Oh, to be young and brave.

I laugh when people call me brave.  They do not see my heart like God does.  I may not be afraid of spiders and snakes, but my fears are vast and intangible.  They loom over my shrinking soul with the grinning taunt of an uncertain path.  

My courage is thin: it flutters feebly against imaginary evils.

Four times in the first chapter of Joshua is the command given: Be strong and courageous.  Four times my forehead wrinkles in a frown of not knowing.  What is a brave heart, and how does one go about getting one?  Bravery is an inspiringly fearful trait.  It is not to be unafraid, but to face the fears you dread.

My battle is not against flesh and blood--I am blithely heedless of things that should concern me, much to the chagrin of my family.  I fear things like disappointment, failure, rejection, condemnation.  My brand of fear closes me off from others, shuts out the world that can hurt me, and replaces hope with dismal apathy.  It is easier not to try than to be rejected.  

While I was auditioning at music schools for college, I avoided as long as possible auditioning for the Cincinnati Conservatory, because I was intimidated by it.  I had been playing harp for only a year and a half when I was accepted as a performance major at this high-quality conservatory.  I chose not to go because financially it would have been hard, but to this day I believe it was the high ceilings and carved doors that really frightened me out of the opportunity of a lifetime.  Oh, the places that I might have gone. 

Four years later, I decided against grad school with the same ingrained beliefs in my inadequacy.  Why even try if I am destined to fail?  The mystic Yoda says that there is no try, therefore in the choice between do and do not, I do not every time.  After all these years, I am surprised to find that Master Yoda, while perhaps being technically accurate, is nevertheless wrong.  It is perhaps good to try.

The Dawn Treader passes through a dark island of fog, where nightmares come true, where Lucy clings to the deck and whispers for Aslan.  Only she hears him whisper back: "Courage, dear heart."

Courage, dear heart.  Have I not commanded you?  Be strong and courageous!  Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.  

I work next to my manager for half an hour during a slow day, silent.  I should be asking him about time off at Christmas, but I am too afraid of the dreaded and inevitable disappointment.  When I get home I find, enclosed in a letter from my mom, a quotation from Francois Fenelon.  "There is only one way to love God: to take not a single step without Him, and to follow with a brave heart wherever He leads."  My heart is not brave in this course of His leading.  It is shirking, shy, slothful to try where it does not expect to succeed.  I run from my potential because I fear not being able to live up to it.  I run from my strengths because I may be forced to learn their weaknesses.

Breathing comes shallow and Aslan's voice whispers again to my cringing soul.  Courage, dear heart.

Migraine Rejoicing

A day of dizziness, of increasing pain, of eyes shut against light and ears aching against overwhelming noise, leaves me emotionally crippled by night.  Tears are quick even when I see the comedy in them.  When the pressure lifts and my head is no longer pinched, the feeling is indescribable.  I will try to describe it anyway.

Relief from a migraine opens floodgates of joy and thanksgiving.  Dizziness departs and my eyes can look once again painlessly towards windows.  I have noticed time and again how beautiful the world is right after a headache finally eases off of my brain.  Colors sparkle, light flashes, the world sings unbidden, and usually unnoticed, but for that day.  I try to hide my laughter as I walk alone down a bike path to reach my church on Sunday morning.  The bikers passing on my left and the joggers avoiding eye contact might think something's wrong with me, when in fact it has seldom been so right.  My appreciation for Mr. Magorium bubbles to the surface in an excess of minute delight.

"Now we wait," says the assistant.  "No," returns Mr. Magorium, "We breathe.  We pulse.  We regenerate.  Our hearts beat, our minds create, our souls ingest.  37 seconds well used is a lifetime."

I wonder, as I note the careful dispersion of glowing morning on sheltered leaves, why my attitude towards all of life lacks the sheen of post-migraine jubilation.  When God lifts the spiritual migraines from my soul, why do I not break into singing as King David?  Where is my daily zest for all things when the Cross, always fresh with Christ's blood shed for my daily guilt, hangs over my now white soul?  Salvation is every day.

"Depression is apt to turn us away from the ordinary commonplace things of God's creation, but whenever God comes, the inspiration is to do the most natural simple things--the things we would never have imagined God was in, and as we do them we find He is there."  ~Oswald Chambers

All of me becomes light when my physical body finds relief. My eternal soul is granted relief every day.  Ought I to take it any more for granted just because it is all the more common?  I hear cicadas hum, and feel cool wood beneath my feet, and my pen scratches across the page.  My head is dizzy again, but I still sing praises because my soul is set free.  Paul, in seven chapters of Romans, reaches a painfully acute dilemma.  "Wretched man that I am!  Who will set me free from the body of this death?"  His words scream.  I hear a pause before his next hushed sentence:  "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"  Chapter eight is victory.  It is relief from the migraine.  It is ice on the back of Paul's head, peppermint on the temples, Excedrin taking effect, eyes wide open toward the light.  It is life, and the life is the light of the world.

We breathe.  We pulse.  We regenerate.  

"Bring my soul out of prison, So that I may give thanks to Thy name; The righteous will surround me, For Thou wilt deal bountifully with me." ~Psalm 142 

Comic Unawares

If I were a joke, I wouldn't be an elegant, dinner conversation remark that causes sophisticated people to smile smugly in acknowledgement of the witty banter.  I would be the kind of in-your-face punch line that makes five year olds giggle in church during the pastoral prayer.

Today I walked in to town via my normal jaywalking route past street lights.  There is a Starbucks being built, to go with the quiet restaurants and business offices that line this little shopping center.  Lost in my thoughts, and growing rather warm in the sun, I thought at first the noise I heard was accidental.  Then I heard it again: a breathy, feeble, distant kind of whistle.  It is a man.  It is a man building a place where pretentious upper class people will get their daily dose of caffeine and have business meetings with prospective interns, and where poor college students will splurge during finals weeks in order to study off campus for a few hours/days.  This man, busy in his important work, was taking a break to acknowledge my existence, however briefly, in his world.  And he was doing it poorly.  Perhaps his lips were dry, or he didn't know how to whistle very well, or he was trying too hard.  Whatever the case, the noise was almost unnoticeable. 

I walked on.  Ignoring the compliment, I realized all too late the opportunities I had missed.  I could have thanked the young man for the compliment but explained how his notice of my physical attractiveness actually  does my overall personhood no favors.  I could have looked confused before asking in a surprised, bemused way if he was trying to whistle.  I could have waved and given him the number of the local Jimmy John's.  I could have shown him how to whistle.

I was given the cue for a joke, and I never picked it up.  How often does that happen in my life, and I never notice?

Today I crouched low over a bridge covered by excrement in order to take pictures of ducks that wanted Saltines.  I got drooled on while sunbathing by an enormous dog who still has weight to gain before adulthood.  I cried over a dying horse in a children's book, and briefly considered whom from my college years I would invite to my wedding, were there such a thing.  I bought bananas, grapes, peanut butter, and Saltines from Harris Teeter and traipsed them across a parking lot, four lanes of traffic, and a small college campus.  I got impatient waiting for my bananas to freeze and made a peanut butter banana split smoothie without peanut butter on accident.  I cleaned the blender twice because peanut butter is important.

On a daily basis, I sleep with a fuzzy green Seuss bird that I named Leroy.  I write "I like my men like I like my __" jokes in a little notebook.  I break out in songs that I don't know the words to, and end up mumbling or humming most of the way.  Sometimes I give up entirely on words and sing songs in solfege.  I take every possible opportunity to make a pun, and sometimes laugh at puns that people make accidentally.

My whole being is unintentionally comical, and in the typical fashion of a comic straight man, I am unaware of it.  I wrote a status today about the whistling man, because I thought it was funny, then half an hour later deleted it because I was suddenly concerned that it sounded like I was bragging about someone whistling at me.  Gross.  I found a bowl of watermelon rinds that I hid from my roommate, because I wanted to feed them to the chickens instead of letting her throw them away.  I threw them away, because they've been hidden for three days and I gave up.

Here is where I fail too often, in refusing to accept awkward situations as Divine gifts.  All too often God sets me up perfectly for a great joke and I just leave His cue in the grass, where it sits until it gets stale and I can't use it anymore.  In this stand-up comedy relationship with God, I am the straight man who is laughed at because of her very unwillingness to get the joke.  The fact that God wastes so many hilarious situations on me is clear evidence of His love for me.  My cup overflows.

Lost: Words.

"Bitterness is a paralytic," says the Cumberbatch Sherlock, and I wince a trifle self-consciously.  I can't move.  There is nothing to invite me into living.  I am waiting for something that I don't know, that doesn't come, and doesn't come, and doesn't come.  Waiting for a moment in which I say, "This is why I am here.  This is my reason."  Dragging my feet through a logical plan that ought to be exciting, pulling my sled behind me through mud and ice, weighted down by an unknown gravity.  I forge my chains like Marley, link by link and yard by yard, coiling them around and around me to move too slowly through a fleeting life.

I do what anyone might do in such a circumstance.  I memorize poetry.  I read it before sleep every night, and collect its gems carefully, as if storing away treasure for an unknown future.  It surrounds my desk.  Fawcett, Green, Donne, Southey, Frost, Herbert.  I seem driven to be engulfed in other people's words at the very time that I can't write or even speak my own.  All is a chaotic silence within me.

Sometimes you don't realize what you have, until you lose it.  Now that I can't even write my thoughts, I miss those words I didn't realize I had.  My pen hovers night after night above the page, eager to spill its ink out of my scattered mind and into rivulets of meaning, but nothing.  Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and nothing happens.

I read.  Frustrated, I play Bach faster than I ought, and I play Chopin with all the emotion I can't express in writing.  I look for my words in gratitude, in prayer, in conversations, in music, and I don't just feel that I have lost something precious, but that I myself am lost.  Lost without the words that have become all-important.  Lost without the freshly inked pages of my soul.  Lost without my one human medium of communication.

The solution is laughable, so I laugh at it unrestrictedly.  I am not lost without my one human medium of communication, because there isn't one human medium of communication.  "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!" shrieks a funny little man from years ago, and I grin helplessly but happily as I sit at my little desk and realize my mistake.  I looked for my words in gratitude, in prayer, in conversations, in music, not because they would magically give my words back, but because these things are my words.  These things are my human communication, fragile and eternal.

Gratitude describes the blessing, prayer worships the Giver, conversation fills surprising dialogues, music speaks the very soul.  Words.  And in the middle of this entirely unsurprising yet wonderful discovery, The Word, not my own but of Another, sings.  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.  His Glory.  As of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.  Always the abundance.  Always the fullness.

The words will come again.  They never really left me.  Freedom comes with the acceptance of freedom.  I move again, to find that the chains are only in my head.  Marley's ghost is nothing, after all, but a bit of undigested beef.

Seeds and Circus Acts

"If you make happiness or joy or peace your one aim and object in life, it is certain you will never find it; but if you put righteousness as your main aim, and if you become so concerned about righteousness and true living that you can be said to be hungering and thirsting after it, well then, says our Lord, you will be filled with happiness.  It will follow." ~Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

It is not an easy thing to be happy.  I am less than capable of convincing myself that I am happy when, in fact, I am not.  In the parable of the sower I am only too aware of the seed I would be, if not pursued so endlessly by a gracious and all-loving Hound of heaven.  The cares of this world choke my fearful heart.

Joy is not a natural state of being for any, certainly not for me, but I have tasted its tang too often to give up my hope in its revival, when thorns prick me on all sides.  Joy is too alive to be held back, wild, untamed life brimming with laughter and salt tears.  I hate pain, but I welcome the life that is its sponsor. My worst of times is my best of times in the middle of my circus act.  Apathy belongs behind the curtains, the shadows in which it thrives, but I am alive here on the stage and the acrobats throw me and the clowns spin me and I may even get shot out of a cannon, and life is the music playing overlapping strains above a multitudinous roar.  We are life's players, we circus performers, we poor but rich servants of an Audience.

I do not achieve joy any more than I achieve a handspring (which I don't).  I reached my particular brand of rock-bottom before discovering with the help of Dr. Lloyd-Jones, Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, and Romans that the fruit of the Spirit is not reached for from the ground, like an apple hanging above me.  I am grafted into the very tree from which the fruit is borne, and the fruit is therefore not eaten nor collected.  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness...these become my own as I become the tree's own.  Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.

"The business of the gospel of Jesus Christ, therefore, is not to reform the individual or the whole world; it is to take hold of us one by one and to bring us out of it, to give us a new birth, a new life, a new beginning.  It makes men and women children of God." ~Dr. Lloyd-Jones

Pursuing by-products of Christ is the world's way of helping: pursuing peace, or health, or happiness.  Meanwhile, thorns threaten to choke out that which is most dear, and I want to taste not just a fleeting savor of joy or peace or patience, but of life fully lived, life fully enjoyed under the Glory of God who lives.

Here is a seed that ought to have fallen among thorns.  Grace threw me into rich soil.

Out I walk along the taut wire, touching the sky with my outstretched fingers.  Next time, I will ride the unicycle.

A Roman's Road to Grace

Ever since that fateful day two years ago, when I opened my unwilling mouth to admit sins kept secret for fifteen years, I have loved the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans.  I remember that my reading had brought me several chapters into the book before Grace shattered my carefully constructed world.  When I picked my Bible up again, every verse glowed at me with a life I had never seen in color.  I cried at the beauty overwhelming my tired soul, and laughed aloud through my tears at the sudden freedom.

"Oh, the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!"  If my soul could have spoken its reaction to the world during this time, these would have been its words.  Oh, the depths of the riches!  Even as a believer, even as Christ is changing you over the years and opening your eyes to the new and the wonderful, you can still live in a shadow.  It is all too easy to work towards righteousness on your own strength.  With Paul I could boast of my pitiful standards, always deceiving myself into believing that my works pleased God.  Never realizing my works were filth before His glory.  Never realizing that He didn't want my burnt offerings.  Never realizing that He wanted me.

One of the trees outside my window has refused, all this fall, to let her leaves turn color.  She has been nearly as green as in the summer, even after the other trees lost their leaves and stood stark and gray against the November earth.  But it snowed last night, the leaves froze on the branches, and now the ground is carpeted green, leaves fallen all at once.  It was such a November for me two years ago.  Refusing my humanity, denying my weakness, somehow keeping my green leaves long after they should have fallen.  It was such a November for me, fifteen years too long, before the frozen storm thawed my proud heart in a single night.  Die, to live.  No condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

No condemnation!  I, who above all deserved condemnation!  I, who had hidden even from myself the depth of my guilt over the confines of years.  It all burst upon me with curious intensity now, and I was left gloriously shell shocked.  Where sin increased, grace now abounded all the more.  This harlot, who had been forgiven much, learned at last to love much.  For who will bring a charge against God's elect?

Oh, the depth of the riches of wisdom and knowledge of God.  This grace.  This widening, ever expanding, always limitless grace, separating my clinging sin from me as far as the east is from the west.  I did not understand.  But for the first time I understood.  In one gut wrenching, perfect frame of time and space, I knew both the magnitude of my own depravity and the all encompassing, death defying, astronomical strength of a freedom I had never realized.  

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  I am convinced of it, because I, wretched woman that I am, was unable to be separated from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus my Lord.  The words soared on wings that shielded me.  Abba!  Father!

I read Romans with new eyes that November.  I feasted on the Word that had once become flesh and died for my sin.  I drank deeply the wine that flowed over my guilt, and every word was a gift, and every grace was a miracle, and all things were grace, for from Him and through Him and to Him were all things.

And such they are still.  May I remember the eyes that saw so clearly, that November two years ago.  May I remember the heart that held so tightly onto living words with the desperate joy of one long-starved for this one central truth.  May I never forget the furious grace that destroyed deceptive chains.  Who will set me free from the body of this death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.

A Caterpillar's Question

"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.

Being told all your life to be yourself can be restricting.  Who am I?

I am only too eager to be different, if what I think I am is my identity.  I want to be smarter, wiser, more open, more gracious, always more of what I deem good and less of what I deem bad.  Less private, less awkward, less uncomfortable.  By some God-ordained miracle I escaped from the too common obsession with beauty of a physical and even sexual nature~what could I do about a flyaway shock of red hair and large hands anyway?  Inner beauty is what I have been told to value~goodness, truth, intelligence~and value it I have, to the detriment of all else more grace-filled.

Because of course, constant reminders of inner beauty reminds a young heart that she is filled only with the ugly.  Don't look.  Too dark for holy eyes to see.  "Confidence is the sign of a Godly woman," I heard sharp voices declare, ignorant of the shrinking girl at the edge of the circle.  Already fearful of letting others see, that giveaway lack of confidence grew exponentially, a cloud of anxiety darkening above a young soul.

"You!" said the Caterpillar contemptuously.  "Who are you?"

Who are you? Asked a wise, drugged up caterpillar of a confused girl.  The same caterpillar, this time dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt and carrying books of systematic theology.
Who are you?

Not good enough.
Not smart enough.
Not wise enough.

We fight a battle, not against the innocent others who speak thoughtlessly, but against the merciless, grinning forces of evil who take careless words and spin tales of such worthlessness that battle after battle in this bloody war is lost at a single withering glance.

I seem doomed to failure.  The flaming arrows have for so long pierced my thin faith that I know unmistakably my own wretched ignorance in all that I most wish to be most knowledgeable.  Words continue to come slowly when I most wish for the articulation and clarity to communicate my own thoughts.
Who are you?

Not smart enough.
Not wise enough.
Not good enough.

I don't know how to step outside of my own viewed incompetency into a better understanding of my own skills.  I try to show people what I see and am only frustrated by their dismissal of my sight as warped.  But what is true.  Who am I.  Why do I not understand the truth from outside of myself that others claim to know?
Who are you?

Not wise enough.
Not good enough.
Not smart enough.

Wrestling with my inadequacy makes my shame ever more tangible.  Where is the confident woman of inner beauty who I am supposed to represent?  This fearful specter of some Victorian imagination haunts me with her gentle smile and perfect poise.  She understands the philosophies of ages past, recites all the grandest poetry, argues ever graciously her perfect opinion with easy clarity, and I hate her.  I hate this creature who stands by my elbow wherever I go and corrects my reality with her own falsehood.

Who am I?  Flesh and blood, faulty, hilariously real.  A sinner, bought with Son.  Entirely bought.  No longer slave to mortality and frail faith.

Who am I, asks Valjean in a far grander melody than my own.  Who are you, asks the Caterpillar with obvious scorn.

Who am I?
Not good enough.  Imperfect.  Faulty, but covered in faultless blood.  Once dead, but now alive by Grace alone (around which all other things orbit). I am holy who by her own power is only the chief among sinners.  I stand before all my imagined juries of disapproval and judgment with the grace to be brought to me at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Keep smoking that hookah, Caterpillar.  Keep reciting your classifications and sage advice, flannel shirted one.  Keep pursuing that inner beauty, you sharp but womanly tongues.

I wear the righteousness of Christ.