Crooked

The mysteries you live with, as a child. Never solved, never resolved. Utterly trivial, petty. Like a tiny pebble in your shoe, that causes you to walk crookedly.
- 'Little Bird of Heaven' Joyce Carol Oates

Hollow Motions

For years of mornings, I have woken wanting to die. Life itself twists into nightmare. For years, I have pulled the covers up over my head, dreading to begin another day I'd be bound to just wreck. Years, I lie listening to the taunts of names ringing off my interior walls, ones from the past that never drifted far and away: Loser. Mess. Failure. They are signs nailed overhead, nailed through me, naming me.

The stars are blinking out.

Funny, this. Yesterday morning, the morning before, all these mornings, I wake to the discontent of life in my skin. I wake to the self-hatred. To the wrestle to get it all done, the relentless anxiety that I am failing. Always, the failing. I yell at children, festering with bitterness, forget doctor appointments, lose library books, I live selfishly, skip prayer, complain, go to bed too late, neglect cleaning the toilets. I live tired. Afraid. Weary. Years, I feel it in the veins the pulsing of cultures hopes. Would I ever be enough, find enough, do enough? But this morning, I wake wildly wanting to live. Physically feeling it in the veins trembling, the hard pant of the lungs, the seeing it in steady stats, how much I really want to really live,. How I don't want to die. Is that the message of nightmares and dreams? To live either fully alive...or in empty nothingness?

It's the in between, the days of walking lifeless, the years calloused and simply going through the hollow motions, the self-protecting by self-distracting, the body never waking, that's lost all capacity to full feel- this is the life in between that makes us the wildly walking dead.

- Ann Voskamp "One Thousand Gifts"

Where Hides This Joy?

Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt?

How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing-through-to-God places? To more-God places?

How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy? Self-focus for God-communion.

To fully live—to live full of grace and joy and all that is beauty eternal. It is possible, wildly.

                                        - Ann Voskamp 'One Thousand Gifts'

Missing the Boat

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.
The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.
But you had this idea you were going by train.
You kept checking the time-tables,
digging for tracks.
And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.
The boat bobbed into the distance
shrinking like a toy -
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea

- 'Missing the Boat' by Naomi Shihab Nye

Disparate Words

When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger and unexplored fears, begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that those disparate words and gestures were adding up to something, a conclusion you didn't anticipate. And later, when you begin to retrace your steps, you see that you will need to reach back further than you could have imagined, beyond words and thoughts and even dreams, perhaps, to make sense of what happened. 

-Bird in Hand

Vanishing

She has forgotten herself for a second, forgotten her desire for distance and privacy.
He could wait for this to pass -- and it will quickly. She'll look at her watch and walk away.
He knows this because he too knows solitude.
He knows its pleasure and its power.
He knows it is a home you cam occupy, a place where you can watch your pains shimmer around you like a school of fish.
It's also a habit, and he knows how entrenched and addictive it becomes.
She might hate him of he pulls her out of its dark waters.
It would hurt at first.
And maybe always.

- Deborah Willis Escape

Golden Girls

I've been watching re-runs of the Golden Girls lately. They ran the finale the other night and I teared up at Dorothy's good-bye monologue. So lovely, and I so didn't appreciate it when I watched it the first time.

These are memories that I'll wrap myself in when the world gets cold and I
forget that there are people that are warm and loving.
Your friendship was never something I expected at this point in my life and
I could never have asked for a better surprise

Love, without encouragement

We can all begin freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.

--Pride & Prejudice

Gymnastics of the Heart

Years ago I was struck by a line in a poem by Ruth Bell Graham: "God, let
me be all he ever dreamed of loveliness and laughter." What would happen if this
wish came true? How many of us know that the men we love, the friends we have,
think of belly laughs and compelling conversation when they think of us? Are we
thought of with delight and as someone to be taken seriously?

At our best, we've all had a glimpse of it. We all know how exhilarating it
is to walk away from an interaction with others and know they are lingering in
it because of us. They are smiling. They are thinking. They have been aroused by
our presence. These moments are a foretaste of who we are meant to be. But we
know there is so much more of us that somehow doesn't make it to our carpools
and business meetings and even our lunches with friends.
So often our loveliness and laughter are shrouded by a
blanket.

A woman who "is clothed with strength and dignity" and who "laughs with no
fear of the future" (Proverbs 31:25) is one who, in the alleyways, sees her
foolish choice to hover. She realizes her hovering reveals her lack of
trust that God will remember her or care about her situation.
She admits the Fall actually happened in her own heart. She doesn't try to
pretend her heart is full of trust. Instead, she takes her fear, her doubt, and
her questions to the God of the universe. She allows herself to respond
to God's pursuit.

He finds her there, redeems her there, loves her there- so she can look to
the future with confident expectation.

Excerpt from The Allure of Hope by Jan Meyers (p40-41)

Allure of Hope

My friend Mel sent me Allure of Hope: God's Pursuit of a Woman's Heart by Jan Meyer. I only a little into it, but it's really good so far.

"We are far more disciplined than we are at rest, far more committed than winsome, far more 'nice' than passionate, far more dutiful than free. Far more weary than filled with hope."

"It's hard -moving into life while carrying around an unmet hope or desire."

"Hope remembers things lost and envisions things not yet known."

"When did the cards we write turn from whimsy to practicality? When did openheartedness turn to skittishness and timidity? What was being whispered to us as these changes occurred?

"We quietly questions whether there is enough loveliness in us to keep others engaged with out hearts."

"We think of hope as something "out there" that we either find or lost. The reality is, hope is something that rises up inside of us with a gentle strength that requires a response. We either respond to it with out hearts or we try to push it down. Responding to it brings a deepened sense of thirst, a deepened ache. Responding to it reminds of us what it truly means to be a woman. Trying to push it down is another story altogether. Notice I sad "trying" to push it down. Hope is tenacious. Hope always finds us again."

"Why do we insist on telling each other, in ways we perhaps don't intend, that trusting God means making an orderly existence for ourselves, that growing in godliness means we become increasingly satisfied and complete? We tell each other to remember that the suffering will end, but we say these words from hearts that haven't entered the bloody, hot, fierce environment of birth pains. Can our words be trusted?"

"We want freedom from the ache. We want to control the level of groaning in our life. Our search for relief is utterly foolish, yet we demand it with fervor every time we shit off the whispers in our hearts - the whisper to dream, the whisper to acknowledge a current disappointment, the whisper to remember something or someone lost. We desire the thrill of a newborn cry without the months of anticipation and hours of labor-ridden hell."

"Jesus' life was not sterile. He consistently plunged into the unclean places of people's lives and hearts. Not much about it was organized or even made sense. But His life was saturated with vision, and He lived out of a deep sense of mission that propelled Him to take the dusty steps to the most egregious of all birthing places: the cross of Calvary."

Quotes: Pete Gall

Here are some quotes from just the intro and 1st chapter of Learning My Name that I had to write down:

Maybe it's time for me to give up my illusions about my condition in hopes of giving up a condition that needs illusions to make it survivable

Truth be told, my sin isn't what makes me feel like a failure. What makes me feel so lousy is the lens through which I see myself and the meaning of my sin. The problem is woven deep within the fabric of how I see the world and it has everything to do with my ongoing refusal to truly -even indolently- allow myself to be love by God

"Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world." -Martin Luther

I don't want to be broken. I hate the sin within me and I do want God to reshape me. But when I look to people like Augustine, Luther and Yancy it doesn't take long before I see that maybe I focus more on my sins than on Gods love for me. Something is broken with the way I interact with the world and with my sin and it costs me the experience of God's love. It leaves me trapped in my own fallen stated. I want to experience the healing and freedom in addition to the forgiveness of God's love.
I am coming to have this feeling that for all of us in one way or another, God eventually lets the pressures of our sins pile up against our best efforts and most ardent attempts at faith so that we crumble, throw in the towel and give the bastardly parts of ourselves to God to do with as he will

I don't want to pay the social cost I'm sure to pay if other people see me in my desperate need and brokenness

As dutiful Christians who've come to believe that Jesus only heals all at once and often only to the level of our faith, many of us refuse to give each other permission to admit it yet, but the embarrassing truth is that we need to return to the Cross again and again, even if it's only a brief visit under the cover of night or because a profound momentary crisis drives us to cry out for Christ's mercy once more.

We will forever stumble back into the need for the Cross, whether it's for salvation or relief from our burdens. The horrible bottom-line truth is the Cross is the only place where we make sense.

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