Lord, yours is a household name.

Nursing infants gurgle choruses about you; toddlers shout the songs that drown out enemy talk, and silence atheist babble.

I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous, your handmade sky-jewelry, moon and stars mounted in their settings. Then I look at my micro-self and wonder, why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?

Yet we've so narrowly missed being gods, bright with Eden's dawn light. You put us in charge of your handcrafted world, repeated to us your Genesis-charge, made us lords of sheep and cattle, even animals out in the wild, birds flying and fish swimming, whales singing in the ocean deeps.

God, brilliant Lord, your name echoes around the world.

O.K. so I added the italics- but that's the question that's been resounding within since Sunday. Why do you bother with us? Why take a second look our way?
And now here is part of the text from Sunday's service:

And they sang a new song:
Worthy! Take the scroll, open its seal.
Slain! Paying in blood, you bought men and women,
Bought them back from all over the earth,
Bought them back for God.
Then you made them a Kingdom,
Priests for our God,
Priest-kings to rule over the earth.
Revelation 5: 8-10

There we were on Sunday, coming freshly out of our remembrance of his death, his suffering, his sacrifice, now celebrating his resurrection, his victory, his worthiness! And my heart broke (or did it take flight) that he did all that for US?! What does he see in us?! What unwarranted love! I've been reveling in my boughtness, caughtness, my loved-for-no-good-reason status.

The slain Lamb is worthy!
Take the power, the wealth, the wisdom, the strength!
Take the honor, the glory, the blessing!