Through the Fog

[Note: Names have been changed]

When I was in seventh grade, every now and then my P. E. teacher, Mrs. Mitchell would make us run the mile which was several laps around the field out behind the school.  There was no track, just a field, bordered on one side by the school and the river on the other side.  On some mornings, it would be so cold that a fog would roll in off the river so thick that you couldn’t see anything as you ran.  You’d lose sight of the school, of the river and if you were running an eleven and a half minute mile like I was, you’d soon lose sight of the rest of the class.

It was an eerie if not scary place to be.  You had no idea if you were going to run into the river or run smack into Mrs. Mitchell, running into Mrs. Mitchell being the worse of the two.  Every now and then, in this perfect hushed silence, someone would dart past you and you would know, right before they disappeared in the fog again that you weren’t out there by yourself.

At some point in your life, perhaps at many points in your life, you will feel like you are running in a fog.  You won’t know where you’re running to.  You won’t remember what you were running from.  You’ll think you’re alone and at that point panic will set in.

But what you need to know is that you are never alone.  You need to know that even during the most frightening times in your life when you feel discouraged, when you feel blind, God is with you.

In the movie version of The Diary of Anne Frank, the two families, the Van Daans and the Franks along with Mr. Dussel are celebrating Hanukah in their Secret Annex, the hidden attic in Anne’s father’s factory, where they’ve been hiding from the Nazis.  There is joy.  There are presents.  There is singing and then a thief breaks in.

Everyone goes silent.  The lights are extinguished.  Everyone waits, holding their breath, trying not to make a sound to alert this mysterious thief to their presence, but a noise startles the thief and he runs, fleeing into the street, leaving the door to the factory open.

Mr. Frank decides to investigate, to leave their secret hiding place behind the bookcase at the top of the stairs and make sure the thief is gone and the factory secure.  He descends the stairs, followed a few seconds later by Peter and Anne.

But just as Mr. Frank reaches the outer door to the street, an old man, walking late at night, notices the open door.  Mr. Frank ducks behind the door just in time, holding a hammer, his only weapon, tightly to his chest.  The old man approaches the doorway.  He is seconds from seeing Anne standing at the top of the stairs.

Anne faints and Peter pulls her into another room just as the old man turns away to call out to two soldiers and tell them about the open door.

In that time, Mr. Frank and Peter, carrying Anne, make their way back to the secret annex.

And everyone waits, once again, fearful, terrified, as the Nazi soldiers make their way up the stairs searching for a thief, for hiding Jews, for anything suspicious.

Earlier, with her husband and daughter having both left their hiding place, Mrs. Frank prays.

Her words are from psalm 121:  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth … the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.”

The Lord is the shade at your right hand.

God is always with us.

What you need to start doing today if you haven’t already is begin examining your life.  You need to start finding those moments in your life when God made his presence known.  Perhaps you dismissed these times as luck or coincidence, but now that you finally take a hard look at them, see that God was there.  This is so important to be able to see that God has worked in your life sometimes in great, big life altering ways and sometimes in seemingly small ways.

When I was in third grade, my mother’s cousin gave me my very first bow and arrow.  This wasn’t some cheap, tacky, plastic toy.  This was a real bow and arrow, the type that you never, ever give to an eight-year-old because they will no doubt shoot themselves in the foot or put someone’s eye out.

And yet my parents were okay with this, so I took my best friend Mike and my new bow and arrow out to the field behind the elementary school to shoot at some trees.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t get one shot off before Phil Dumphree dropped out of one of the trees that he had been climbing.  Phil was in the same grade, but was … scary.  As soon as he saw the bow and arrow, his eyes got real big and he immediately held out his hand and said, “Let me try.”

Now, I was a pretty quick kid and I knew that if I gave Phil the bow, that he would either shoot me or Mike.  I had about a 50-50 chance there.  I also knew that Mike and I could just try and make a run for it, but that Phil would probably catch us, pound us and then still have the bow—so I went with the odds.  I gave him the bow.

Fortunately for Mike and me, Phil decided to practice first with a nearby tree and because he was Phil and had something to prove, he drew that bowstring back so far, his hand was shaking.  And because he had to prove how strong he was, a miracle happened.

SNAP!

The bow cracked right in half, split right down the middle.

I had never been so happy to have something of mine break in all my life.

Now was that luck?

Or did God have a hand in that?

In sixth grade, toward the end of the school year, I became very sick.  I had a fever, a horrible sore throat and was so weak I could barely walk two steps without losing my breath.  Antibiotics didn’t help and I would wind up missing the last two weeks of school.

But I wasn’t going to miss my sixth grade graduation.

I grew up in Upstate New York.  It never gets very hot there, but the day of our graduation, sometime in late June, it was warm and the auditorium, without air conditioning was even warmer.  I think they actually measured the temperature on stage where all the sixth graders were sitting at over a hundred degrees and there I sat, still sick and having a hard time just sitting up.

Sitting next to me was John Mason.  Now I had switched schools at the beginning of sixth grade so you can call John Mason this school’s version of Phil Dumphree.  John had been in elementary school long enough to have grown a mustache and by seventh grade the rumor was he was driving a motorcycle to school.  I had once watched John, when the teacher stepped out of the room, put another boy in a headlock so tight the boy’s face had turned red and then purple before I ran out and grabbed the teacher across the hall.

John was scary … and sitting next to me.

I was ready to pass out, but then I felt this breeze on my face, this blessed breeze.

John Mason, for whatever reason, had lifted his program, the one we all had with our names and the order of the ceremony and was fanning me.  He didn’t look at me.  He didn’t smile.  He just sat there and fanned me for the entire ceremony.

That’s another awesome thing about God.  He can put cracks in even the hardest of hearts and let kindness seep through.

God is everywhere and not just in times when you are suffering, but in times of awe-inspiring wonder.

We went on a field trip in eighth grade to Quebec, up in Canada and we visited a large church there called Saint Anne de Baupre.  St. Anne’s is a beautiful church, also known as a basilica.  But it is not its beauty that it is known for.  Over the years, millions of people have visited St. Anne’s and of those millions many have come unable to walk, bound to wheelchairs and canes.  They’ve come to St. Anne’s and been healed.

And because seeing is sometimes believing, when you walk into St. Anne’s, the first thing you see are two giant, massive columns reaching from floor to ceiling and covered, every square inch covered, in walkers and canes and wheelchairs of the people who have entered the church unable to walk and left the church unaided on their own two feet.

I don’t think at thirteen, I walked into St. Anne’s believing in miracles.  The TV was full of preachers who could lay hands on someone and supposedly heal them.  It all seemed fake to me, but at St. Anne’s there is no one to lay hands on you.  There are no preachers with TV cameras.  There was only—there still is only—God.

And realizing that at thirteen cracked open my own hardening heart.

Here is the beauty of starting this journey.  Here is what will happen to you if you begin to search out those God moments in your life.  The more places you find God, the more you realize the part he has played in your life, the more real he will become.

He will cease to be some invisible guy that you have to sit and listen about for an hour every Sunday and he will begin to become a very real presence in your life, a physical presence that you cannot ignore.

I was in second grade when I received communion for the first time.  That’s how it works in the Catholic Church.  All that year, Sister Julie prepared me and the rest of my class for what communion meant and how we were to take the wafer and while I knew it was all very important, it didn’t really sink in.  I was seven.  I practiced giving communion to imaginary parishioners at home with potato chips.

But Sister Julie was special.  She was the nun I wished would adopt me and take me home.  When she gave me communion on Sunday mornings, it felt different. 

Years later, my parents would divorce and I would spend the weekends with my mom who lived an hour away.  Sometimes though, on a rare Sunday, I would find myself back at St. Bart’s and Sister Julie would be there giving communion.

And whenever she gave me communion, she always began the same way—with my name.

“Kendra, the Body of Christ.”

And when she said that, when she said my name, it wasn’t Sister Julie speaking, it was God, through her.  She had this connection to God that I envied and that was probably the first time I knew that I wanted what she had.  Girls couldn’t become priests in the Catholic Church, but I dreamed of it anyway.  I wanted what priests and nuns had.  I wanted to serve God.

But much like the Israelites who wandered the desert for forty years following their escape from Egypt, I wandered my own spiritual desert for many years.  From the time I was sixteen, until just a few years ago, I searched for the right church, for the one that would let me have that connection to God that I longed for and for many of those years, I didn’t attend church at all.

But then I found Hope, here.

And before I was even confirmed here, I was taking the first steps in becoming a priest, a process that I am still undertaking.

Fogs, deserts—there will be many times in your life that you will feel lost and afraid, but you must remember that God is with you always.  He never leaves.  He never has business elsewhere.  You are his concern.

Find those God moments.  Search for them and hold onto them when you find them.  They will sustain you.

Life of Pi

A day after reading Life of Pi and I’m still trying to wrap my head around all its themes.

It was a book I almost gave up on, that for the first one hundred pages or so reminded me of A Passage to India in the sense that it seemed like one of those books forced upon unsuspecting children for summer reading in preparation for an AP class in the fall.  It seemed that for a book that was supposed to be about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger, it was taking a horribly long time to actually get him out to sea.

The first part of the book, though, is important in establishing Pi’s faith which ranges from Christianity to Islam and all religions he can find and explore.  He is devout in his belief in God.   There is an innocence to his belief.  He doesn’t understand why he can’t believe in all religions.  It will be his innocence which makes the end of the book so devastating and it is faith, ultimately, that will make him a survivor.

After the ship he is on sinks, Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with an orangutan, zebra and hyena.  The hyena eventually makes short work of the already wounded zebra and the aggressive, but smaller orangutan.  For all this time, Pi thinks that his greatest worry is the hyena, and then he discovers that sleeping below him in the lifeboat is a 450 pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Richard Parker dispatches the hyena and Pi is left alone on the boat with a ferocious killer.

Quickly Pi makes an important decision.  He cannot stay on the boat with Richard Parker, so, while the animal recovers from seasickness, Pi devises a makeshift raft from oars and lifejackets, ties it to the lifeboat with a forty foot length of rope and hops on board, giving himself distance from the deadly tiger.

But Pi finds life on the raft unacceptable.  He is constantly wet for starters and no matter how hard he tries to make the raft a home, he realizes that in order to survive he must go back to the lifeboat and find a way to deal with Richard Parker. 

He identifies several scenarios which would result in the tiger’s death, the easiest being to let the animal starve to death or die from dehydration, but eventually Pi comes to the conclusion that he cannot do any of these things, that the only way he will survive is on the lifeboat and the only way he will survive Richard Parker is by taming him.

Raft or boat?

Miserable and safe vs. less miserable but with the risk of being eaten while you sleep.

If Pi stays on the raft, he won’t be eaten, but he most certainly won’t survive.

Going to the lifeboat gives him a better chance of survival if he can avoid being eaten.

It seems like an easy decision until you’re staring at a 450 pound tiger.

Which would you choose?

I would argue that too often we choose the raft, that too often we are paralyzed with fear and we convince ourselves that if we stay on the raft just a little longer, something will change.  A ship will find us.  Richard Parker will die.

Staying on the raft is a passive response that hands your fate over to chance.

Moving to the lifeboat, on the other hand, is a risk, but it puts your fate in your own hands.  Tame the tiger and live.

We know this, I think.  We always know this deep inside that the riskier move can provide the most reward.

And still we sit on the raft and wait.

Every year when I was teaching, I worked on getting my students to take risks in their writing, knowing that when it came time for them to take the FCAT Writes, that a riskier essay, one that was creative and took chances had the best opportunity for scoring higher.

And every year, I would seemingly have at least half of my students ready and willing to take this risk.

And every year, most of them would take the easy way out, write the same old boring essays and take their passing 4’s when if they had just taken a risk, they might have scored the perfect 6. 

I write this, of course, realizing that I’m sitting on my own raft right now, hoping passively that the circumstances of my life will change, that my health will magically get better, that my books will become overnight bestsellers, that money will appear under my pillow each night and I will be able to afford seminary and other things like food and books (the two staples of life).

And I know too, that to move forward, I will have to leave the raft.  I will need to take risks that I’m always encouraging others to take, that when we look at the greatest inventors and leaders in history, the ones that changed the world were the ones who were single-minded and dogged in their approach, the ones that sometimes fell to rock bottom and yet still wouldn’t stop.

What reading Life of Pi has taught me is that even though we may not be stranded literally in the middle of the ocean, that our lives, the stories of our lives, the “Life of Kendra,” the life of Beth and Rebecca and Nancy and Danny and everyone is a story of survival, of how we move forward.

Life is about moving forward always.

Life is about assertiveness and not passivity. 

It is about risks and knowing, always knowing, as Quaker Thomas Kelly wrote that “Over the margins of our life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living which we know we are passing by … that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power.”

May you hear that whisper in 2013 and let nothing pass you by.

Building Rock Walls with Linus

Christmas is over.

All the necessary boxes have been checked: opening presents, check; lunch or dinner with family, check; Doctor Who Christmas special, check.

And now it is the day after.

In less than a week, a new year will begin.

So now what?

As stressful as the holidays can sometimes seem, they at least give us a goal.  They give us something to do, whether it be shopping or cooking or otherwise preparing for the day.  In the months leading up to Christmas there is always something to do.  Watch long marathons of Christmas movies on Lifetime or Hallmark.  Make Christmas cookies, decorate the tree, entertain the children with that creepy little Elf on a Shelf doll.

But after Christmas?  It’s time to reboot.  It’s time to reset and focus on something else.

Yesterday, one of my presents (as per a tradition my dad and I have), was the latest in the Fantagraphics line of Peanuts books.  Twice a year, Fantagraphics publishes two Peanuts books, each with two years of comic strips.  We’re up to 1985 and 1986 most currently.  The publisher’s goal is to print every Peanuts comic strip ever produced.

So yesterday morning, I took some time to read through the latest book.  In a continuing storyline, Linus begins building a rock wall.  Why?  My guess is he grew up in the same small town I did where once in third grade, my best friend and I spent an afternoon smoothing out and polishing rocks we found in the playground on a larger rock in the playground, all because we had learned about erosion that week in school.

But as Linus continues to work on his rock wall, he discovers that it’s providing him therapy, so much so that he comments he might not even need his security blanket anymore.  His sister, Lucy, says that’s a good thing, because she has cemented his blanket in the wall.

Linus freaks out.  Charlie Brown tries to offer comfort, by explaining what Linus, himself, already knows that building the wall is all the therapy he needs, that if he just adds a rock to the wall every time he feels stressed, he’ll ultimately feel much better.

Linus’s response? “There aren’t that many rocks in the world!”

I marked the page.  How often do we feel like Linus?  How many times do we feel (in a completely non-paranoid way) that the world is conspiring against us?  That even when we find something worthwhile to do, it will never be enough to ease the stress and sadness and worry in our lives.

As I was driving home from my grandmother’s yesterday afternoon, I saw a cop car up ahead on a side street with his lights flashing.  The car in front of me and I slowed to a stop to let him pull out, but he didn’t move, so we wound up driving on through.  But when I looked in my rearview mirror a moment later, I saw that the deputy had pulled out and was now behind me, at a distance, but closing fast with his lights still flashing.

So I eased the car onto the shoulder and waited for him to pass me.

Much to my shock, he pulled in right behind me.  I quickly put my own car into park.  Normally, my heart would stop at seemingly being pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy, but I was so confused, all I could do was watch in my mirror and wait.  I hadn’t been speeding.  I hadn’t run a stoplight or stop sign.

It was only seconds, but it felt like an eternity.  I watched as the deputy turned off his lights and a second later drove away.

I spent the rest of the day (and obviously this morning) trying to figure it out.  Was it some sort of Christmas prank?  My mom said he was probably running my plate.  But he wasn’t behind me long enough to do that.

It was crazy.

If I were Linus, I’d add another rock to the wall and another for the disability company that still hasn’t paid me and another for the ennui that follows Christmas and another for the cloudy skies and too much wind.

And if I kept doing this, I’d probably find, like Linus, that there aren’t enough rocks in the world.

So instead, I need to take the Peppermint Patty approach.

Perpetual D- student Peppermint Patty writes this for her homework:  “What I did on my Christmas Vacation.  I went outside and looked at the clouds.  They formed beautiful patterns and beautiful colors.  I looked at them every morning and every evening.  Which is all I did on my Christmas Vacation.  And what’s wrong with that?”

Patton Oswalt, in his introduction to this latest Peanuts book, writes, “Charles Schulz wrote a fifty year-long psychological autobiography starring a bald kid and a sentient dog.”

If we look at all the Peanuts characters, we can find aspects of Schulz’s personality, but also all aspects of our own.  There’s Lucy, the crab, Linus, the philosopher, Peppermint Patty, the optimist, Charlie Brown, the worrier and Snoopy, the dreamer.

As I look to my own future, I must recognize these traits in myself and use them in the best possible ways.  There are times for worrying and building rock walls and there are times for dreaming and staring at the clouds.

There is a season for each.

Christmas Day is over, but the season is not.  Now is not the time to add rocks to our wall.  Now is the time to remember that this is a season of hope (and I’m reminded in Pastor Debbie’s Christmas Eve sermon) and also faith and love.

So maybe I’ll take a minute to stare at the clouds today and remember that in a world where there will never be enough rocks, there is a God who loves us.

Why am I keeping a sock?

There is an episode of Friends where Chandler, after marrying Monica and moving in with her, discovers a secret locked closet in her apartment.  He and Joey speculate what she might be hiding.  Joey suggests her old boyfriend, Richard.  But when Chandler finally opens the closet, he is shocked at what he finds.

His wife, the clean freak, has a closet stuffed from floor to ceiling with junk.  She is a closet hoarder in the literal sense.

I completely relate to this, not so much in being a clean freak, but in despising clutter.  Clutter makes me anxious.  I hate things lying around, but, like Monica, I also have the hoarder gene and so while you may walk into my condo and think how everything is so neat and tidy, you wouldn’t want to start opening closet doors or old trunks or hope chests or anything with a drawer.

Saturday, I dove into an old trunk looking for the Miami sweatshirt I had worn in college.  It’s a trunk where I keep things that matter to me, but when I got it open, I found more trash than treasure.  There was a pair of faded jeans with a label that said “junior.”  That went in the trash.  There was my old jacket from college.  I checked the pockets first and found about fifty cents.  There was a vest that no one has dared to wear since 1992 and a sweater, stretched out and well worn.

Trash, trash, trash.

And there was a sock.

A random, half of a pair, white sock.

All of this in a trunk where I was keeping things like my old baby blanket and the stuffed elephant I sewed in Home Economics in seventh grade—you know, things that had sentimental value.

All of that … and a sock.

Trash.

Pastor Debbie and I were talking yesterday morning about how Lent and Advent are times of the year when it’s good to clean house in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways.  Advent especially is a time to spend preparing for the coming birth of Jesus.  And as we would for any guest, it’s a time to straighten up, to clean up, to throw away any trash we’ve been hoarding over the past year.

It’s a time to ask ourselves why we hold onto things.  What are the things that really matter in our lives and what things do we need to let go of?  What things do we need to give away?  What things need to go straight to God?

What burdens are we carrying that begin in our heart, but weigh at us physically too, stooping us over, rounding out our shoulders so that we appear so much older than we are?

Christmas is, sometimes inexplicably, the most stressful time of year.  It’s not just the preparations, the gift-finding, the decorating, the ever increasing need for a day off, it’s that all these things weaken us just enough that suddenly we can be bombarded by memories of old, things we’ve locked away in the trunks of our mind, both good and bad.  We become Scrooge, biting the heads off of overworked store clerks, and wrapping presents with bitterness instead of kindness.  We become haunted by our ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.

Think of Scrooge’s house for moment, the cold, the damp darkness, a bed walled off by curtains most likely filled with a lifetime of dust.  Think of his old partner, Marley, weighed down by the chains of his own past.

Christmas is a time to clean house, to open the windows and let the sunlight in, to throw away the clutter and the trash.  In a time in which we celebrate a birth, this should be the time of rebirth for us.  We make New Year’s resolutions, but really we should be making them sooner, in Advent, so that everything is ready and we are able to stand with arms open to welcome the Son of God.

Despite the stress, Christmas is still my most favorite time of the year.  I love my peppermint bark chocolate and Christmas carols.  I love the majesty and tenderness of the Christmas Eve service.  I get teary-eyed just writing about these things, because this is the time for miracles.  Right now—if we’re willing.

This is the time to rejoice.

This is the time to throw open the shutters and announce to the world how blessed we are.

This is the time to let go of the burdens we carry, to unlock the chains of our past and let them fall away.

This is the time—right now—to start anew. 

Watch out for that ... ouch

If you wear glasses or have ever worn glasses then you know what I am about to tell you is the absolute truth.

Flying objects, defying all laws of physics, are somehow mystically and magically attracted to your face.

When I was a kid that meant basketballs, kick balls, dodge balls, softballs, errant hands waving about, just about anything and everything seemed to be heading one direction and then take this crazy curve and crash into my face.

When I was sixteen and on a class field trip to Quebec, a Nerf softball (yes, I said Nerf) hit me in the face, knocking my glasses off and bending them at a horrible angle.  Our tour guide wound up taking me to the local mall to get them fixed all the while explaining my predicament in French, French that I’m sure included the words, “Elle est stupide.”

Even as an adult, I am a magnet.  A few years ago I was babysitting the kids of a friend of mine when out of nowhere a ball slammed into the side of my glasses, knocking them off into my hands.

A few years before that, I was trying to blow out a candle and not having much luck (does it surprise you that a girl with glasses as thick as mine would be too wimpy to blow out a candle) so I took one last deep breath and blew as hard as I could … sending wax that had pooled around the wick flying up into my face.  The only reason I’m not blind is because of my glasses.  Try removing dried candle wax from your glasses someday when you’re bored and have an afternoon to kill.

And then yesterday, I was trying a craft project where I use binder clips to hang a picture on the wall and the next thing I knew, the binder clip popped off, shot across my right shoulder and landed ten feet behind me, stopped only by the laundry room door.

And I laughed.

My friend Jennifer and I laugh all the time about our horrible eyesight giving us zero depth perception, but fortunately for me, I’ve played a lot of video games in my life and I have excellent reflexes, either that or a very patient guardian angel.

Whether you wear glasses or not, though, I’m sure you can appreciate feeling at times like the world is taking shots at you, that everywhere you turn, something horrible is flying in your direction and you’re spending every minute of every day trying to dodge family squabbles, or trouble at work, or sickness, or your own interior Incredible Hulk that seems to pop out every time you get stuck in traffic.

The holidays are a time ripe for this type of thing.

I practically had a coronary (does anyone say coronary anymore) the other night trying to figure out my Christmas list, who I always bought for and how I was going manage giving gifts when, for the first time in my adult life, I have no source of income at Christmas.

It’s been frustrating, but it’s also allowed me to be more creative and thoughtful in my gift giving this year.  In a few days I will begin sending my mom’s Christmas gift to her.  For years, she has given me an Advent calendar.  But this year it’s my turn.  She’s been begging me for pictures that I’ve taken of flowers and wildlife and I found about 24 of them that I had printed on postcards and shoved in a drawer years ago.  So she will be getting one picture a day and on the back will be a verse from the Christmas story.

Other gifts, I won’t spoil here, but the plan is, after two Decembers in a row of dealing with one fever after the next, to spend this December relaxed and comfortably busy. 

There is a Capri Sun commercial that I love that has a mother watching over everything her son does day and night, answering questions for him in class, biking home with him and, during a game of dodge ball, standing in front of him, knocking the balls away.

We tend to make New Year’s pledges and Lenten sacrifices, but my Advent pledge this year is to let God do what God loves to do, which is take care of us. 

Psalm 91:5 tells us, “You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day.”

God is our protector, our redeemer and our hope—always. 

Even Angels Get the Blues

Yesterday was the type of day that when I lived up north, I would pray for snow instead.  The local weatherman had our high temperature predicted to be in the low seventies, but if it ever got out of the 50s, I would be shocked.  All day it was gray, cloudy, windy and cold and then later in the day, just as I left to drive to the church seeking a good walk in the labyrinth, it began to drizzle.

I began to feel a little like the Pink Panther, not the bumbling French policeman, but the cartoon pink panther who would sometimes walk around with a single cloud of rain right over his head, following him wherever he went.

When I pulled up to the church, Robin opened the door for me and asked if I was coming inside and despite the misty air, I said no, that I was going to walk the labyrinth and that was exactly what I did, hands shoved in my pockets, bitterness trailing after me in the rain.  Walking the labyrinth has always given me a sense of journey, a literal vision of paths we take.  But when I walked that path yesterday, my future seemed as muddled as the weather.

I headed out behind the church next, searching for the bridge, a key focal point in the new book I’m trying to write and though the path back there had been recently cleared, the bridge was now in disrepair and the angel, the one that graces the cover of my latest book, had suffered some sort of catastrophic injury and now had a jagged hole in her head.

And I thought, wow, even angels aren’t immune to crappy days.

I was ready to leave the church, disappointed that coming out there had not given me any real deep insights or at least vanquished the cloud over my head, but before I left, I headed inside, so that I could say a simple hi and goodbye to Pastor Debbie.

But in the few minutes it took to give a few pleasantries, something quite wonderful happened.  Heather showed up with her four-year-old, a little girl carrying with her a child’s Bible.  And I flashbacked to the story Bibles I had when I was little.  So while Heather talked business with Pastor Debbie, I found myself asking this little girl about her book and sharing with her the stories I remembered, while she told me what she thought the pictures were saying.

It is an interesting thing about the Bible that as I flipped through it, it was virtually impossible to find a story that wasn’t horribly frightening, especially to a girl who had just admitted that the movie “Brave” frightened her.

Oh here’s Adam and Eve, followed by the story of their sons, one of whom killed the other.  Oh and here’s God destroying the world in a flood and here’s God killing the Egyptians in the Red Sea and here’s Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers and here’s Daniel with the lions and why don’t we just skip to the New Testament?

I tried to stick to the positive.  Joseph had a beautiful coat.  Did she have a coat?  What color was it?  Purple, I think she told me, a purple raincoat that was too big for her.  And after the flood?  There was a rainbow.  That was God’s promise.  Rainbows are a way God speaks to us.  “I saw a rainbow,” she said.

Finally she pointed to the last page, to the three paragraphs given to Revelation.  “What’s this story?”

By this time, I was standing with her in the office with Heather and Pastor Debbie and both chuckled wondering how I would explain Revelation.

“Here’s where everyone goes to Heaven,” I said.  “The end.”

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of reading a chapter from my book Sunburner to a class of seventh graders.  It filled me with joy to share my book with them, to talk to them about writing after, to answer their questions, to see their curiosity, to see the budding writers, the ones who couldn’t help themselves but had to write every day. 

I mistakenly thought that my joy was just an ego trip.

But sharing the Bible with that little girl yesterday made me realize that the thing that brings me joy is simply sharing stories, in telling stories, and in teaching, that it doesn’t have to be my story.  All it has to be is a story I love, something that is already a part of me and the story that is my life.

I finished the day watching the PBS documentary on the Dust Bowl, a seemingly depressing way to end a dreary day.  I have read about the Dust Bowl before, but it was something else to hear ninety year olds speak about it like it had happened yesterday, to see them weep still for something they had lost so long ago. 

One woman spoke of their move to California.  She said their dad had rented a small house, built on stilts on the side of a hill.  She said there were towering pines all around and that when they walked to school, they frequently left without hats and coats because they wanted to feel the mist that settled on the land each morning.

The land they had left wasn’t the only thing that was parched, she said.  We were parched too.

It gave me a new respect for cold, damp days and reminded me that perspective is everything.

Lost and Found

In the opening scene of the most recent Spiderman movie, Peter Parker is playing hide and seek with his parents.  It’s nighttime.  The house seems huge and foreboding, empty and dark.  Peter enters his father’s office and finds it a wreck.  Someone has been in the house, looking for something.

When I was a kid, I remember not liking hide and seek very much.  I didn’t mind hiding.  I still remember fooling my dad by hiding in between the shower curtain and liner, so that when he pulled back the curtain, thinking I was in the tub, I was still hidden.

But I never liked the “seeking.”  It caused me a great deal of anxiety both because I was afraid that whoever was hiding would jump out at me and because I was afraid that I would overlook them even when they were hiding in the most obvious place.

I don’t play hide and seek anymore, but like most people, the older I get, the more I find myself misplacing things and turning the house upside down in order to find whatever it is I’m looking for.

Last January, I drove up to Daytona to buy a car.  I brought the title of my old car with me, sticking it in my bag.  In the end, I left Daytona in the same car I came there in, unable to make a deal.  When I got home, I put my bag on my desk chair and forgot about it until a few days later when I came down with one of my crippling fevers and wound up in the emergency room.  Before I left for the E.R., I emptied my bag, including the title for the car and stuffed the bag with things I might need for an overnight stay at the hospital.

That was the last time I saw the title.

Now I’m a bit of a hoarder when it comes to papers.  I hate clutter and I’m good with throwing away most everything else, but for some reason, every piece of paper seems important to me, so I have boxes and boxes of papers.  So when I lost the title, I knew it was some place in the house.  I knew I hadn’t thrown it away.  But I looked in all the obvious places and it had just vanished.

Until yesterday.

For whatever reason, I decided to sort through the watches I had stored in my nightstand.  I tend to kill analog watches and clocks.  Don’t ask me how; it has nothing to do with the batteries, trust me.  But if I buy an analog watch, it is almost guaranteed to die within the year.

So I sat down in front of my nightstand and started making a pile of watches that still worked (the digital ones and the self-winding ones) and a pile that needed to be trashed.  And while I sat there, I said, well since I’m here, I might as well straighten up the nook of the nightstand where I had shoved books and a few loose papers.

Wouldn’t you know it?  When I made that decision yesterday to throw things out and straighten things up, I found the title to the car, buried in the nook of my nightstand.  Never in a million years would I have thought to look for it there.  I don’t even remember the last time I looked in that nook, but if you had asked me, I would have said it’s been years.  But it hadn’t been years, because there was the title.

“Seek and ye shall find,” the Bible says.

But I had been seeking for months now and hadn’t found that dastardly elusive title.

I’ve heard people say that when you stop looking for things is usually when you find them, but I think something more was going on here.  It wasn’t that I had stopped looking, it was that yesterday I made an effort to straighten up the house, to clean up, to dust, to throw away things that no longer mattered or were of any use to me.

And it was only when I made that effort that I found what I was looking for.

Our lives are filled with clutter and not just in the literal, physical sense.  Our lives are filled with emotional clutter.  I have said before we are emotional hoarders.  We allow our lives to become so tangled and messy that even though we know that God has another path or direction for us, we can’t see it because we’re lost and tied down by other things.

This morning was a church work day and I watched Donna pulling vines off a tree and I saw other vines, dead and hanging from pines.  During previous work days, when we have pulled vines off of trees, we have revealed treasures, oaks and other trees stunted and craving the sun.

We have to make an effort in our lives to clear away the vines, to let go of things, so that we can clear the path and find what we are seeking.

It occurs to me that I’ve also lost the key to my filing cabinet.

I’m sure I’ll find it somewhere in a part of the house I’ve been neglecting.  That’s one of my goals.  Which part of the house have I been neglecting the most?  When I find that, I bet I’ll find the key.

Which part of your life have you been neglecting?  Address that and you’ll find another key, a key to open the doors you’ve been searching for.