His Pleasure

It has not been a happy two weeks.

I despise pain.

I hate being cooped up.

I used to love my couch.  Now I think it’s time we broke up.

I miss being able to walk freely.  I miss being able to amble. 

In the midst of this all, though, in the midst of a pity party free for all, I have managed to rediscover two passions that I had been long without, two passions I had ignored for so long I had forgotten that I even missed them.

For instance, I find myself staying up late to read again.  I can’t put books down even as the hours tick away.  It has been a long time since I’ve been unable to put a book down, a long time since I’ve told myself “just one more page,” and then went on reading another hour.  I did that this past week twice, with the new biography on Steve Jobs and with a young adult fantasy novel.

Reading and writing.  For most of my life, they were the only two hobbies I knew to list when someone asked what I did with my free time.  And I’ve neglected both the past year and a half, mostly because I no longer have free time.

Yesterday I wrote my first short story in years.  Inspired by the Dystopian novels I read a few weeks ago, I wrote a story about three scrappy, wounded and sometimes downright unlikeable kids fighting to stay alive in a world decimated by plague.  They were loyal to each other, to a fault and the more I wrote about them, the more I fell in love with them.

When I write a story or a novel, I always have a beginning, middle and end in mind.  I always have a framework.  And sometimes, if I’m lucky, something magical happens.  The characters flesh out and begin to dictate their own story.  Sometimes they know better than me.

All yesterday, I kept thanking God for giving me this story, for giving me these characters to love.  It had been so long since I had felt that way.  It had been so long since I had last written fiction.  And it was a beautiful, beautiful thing.

In the movie, Chariots of Fire, runner Eric Liddell says this:  “I believe God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast.  And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

That is how I feel when I write, when I write beautifully and honestly, when I tell a true story even in a fictional construction.  I feel God’s pleasure wash over me.

The past few years I have felt the joy of responding to the call of God to the priesthood, but I’ve been neglecting the first gift He ever gave me, the love of story.

And it’s taken pain and physical illness to remind me that God calls me to do two things, to be His priest and to write beautifully for His pleasure.

One day, I’m quite certain, those two calls will intersect and what a glorious day that will be.

Love's Labour's Lost

It doesn’t take much for me to get cabin fever.

It’s one thing if it’s my choice to stay inside, but too many days of rain, or too many days of a bad back keeping me couch bound, and I start to go a little stir crazy.

Thanks to my back, I’ve spent much of the last four days on the couch. I didn’t even go to church this morning which is never a good thing for my mental and spiritual health. During the past four days, I have maintained some semblance of sanity by sleeping a lot and reading a lot.

In fact I read four books over three days, four young adult books (I’ll always be a teacher in my heart—I’ll always be looking for the next great novel that will inspire my kids). The four books were Unwind by Neal Shusterman, Matched by Ally Condie, Delirium by Lauren Oliver and A Year without Autumn by Liz Kessler.

A Year without Autumn is the story of a girl who manages to travel backward and forward through time thanks a supernatural elevator. It’s a pretty typical coming of age story, how we grow apart from our friends, but it is also a story about fate. How much of our lives is predetermined? Can we change the future?

The other three novels could all be classified as dystopian novels. Dystopian novels present a view of a future that has gone awry. They can be post-apocoalyptic novels like Stephen King’s The Stand, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. They can be visions of a future where democracy has failed and various dictators or dictatorial groups rule. Think Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Dystopian novels for teenagers are all the rage right now in the same way that a few years ago, it seemed no books could be published that didn’t have a vampire or werewolf in it.

Two of the novels I just read, Matched and Delirium deal specifically with love. Matched presents a world where your every move is predicted by a computer and a computer decides who you will marry. Again, it asks the question how much control do we have over our lives.

Delirium presents a world where love is considered a disease and, upon turning eighteen, people are cured of this disease through brain surgery. Children are taught that Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale. Love can kill. Parts of the Bible are rewritten and, it seems, that any mention of Jesus—as one would expect—has been completely erased.

The plot of the novel follows a girl, weeks away from her “cure,” as she falls in love.

In this Sunday’s gospel reading Matthew 22:34-46, Jesus is once again tested by those pesky Pharisees. “Which commandment is the greatest?” they ask him. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” he tells them and then follows that with, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In her sermon today (which I had to read since I wasn’t there in person), Pastor Debbie touches upon the fact that words like “love” and “heart” are so used and overused and sometimes wrongly used that they have lost the force and the power that Jesus intended them to have when he used them with the Pharisees.

Pastor Debbie points out that Jesus doesn’t ask you to love. He demands it.

These are the two greatest commandments, beautiful in their simplicity and frightful in what they require. No matter what we do in life, if we have any questions as to whether or not we are doing the right thing, we only have to refer back to love. But at the same time, we also don’t have a choice as to when we can follow these commandments. God expects us to follow them at all times, not just when it’s convenient for us.

In that way, love becomes a powerful and dangerous thing, because doing the right thing is not always the popular thing, it’s not always the most comfortable thing. It requires us to be more than we think we can be, more than we want to be. It requires us to be action oriented. People who love do not do so passively.

It is why so many dystopian novels focus on love, focus on squashing it, or controlling it. In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a dystopian dictatorship is destroyed simply by stating the word love.

That is the love that Jesus talks about, something so powerful it can change the universe.

A Dream Deferred

This past Friday, I walked outside during one of my planning periods to get better 3G reception on my Kindle, but it was so nice out that even after I downloaded the material I wanted, instead of going back inside, I sat on a bench in front of the school and read.

The sky was bright blue and the air had a touch of autumn in it. It was so peaceful reading out there, so perfect, that I wondered why it had taken me 12 years to step outside, why it had taken me 12 years to realize that the outside world didn’t disappear when I stepped foot in my classroom.

Sometimes I’m just blind.

Sometimes I’m stubborn.

I was eighteen before I tried a strawberry, because how could anything with so many seeds be any good. Low and behold it was wonderful.

Sometimes I’m afraid.

I didn’t learn how to swim until I was sixteen.

Sometimes I wonder what all three: blindness, stubbornness and fear have kept me from all these years.

This past Tuesday at seminary, my professor made an allusion to Langston Hughes’ poem "A Dream Deferred." It’s one of my favorite poems and as soon as I heard the words “raisin in the sun,” Tuesday night, I was googling the poem, pulling it up during class.

Here are the words that move me most: “What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?/… Or does it explode?”

How many dreams have I deferred in life without even realizing it? How many dreams have I passed on the street and never made eye contact with? How many dreams have I run from? How many dreams have I thrown away because they couldn’t possibly be for me? What has happened to those dreams? Where did they go?

Of course as soon as I reread the poem the other night, I thought about the priesthood, about seminary, how not going to seminary fulltime makes me feel like I’m deferring a dream, and much like in the poem, I worry about what such a deferment will do to me, spiritually.

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few weeks about Langston Hughes and Steve Jobs. Who would have thought those two names would ever be used in the same sentence? But they were both visionaries and both hungry for what mattered in life.

Again, I go back to Steve Jobs’ Stanford speech. He says, in reference to finding work you love, “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

What is our purpose in life? It’s an important question, one posed, I’m sure, centuries and millennia before Rick Warren turned it into a book.

What is our purpose? What is it that God wants us to do with our lives? What gifts has He given us? How will we make use of those gifts? These are the great questions of anyone’s life and I would add one more to that.

I think finding our purpose in life is the easy part. It’s the joy-filled part. It’s the thing that gets us up in the morning. The hard part is fulfilling that purpose. The hard part is living the dream even when it seems the world is conspiring to tear it from our grasp.

How do we hold on?

Before the crucifixion, the disciples knew exactly what their purpose in life was. They had been fishermen, some of them, but Jesus had set them on a new path. They were followers. They went where he went. They ate what he ate. They slept where he slept.

But then Jesus died.

In his book Beautiful Outlaw, John Eldredge describes a scene from the Bible that I was unfamiliar with. It is from John 21:1-14. Jesus is dead. Seven of the disciples are out fishing when a man appears on the shore and asks them if they’ve caught anything. When they declare they haven’t, he tells them “cast the net to the right side of the boat.” Immediately, they have so many fish, they can't even haul them into the boat.

They suddenly realize that the man on the shore is Jesus and when Peter makes that realization, instead of waiting to turn the boat around and head back to shore, he jumps into the sea and starts swimming to Jesus even though they are more than a football field away.

Eldredge points out that though the Bible does not say what happened the moment Peter reached the shore, he expects that Peter and Jesus engaged in a long embrace.

I said in an earlier blog that our life journey is to seek out what God intends for us and then not to let go even when the seas get rough.

In fact, we need to be more like Peter. Peter thought he had lost the one thing he cared about more than anything else in the world, but when he found it again, he didn’t wait, he leapt in and used every bit of his will and determination to bring him to Jesus. And then he grabbed hold of Jesus and didn’t let go.

God is the one constant in our lives, the One who forever lives and loves. He is unchanging. And it is to Him that we need to reach for when our dreams seem just out of reach.

Stations of the Cross

Some months ago, I asked my mom to make Stations of the Cross for the church. Her reaction was speechlessness. She and I both knew she hadn’t done anything artistic in years … and that was precisely the reason I asked her to do the stations.

When I was a child I thought of my mom as an artist. She probably thought she was just crafty, but there wasn’t a house in the neighborhood that didn’t have in it something she had made. She was also a perfectionist. On multiple occasions I had to rescue her work from the trash.

We are, ultimately, a product of both our parents. My dad gave me my love of the written word and my mom, I think, gave me her “eye.” While I have never been able to draw or paint like she could, doing those things takes an “eye,” an ability to see the world differently. And I see that “eye” in action with my photography. Photography, to me, is like visual poetry.

She also passed on her obsessive perfectionism. (Trust me, you may have read the preceding paragraph once, but I have read and reread it at least twenty times and rewritten it several more.)

When Pastor Debbie said that she wanted Stations of the Cross for the church, at first I thought I would make them. I thought of doing something abstract with photography and using aspects of nature to represent the various stages of Christ’s journey to the Cross. But I couldn’t get that to work in a way that would be easy for others to decipher.

The more I thought about how I would go about making Stations of the Cross, the more I knew that the best person to do that was my mom. She would know exactly how to go about it. All I had to do was convince her to undertake a huge job.

As I said earlier, she was speechless when I asked, but then she came around. Over the next few months, I pushed and encouraged her because I knew that she could do something amazing and beautiful.

Finally, last night, the finished Stations of the Cross arrived. It had taken my mom months to finish. She had sacrificed her most recent paycheck to pay for shipping and packaging materials. Though I offered to send her money, she refused.

Unwrapping each station last night was like opening the doors to some sort of Lenten Advent Calendar. The box the stations came in smelled of wood, raw wood, like the kind you smell in a hardware store. And I was immediately taken back to childhood when my mom was tole painting.

The first station I unwrapped was of Christ dying on the cross. My mom had chosen pictures from a book to decoupage on a wooden plaque. Then she had gold leafed Jesus’ halo and hand painted the roman numerals. The gold leafing, in particular, was painstakingly perfect.

It was amazing, but the true beauty of what she had done only became more apparent with each station unwrapped. Fourteen stations. Fourteen portraits of Christ’s journey. Each beautifully rendered. But what came through even more that any artistic skill was my mom’s love.

She had undertaken this project because she loved me.

She had sacrificed time and all the money she had because she loved me.

And that love showed.

I don’t get to see my mom very often. I haven’t been to New York, where she lives, in seventeen years. For reasons beyond her control, she missed out on a large chunk of my childhood.

I know she probably feels sometimes like she doesn’t know me very well.

But what she did with those stations proves that she really does know me. She knows exactly what is important in my life. And making those stations allowed her to be a part of my life and be a part of this journey.

Steve Jobs

Part of my freshman orientation in college in 1994 was to learn about this newfangled thing called e-mail. There was nothing fancy about it. The screen had a distinct DOS-like feel to it. I don’t remember being inspired by it. I hadn’t even brought a computer with me to college.

The very next year, the Internet and email seemed to explode in popularity. My dad gave me his old computer, one with a hard drive of 100mb. It ran Windows 3.1. Later in my sophomore year, a professor volunteered to teach us html and help us design a webpage instead of completing a standard research paper.

By my senior year, the dorms all had an Ethernet connection.

A year after that, people began downloading music through a peer-sharing site called Napster.

Two years later, Steve Jobs introduced iTunes.

The Digital Age has been an amazing ride and Apple and Steve Jobs have been instrumental in both sparking the digital revolution and maintaining it. The first Apple computer was released in 1976, the year I was born. The first computer I remember being taught how to use was the Apple IIe when I was in third grade.

Twenty-five years ago, I took my first digital picture, using a camcorder hooked up (I believe) to one of those Apples. I believe the resolution was somewhere around 10 pixels per inch. Seriously, I still have the picture. I can count the pixels.

It's rather impressionistic.

Now I use a digital camera that boasts a resolution of 12 megapixels, with one megapixel being equal to 1,048,576 pixels.

Twenty years ago, I made mixtapes for my friends. Ten years ago, I made mix-cds. Now I don’t own a cd or a tape. Even my DVD collection is gathering dust. All my music and a majority of my videos now rest on a computer or an ipad or an ipod.

And I’m almost ashamed to say that it’s not just my DVDs gathering dust, my books are too.

Everything is digitized.

And Steve Jobs is primarily responsible for that.

Since his death a few days ago, Steve Jobs has been called the Thomas Edison of his generation. Only time will tell how he will be remembered. Only time will tell how his legacy will settle into our collective consciousness.

After his death this week, I read the text of Jobs’ speech to Stanford graduates in 2006. I was surprised that a man who had a reputation of being arrogant and controlling and not much of a people person, could come across as a humble and down to earth as he did in that speech.

Here, after all, was a man who was at the top of the world years ago, running one of the most successful businesses in the world, when he was fired as CEO. Instead of curling up in a dark corner somewhere, he continued to innovate and build and when Apple rehired him, he brought those innovations with him, ideas that are still be utilized in Apple computers today.

One of the things that Jobs said though that really made an impact on me is this:

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

He is describing what it means to be called.

Some people are called to be teachers. Some are called to be pastors. Some are called to lead the world in a digital revolution. No matter what the call, the worse thing in the world is to ignore it. The worse thing is to choose not to follow.

Can you imagine Jesus calling the first disciples and instead of dropping everything and following him, one decided to look the other way instead and go back to fishing? What kind of life would that man have led? It wouldn’t have been a happy one. It wouldn’t have been a fulfilling one. It would have been a life of constantly feeling an itch, a pull at the soul that could not be satisfied.

Oswald Chambers writes that “the call of God is like the call of the sea, no one hears it but the one who has the nature of the sea in him.”

God calls us to the life that is already within us.

When I walk across the parking lot to seminary and feel, for a moment, like I am leading someone else’s life, I’m wrong. I’m not leading someone else’s life. I’m leading my life, the true life that God has put within me.

Whatever it is God intends for us, it should be our life journey to seek that out and once we find it, to grab hold and not let go no matter how rough the seas get.

Thank you Steve Jobs for not letting go.

For the Birds

Tonight I offered a reflection Matthew 10:24-33 during Evening Prayer. The text of what I had to say is below.

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself/ a small bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” The name of that poem is Self-Pity and it was written by D.H. Lawrence. I’d like to say that I first heard it and studied it in one of the many literature courses I took in college, but actually, the first place I ever heard it was in the movie G.I. Jane.

G.I. Jane stars Demi Moore as a woman attempting to become the first female Navy Seal. Before her training begins, the Master Chief stands before the recruits and recites D.H. Lawrence’s poem. It is a gentle moment, a literary moment, one that will stand in stark contrast to the training that is about to commence, training that involves pushing the recruits both physically and mentally, demanding that they push past that moment when they think they can’t go on, when they think that if they go just one more minute, or one more mile, they will die.

I was reminded of this poem as I read the verses from Matthew. Here we have Jesus warning the disciples not to be afraid of those who can only kill the body, but to fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell. It is a warning that the disciples will be pushed and will be afraid. It is a foreshadowing that many will be killed for their belief in Christ. But in the end they should not worry about death because souls are far more precious than bodies.

In the midst of Jesus’ warning, in the midst of some pretty dark language, Jesus also offers comfort. As it turns out, the message here is one of worth. What are we worth in God’s eyes? How important are we?

And the answer is we are worth so much more than we know. We are more important than we ever dreamed possible.

In Matthew 10:31, Jesus says, “So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” This isn’t the first time that Jesus has compared the human race to birds, sparrows here. In Matthew 6:26, Jesus says, “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

Why birds? Why does Jesus choose to compare us to birds? Why not cows, or jackals, or camels or the dung beetle? Maybe the answer’s obvious. Each of those animals comes with its own inherent symbolism and so does the bird.

I would argue that in literature, the bird is frequently seen as innocent and that killing birds or caging them is seen as sinful.

Take the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. “Remember it is a sin to kill a mockingbird,” Atticus tells Scout. Why? Miss Maudie explains, “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy … but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Or in the poem Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “I know why the caged bird sings … It is not a carol of joy or glee/But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core/But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings.”

Birds are special, are innocent; they don’t get angry or complain. They don’t feel sorry for themselves. They are beautiful and are perhaps, in their ability to take flight, far more free than any other animal on earth. They are special.

But we are more so, Jesus says.

God the Father takes care of the birds. And we are of far more value than birds.

The Girl Who Waited

In the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, children were given a marshmallow to eat. They were told though that if they could wait 20 minutes to eat it, while the researcher stepped out of the room, that they would be given two when he returned.

The results of the experiment showed that children who were able to delay gratification performed better in school than those who consumed the marshmallow almost immediately.

I have always thought that had I been given that test, I would have passed, not because I’m good at delaying gratification but because I was an intensely suspicious child, taking the “don’t take candy from strangers” order to heart at an almost obsessive level.

The fact is, though, I hate waiting.

I can still see myself as a kid waiting for my mom in the department store.

“How much longer?” I would whine.

“Five minutes,” Mom would say.

And then I would start counting seconds. I think my love of math may have actually started from being so bored while my mom shopped. I remember one time my dad taught me square roots to keep me occupied. I was seven.

It seems I have spent much of my life waiting for something. If you read my last post then you know how cranky I’ve been lately, having to wait and move more slowly than I would like in achieving my goal of being a priest. I was so upset this past Thursday that I think I may have been moments away from throwing an actual temper tantrum.

I have become “the girl who waited.”

And, as it turns out, I have a lot in common with three other women who waited. I’ve written about them before. There is Amy Pond, known (long before me) as “the girl who waited,” when she packed her suitcase and slept outside waiting for the mysterious Doctor and his shiny blue blox to return for her.

There is Lucy Pevensie, a queen of Narnia, thrust back into our world after living almost a lifetime over there. Though C.S. Lewis doesn’t explicitly say so, I know Lucy spent many nights in front of that wardrobe, hoping it would take her back to Narnia. How could she not?

And then there is Mary Magdalene, waiting at Jesus’ tomb.

Three women, two fictional, one real, all three lives changed and upended by an incredible force of nature, an alien doctor, a lion, and the Son of God. All three given glimpses of a wonderful and rich universe. All three made to believe that they are so much more than they thought they could be. They are brave. They are courageous. They are beautiful and kind. And then all three have those worlds ripped away from them.

It was a long Saturday for Mary Magdalene. It was many long Saturdays for Amy and Lucy. I’m sure they felt abandoned. I’m positive they felt lost. But though their futures may have seemed gray and lifeless to them during those Saturdays, I’m also sure they still harbored hope.

Why else wait?

And wait they did.

It’s a hard thing to do when we’ve been given a glimpse of the life God means us to lead. Virtually every time I walk across the parking lot to seminary, I stop and look around, amazed that this is my life now. I keep thinking I’ve step into someone’s life. And, in a way, I have. I’ve stepped into the life that God has always intended for me.

But now that I have it, or have part of it, I want the whole thing. And I want it now.

I’ve been rereading my blog posts and have seen various common themes. It was in July that I first posted a quote from Timothy Keller who wrote, “Are you trying to hurry Jesus?”

I think my answer to that is obvious. Of course I am. In fact if God would give me a timeline, I might start counting seconds with Him, which is probably why God doesn’t give us timelines.

It’s agonizing. I’ve used that word before too.

But then I remember how much worse it was for Lucy wondering if she would ever get back to Narnia.

And I remember how devastating it was for Mary Magdalene as she sat by Jesus’ tomb.

And I remember that Lucy did get to Narnia three more times and in three different ways. And the Doctor did return for Amy Pond years later to whisk her away on many adventures across time and space.

And Jesus did return to Mary. He returned to her first. Just thinking of her joy brings tears to my eyes.

God never abandons us. He always returns. He’s always there. And with Him is joy.

What we are waiting for is so much more than two marshmallows. It is life itself. It is joy and wonder. It is healing. It is heaven on earth.