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.

After the Storm

In Back to the Future, Doc Brown and Marty McFly are about to witness something amazing, something stunning.  Doc has created a time machine out of Delorean and he has tapped his dog, Einstein, to be the first time traveler.  As Marty films the event, the Delorean, remote controlled by Doc, and with Einstein behind the wheel, reaches 88 mph and disappears.

Doc is ecstatic.  Marty thinks his friend has just incinerated his dog and car.  But a minute later, the unthinkable happens, the car and Einstein reappear.  Doc Brown had sent Einstein a minute into the future, a minute that passed with Doc leaping for joy and Marty freaking out, a minute that seemed like no time at all for Einstein.  For Einstein his trip was instantaneous.

There was no minute.  He had simply travelled forward in time.

I was wondering today how that would feel—to time travel, to leap forward in time, but not be aware of what was happening.  Could even a dog feel that something was off, that he was missing something, a minute of his life when the world turned and people did what people do, but a minute that he had missed and would never get back?

Today when I walked out of church, the weather was so perfect I decided instead of racing everyone out of the parking lot, I would walk the labyrinth.  I had energy for that and couldn’t resist, but I had barely started the path when I felt overwhelmed and almost sat down right there in the grass and sobbed.

I didn’t—because the grass was wet (perhaps a lot of people have been crying on the labyrinth lately) and because the church was full and I didn’t want anyone to wonder who the crazy lady was out crying behind the church. 

But I walked the labyrinth today filled with tears, tears because it was so beautiful out and just yesterday and the day before (thanks to Hurricane Sandy) it had been so gray, and cloudy and windy and my condo had been filled with the strange noises of a hurricane, the pelting of rain and the creaks of the doors and windows from the wind, and now, today it was the most beautiful day I could imagine, blue skies and cool air and a light breeze.

And I thought, how recently in my life, I’ve not had very many beautiful days.

Pastor Debbie mentioned during the service today what our Advent study would be this year and I was hit with a surreal moment, a moment that contributed to those tears aching to be released out in the labyrinth.

Where had the year gone?

It was like I had gone to sleep last October, 2011 and woken up today October, 2012.

I felt like I had lost a year, like Einstein lost his minute in the Delorean.  I lost a year to my health, a year of not knowing if I would be well enough to get in the shower, to drive, to make lunch and dinner, to take care of the cat, to see friends, to go to church, to shop, to laugh, to cry, to do all the things that we take for granted.

For more than a year, my health even kept me from making it to the hairdresser.

This past Tuesday, I finally went for that haircut and had thirteen inches cut in one large chunk followed by another two inches or so as she trimmed me up.

I feel like a new person.  Lorraine told me cutting my hair was a lifting of a burden in both a literal and figurative sense.  How I love washing my hair now.  I love playing with it.  I love that even in a breeze, I don’t feel like it’s trying to strangle me; I just tuck it behind my ear and move on.

A lost year.

One of the first things Pastor Debbie ever told me was that there are no wasted years.  I had been frustrated when I first found Hope Church because it had taken 17 years of looking in order to find it and I had felt those years wasted.

But Pastor Debbie said no.  No wasted years.

And despite all my health problems this past year, it was not a lost year either.  It was a year in which I wrote and published two books, a year that I took another step in learning to take care of myself, a year in which the many paths that God has set before me began to coalesce.  It was a year I learned to depend on others, to ask for help.  It was a year when people fed me, both my stomach and my wallet and my spirit.

It was year that showed me I still have a ways to go, but that there is always peace after the storm.

It doesn’t mean that other storms won’t come.

And for those of you waiting for Hurricane Sandy, keep safe, but remember that when it is over, the skies will be blue again and the air will be crisp.

Winter is coming.

Christmas is coming.

After the storm, there is always salvation.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The other day I downloaded the “Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2012” game for my ipad.  I don’t play golf in the real world, only with swoops of my finger across the ipad screen.  And what I love best about this game is the help you get in reading the greens.

Not only does the game tell you how much of a break there is and fast the green is rolling, but before you even putt, you can tap a button that will show you the line from where you are to where you aimed and if you’re too far left or right, you can adjust before making the putt.

I wish I had this feature in my real life. 

I was talking to Pastor Debbie the other day about how sometimes I know exactly what God wants me to do in the far future, but I have no idea how to get there.

And sometimes I can’t see the future at all; I can only see the first step and—it’s a doozy.

Sometimes, Pastor Debbie said, all you can do is pray to God minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day to show you where to go.

Even the Tiger Woods game has it limits.  Sometimes you’re on the green, but so far away from the hole, the game tells you it has no tip to give you.  You’re on your own.  You make the putt and hope you get it close enough to the hole, that when you go to make your next putt, you’ll be close enough for some advice.

Think of all the technology we have that promises us to make us better golfers, better spellers, better drivers and yet every single one of those technologies has its limits.

How many times in Word has your spelling been so far off, the computer has no idea what word you’re trying to spell, it only knows that you’re WRONG?  So you keep playing with the letters until you get it close enough to something the computer recognizes.

How many times has the GPS sent you through houses and construction barriers?

All these things we have in life to point us in the right direction and yet we still wind up lost or so far off the green we’re now “out of bounds.”

There is no prayer button in the Tiger Woods game.

There is no prayer button in Word.

My GPS talks to me, but it doesn’t listen.

Only God can direct us, if we ask and if we listen and if we remember that God often speaks in such still small voices it’s a wonder we can hear Him at all.

The other day, I had a hearing test where they lock you up in what looks like a good old-fashioned 20 questions booth with headphones to block out all noise and it was only then that I realized that I have a ringing in my ears.  Most of the time I don’t notice because we live in such a noisy world, but locked in that booth with those headphones, I could hear that small ringing and I worried for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to hear the tones that were about to come over the headphones.

As it turned out, my hearing was just fine, despite the ringing.

But never had I listened so hard in all my life.  I listened like my life depended on it, partly because I’m super-competitive and partly because I knew if they found hearing loss it would indicate a cause of my vertigo that would necessitate some unpleasant testing.  So I listened and tried not to get worried when there appeared to be long gaps of silence.  I listened.

Perhaps I should ask for the booth and headphones again, and this time, tell them to just let me sit there for a while and pray.  Maybe then I would hear God and maybe then I would know what it is He wants me to do next.

Where is it that He wants me to go?

Good News

There are many things in my life that I wish were simple.  I wish I had a better filing system other than piles of do this now, do this later, forget about this but don't panic when you suddenly remember and trash.

I wish my health were simpler as in not having to remember all the medicines I'm taking, not having to go to the pharmacy every other day because I can't have a life where my medicines are due for refill at the same time, having an accurate diagnosis that fills me with confidence that things will get better.

The only thing I can do right now is simplify my blogs.  So, in that respect, I have decided to reopen "New to Hope" as a blog, because after health issues keeping me away from church and church activities and time with God for so long, I once again feel new to Hope, especially when I walk into church and see people I've never seen before.

Especially when I walk into church and find that my seat has been usurped.

I've deleted several other blogs and added one more that I will use to talk about reading and writing only.  The name of that blog?  "All things Write and Readable."  You'll find it at:  www.kendralacy.blogspot.com 

Can't get much simpler.

So stayed tuned to both blogs.  First item of business is to update kendralacy.blogspot.com with news on my latest book, Sunburner.

And periodically, as the spirit moves me, I will update "New to Hope" and hope the spirit moves soon.

No Longer New

This morning I was sitting in church listening to Pastor Debbie’s sermon and thinking how bright it was inside the sanctuary.  Hope is blessed with floor to ceiling windows on two sides of the church and between those windows and the overhead lights, it was almost too bright.

In either the second or third Kid’s Talk I gave I told the kids how I was afraid of the dark, how I keep an abundance of flashlights nearby just in case the power goes out.  Light is so important to me, especially natural light.  I almost didn’t buy the condo I’m currently living in because it faced north and didn’t give me the lighting that I needed.

When I think of all the reasons I stayed at Hope, I sometimes wonder if subconsciously I stayed because of the light.  Every other Episcopal church I’ve been to has been dark and cave-like.  At those churches I tend to feel hemmed in and sad.  But at Hope, the light was a beacon calling me home.

In a little over two months, I will be celebrating my second anniversary at Hope.  I can’t believe it’s been two years.  I can’t believe how long and short that seems.  My life has changed in so many wonderful ways, ways I began cataloguing in this blog in May, 2010.

I called my blog New to Hope, meaning that both in a literal and figurative way.

Two weeks ago, I sat in the Diocesan Convention and heard Bishop-Elect Greg Brewer give his first address.  He quoted Vaclav Havel in regards to hope and much like Pastor Debbie, whenever I hear that word these days, I immediately perk up.

I like just about everything Havel says about hope, but this particular line sticks with me.  Havel says: “[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

That is the hope I have been given, the certainty that everything in life has meaning, has purpose, and that God will use everything great or small, good or bad, in furtherance of His will and His will is always glorious and wonderful and beautiful.

Hope, Havel says, “is an orientation of the spirit.”  Hope does not reside within us.  Instead, we live inside hope.

This blog has chronicled my journey to hope.  And I am both pleased and saddened to say this part of the journey is over.  I am no longer new to hope.  I’ve been living it.  And so, after much prayer, I’ve decided it’s time to end this blog.

When I was in fourth grade, I wrote my first poem and all through fifth and sixth grade, I wrote poems like a mad woman.  Ironically, poetry kept me sane when the world around me began to crumble, when the death of a friend and the illness of a parent threatened to pull me far, far away from hope.

Eventually, I healed and the flow of poetry slowed.  But I never stopped writing.  I turned to playwriting next and then more poetry in college and then novel writing as a young adult and blogging most recently.  Whenever I stopped writing one thing, something else was waiting to take its place.  Interestingly enough, I think my photography has taken the place of my poetry.  Whatever I felt writing poetry, I feel now when I snap a good picture.

Regardless, what I’m trying to say is that even as I bring this blog to a close, I will not stop writing.  I may even start another blog.  And if and when I do, you’ll be the first one to know.  In the meantime, God has called me to write other things.  And as I’ve discovered with my call to the priesthood, when God calls us to do something, we can only ignore Him for so long.

I thank each and every one of you who has read this blog.  As a character in the movie Shadowlands said, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

You are not alone.

And thanks to you, neither am I.

God Bless.

See you soon.

Power Windows

When I was a teenager, my mom had a car with a horn that would randomly go off sometimes while we were cruising down the highway and sometimes while it was sitting in the driveway in the middle of the night.  I’m not sure which was more embarrassing, waving to people on the highway and giving them a quick shrug of the shoulders as an apology or waking up at two in the morning to this distant whine, like a drone of a mosquito that can’t be swatted away, and realizing it’s not a mosquito at all, but the car, some Stephen King she-devil.

My own car these days is picking up some quirks.  It’s the power windows most recently.  A month ago, I rolled down the driver side window to drop a letter in the mailbox and then couldn’t get the window back up.  I was sitting at a stoplight, pushing the up button with one hand and physically manhandling the window with the other.  Finally, it came up.  But since I never know when the window’s going to work, most recently, I’ve not used it at all.  It’s a pain.  Who knew I rolled down the window so much?

This morning I woke up with vertigo, my first bout of it in more than three years.  It was depressing and I was angry and it was a horrible way to start the morning.  Though the spinning only lasts as long as I have my head in a certain position (in this case lying down on my left side), I’m left feeling woozy for hours after.  I had every excuse to not move from my condo today.  I had every excuse to sit in this darkened cave and feel sorry for myself.  And I actually did that for about an hour or so.

But then, motivated by an article in the newspaper, I headed out to the Viera Wetlands (yes, I was well enough to drive, no worries) to take pictures of the birds that had migrated there for the winter.  I had been to the Viera Wetlands before, but it had been awhile and I had a new camera to try out.

As I drove around the park, sometimes I stopped and got out and snapped a few pictures, but sometimes, I was just too tired to get out.  And so I took a risk, and rolled down the window, smiling as it came down smoothly and holding my breath each time it stuttered and struggled to come back up again.

But it was a risk worth taking.  God let me capture some of the most beautiful photos I have ever taken including the eyes and nostrils of an alligator sitting just above the surface of the water as concentric circles expand out and around and then later, the body and head of the same gator as he moved through weeds.  A great blue heron actually flew to me and posed twenty feet from the car.  Another bird—I’m not sure what type, I haven’t looked it up yet—stood in the sunlight in such a way the light seemed create a halo around its head.  And I wondered if angels sometimes appear as birds.

Life is so short.  This is the lesson I have learned over the past few months.  It is so short.  And even on the days when I wake up with vertigo, even on the days following the nasty fevers that have plagued me for the past two years, even when I wake up in pain, I know I am blessed.  If I can get up out of bed, if I can walk, if I can drive my car out into nature to take photos, then I know I am blessed.

I am blessed with life.

Today Gabby Giffords resigned from Congress.  A year after a gunman’s bullet nearly took her life, she is still recovering.  She still needs help to walk.  She still hasn’t regained her ability to speak with any of the fluency she once was capable of.  But she gets up out of bed every morning and she strives for something.  She strives to be strong.  She strives to hope.  She strives to live.

And I’m sure she would agree that she is blessed.

We don’t know what tomorrow will bring us.  We don’t know if that power window will come back up once we have rolled it down, but we take the risk anyway.

We get up.

We walk out into the world.

And we live.

Silence

When I was in college my choice of major became a running joke between my dentist and me.  Every six months he would try and make conversation and ask me about my major and seemingly every six months, I would have changed my major to something else.

I started out majoring in Social Studies Education, followed then by Linguistics, then Journalism, before finally settling on a double major of Creative Writing and Literature.  The outlier among these majors would seem to be Social Studies Education, but in truth it fits perfectly with what I love.  I wanted to be a social studies teacher because I loved history.  I loved telling the stories of what happened to us in the past.

I love stories.  It’s as simple as that.  Perhaps I could even take it down to another level and say simply that I love words.

I love language.  I love the beauty of the words.  I love how rich and wonderful words can be.  I love how words make me feel, how they warm my heart, or excite my soul.  I love how sometimes when I read, I get so moved I have to close the book or turn off the Kindle and take a breath.

One of my favorite episodes of Friends has Joey revealing that when he read The Shining, he was so scared he had to hide the book in the freezer.  When he and Rachel trade books—he gives her The Shining and she gives him Little Women, he is so moved by Little Women that too winds up in the freezer. 

In Journalism class, we learned how to weight a sentence.  Especially in journalism, when writing a news story, you want the most important facts to appear in the beginning of the sentence.  So for example, you wouldn’t want to reveal the murderer’s name at the end of the sentence or the end of the paragraph or the end of the story.  It's called burying the lead (or lede).

But even outside journalism, how we weight words is very important.

I was reminded of this when I was reading today’s psalm in church.  Psalm 62:5 reads in the NRSV: “For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him.”  It is a beautiful line, in and of itself, and far be it from me to criticize word placement, but I think (and I’ve blogged about this before) that the meaning, the impact, of this sentence changes if you flip three words.

“My soul waits in silence.”

As it is written, “my soul” is given the most weight, followed by “waits,” and ended with “in silence.”

The fact that we are waiting is given primary importance here.

But what if we flip some words?

What if we said: my soul in silence waits.

Now the importance shifts from the waiting to how we wait.

Such a minor thing, but do you see the difference?

We wait for God … in silence.  The silent part is very important and easily forgotten when slipped in at the end there.

How do we wait?  In silence.

We wait for Him at rest, calm like the sea on a windless day. 

We wait for Him—in silence—in stillness, not wanting even to breathe and remembering 1 Kings 19:12: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.”

“A still small voice.”

The reason we wait in silence is so that we might hear that still small voice.

Two words—in silence.  Pay them close attention.  They may be all that stands between you and God.

All Natural

The Bible is filled with human beings.

That’s stating the obvious right?

But how often do we look at the humanness of the people in the Bible?  How often do we focus on their sainthood instead?  We put Old Testament heroes like Moses and Joshua and Solomon and New Testament heroes like Paul and Peter on pedestals and we think how can we ever achieve a fraction of what they achieved?  How can we ever experience the closeness and richness of their relationship to God? 

When we think like that we create a barrier between ourselves and them.  They cease being people and become characters and legends.  They are simply people who have lived so long ago they might as well not have lived at all.  They become stories.

Which is why I found two of today’s readings so refreshing because of the humanness of Samuel’s response to God and because of the perfectly natural response of Nathanael’s when told the savior had been found.

In 1 Samuel 3:1-10, Samuel is lying down minding his own business when he hears someone call his name.  Thinking it is Eli, Samuel rushes to him only to be told that no, Eli had not called him.  Samuel lays down again and again hears someone call his name.  Again he rushes to Eli and again is told that Eli did not call him.  But Eli guesses that maybe it’s God calling to Samuel and tells Samuel to go back and address the voice should it speak to him again.

A third time, someone calls Samuel’s name and Samuel responds, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

And God speaks.

And Samuel’s time as prophet begins.

But for a while there, Samuel was just like us.  Someone was calling his name and he couldn’t figure out who was calling him or why.  Have you ever woken up to a strange sound in the middle of the night?  Have you ever gotten up to investigate that sound and then, having found nothing, gone back to bed only to be woken up again by the same noise?

For me, that’s usually the smoke alarm battery going, but for Samuel, that noise was the voice of God and for more than a few minutes, I’m sure Samuel was irritated and frustrated at not being able to recognize the voice.

We are all like Samuel and just like Pastor Debbie said in her Kid’s Talk today, God doesn’t always speak to us audibly, but He does speak.  He stirs something within us, something that cannot be ignored no matter how hard we try.  Something that will not go away until we address it.

It was exactly how I feel with my calling to the priesthood.

Today’s Gospel reading was from John 1:43-51.  Jesus goes to Galilee and is in the process of calling his disciples to him.  As always when Jesus calls, in this case, Phillip, Phillip drops everything and follows him.

Phillip’s blind faith to a man he’s never seen before is a hard thing for any of us to live up to.  How can we possibly do as Phillip did and just go, just leave everything behind and follow?  The amount of faith that takes seems extreme.

But then in the same passage we are given Nathanael.  Nathanael represents all of us.  When Phillip comes to him excited and thrilled to have found Jesus, all Nathanael can do is say, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

And here I thought cynicism and sarcasm were creations of my generation, Generation X.

Nathanael is a skeptic.  And it is Nathanael we should most identify with because the reality is that we are more like Nathanael than we are Phillip and that’s okay because Nathanael doesn’t walk away.  He doesn’t brush Jesus aside.

Like Samuel, Nathanael doesn’t know who’s calling him, but he’s curious and so he sticks around and listens.  And like Samuel, Nathanael meets his Lord when he decides to listen.

So forget about the heroes of the Bible for a minute and focus on the little guys, like Nathanael.  Focus on Samuel, who actually turned out to be one of the big guys of the Bible, but for a moment was just as confused as any of us. 

And learn from them.

Miracles

The other night at church we discussed Joseph, Jesus and Mary’s flight to Egypt.  Herod had ordered the murder of every child two and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area and an angel had appeared to Joseph saying, “’Get up … take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him’” (Matthew 2:13).

I can only imagine what was going through Joseph’s head.  Yes, there was apparently a large colony of Jews in Egypt at the time, but Egypt really?  Nobody has that short a memory.  Of all the places to send His son, God chose Egypt, a place where the Jews had once been enslaved, a place that needed 10 plagues set upon it in order to bend it to God’s will.

Egypt.

And not only that, but the angel gives no timeline to Joseph.  Go, leave your home, leave all that is familiar and go to this foreign place and “stay.”

Just stay.

What must Joseph have been thinking?  We don’t know.  What we do know is that he was a man of deep faith for he did as the angel told him.

When we think of Jesus and his life, we think of miracles.  We think of how he healed the sick.  We think of that first miracle in John, the turning of the water into wine.  But for me, I think that miracles surrounded Jesus from the moment he was conceived.

That Mary, a child, a teenager would accept God’s calling, that Joseph would take Mary as his wife despite her pregnancy, that they would find shelter in a manger, that the shepherds and the wise men would find them, one group guided by angels, the other by a star.  That Joseph would agree to take his family to Egypt … all of these things done by faith.

In my last post, I wrote about my new favorite Broadway star, Sutton Foster.  At the Kennedy Center Honors a few months ago, she sang “Everybody Says Don’t,” a song from the musical Anyone Can Whistle as a tribute to Barbara Cook.

Anyone Can Whistle is a musical about miracles, about one miracle in particular that is faked in order to bring tourists to a dying town.

At the close of the second act, Hapgood sings to the town’s skeptic, Fay, the song “Everybody Says Don’t.”

Here are a few of the lyrics:

“I insist in miracles if you do them/miracles they might come true/Then I say/Don’t be afraid.”

It’s a song about the dangers of sitting back and waiting for things to happen.  It’s about living and searching and longing.  It’s about being afraid of failing and then going ahead and trying anyway.  And it’s about miracles.

I love the use of the word “insist,” in the lines above.  I insist on miracles.

Joseph and Mary did not practice passive parenting.  They had no idea what awaited them in Egypt, but they went anyway. 

They had faith.

And I do believe at every step of their journey they too insisted on miracles.

And were rewarded with such.

Insist on miracles.