"I am not looking to be understood anymore...I want to understand."

Have you seen the movie "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," about St. Francis? Recommendation of the day. I am eager to read some good stuff about Francis when I get back.

I am leaving TX on Sunday afternoon, headed for PA for one night, then flying out of NYC on Monday night...with a (too-short) stop at London Heathrow, then a landing in Accra, Ghana.
Thank you for your prayers; a priceless Christmas gift they are to me. Pray that I will listen and obey the Holy Spirit in all things at all times, and that I would radiate the goodness and love and truth of God in ways beyond anything I could ask or imagine or generate. With openness to learn and a mind following Jesus' track for it.

Please pray for the kids I'll be meeting, too. And the dear kids I'm leaving behind!
Merry Christmas and happy new year, one and all. God's peace and the the riches of poverty be yours until we meet again.

Particularly for a girl in the Ukraine who digs music...

So I'm going to turn the venerable old Archos Jukebox mp3-er on and set it to 'random' and see what it sings...I shall just let it run till I have to leave for work.
let's boogie.

1. Town Called Malice (The Jam) -- any good session has to start with this, no?
2. Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat (Mozart)
3. The Phony King of England (from Robin Hood)... and down with that scurrrrrvy Prince John!
4. I'm Troubled (Flatt & Scruggs). Good banjoing.
5. Rain Must Fall (Queen)... oh, Mel, I could just see you tapping your feet Billy-style to "Don't Stop Me Now" on a Ukrainian bus. Delightful.
6. Someone to Watch Over Me (Chet Baker). Chet Baker, James Dean and my dearest brother are somehow linked in my mind.
7. Free--Take My Life (Jill Paquette)
8. Here with Me (MercyMe)
9. Limes (Little Women ST)...from you, Mel! :-)
10. Mr. Yunioshi (from the Breakfast at Tiffany's ST)... have you seen the movie? Mr. Yunioshi is a staggeringly embarrassing part of it. :-)
11. The arrival of Tinkerbell (Hook ST; wow, we're on a soundtrack roll)... also from you, Mel-o. You know, for many years of my childhood I could not fathom that Captain Hook and Dustin Hoffman could possibly be the same person.
12. It is Well With My Soul (Hymns in the Vineyard)
13. When Summer Ends (ST of Lewis & Clark documentary). I love PBS documentaries that pick you up and make you an invisible participant in another world within the world.
14. We Are What You Say (Sufjan Stevens). This man makes good music. First song I heard was "Holland" while on a roadtrip with Popo; we went to Holland, Michigan, where we were born. I think Sufjan takes the title for best Holland, Michigan song of all time. I'm not sure he has any competition there, but even if he did, he'd take the title.
15. As I Love You (Carmen McRae)
16. Playmate (Willie Nelson)...what a great album 'Rainbow Connection' is. Willie's voice is like a homey shed to live in. The best of forts.
17. When You're in Love (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers ST). Tak...
18. On the Road to Find Out (Cat Stevens)
19. I Love to Boogie (T. Rex) Okay, so I cheated and picked this one on purpose, but it's almost time for me to leave for work and the Archos missed the boat on this one.
Goooo Billy! Spin it!

Okay, I'm off to "work," or as I like to think of it, "chatting with two-year-olds."
keep dancing.
i love you forever; always be yourself.

where the treetops glisten...

what. on. earth. Snow. Are you kidding? So it's more like a sheet of glazed snow coneage. More ice than snow. But it is officially snow. It is making driving impossible. And it is here. In Texas. I didn't think it was possible for snow to fall anyplace I call home. This is new. Apparently I am not a human heat wave. Merry Christmas!

One of the coolest people I know.

You meet the greatest souls working in a daycare.

He's always been faithful.

I saw somebody this weekend that I hadn't seen for a long time; just ran into him at Starbucks. I won't bore you with all the details but it rattled me somehow, made me look back at the last five or six years and I suddenly got scared. This guy is in his first year at Harvard med school. He was wearing the Harvard t-shirt and everything--the whole 9 yards. :-) We were old school rivals in a way, back in the day, and we've taken such different paths since then. It was weird to see somebody 'grown up' after several years, yes, but something more than that shook me up inside and I couldn't shake it...

It's not that I'm ashamed of the path God's taken me on since high school. Working for Wycliffe in Canada and the U.S., traveling North America and Europe, Bible school at Capernwray in England, time in the Philippines with God and my grandfather, precious time with my family, cementing my best-friendship with my brother, counseling at Handi*Camp and now going to Ghana for a few weeks to minister to kids with disabilities there, my job here working with kids I love profoundly... there are so many things I wouldn't have missed for the world, and some very, very precious people that I would never have given up meeting. And I'm happy with the distance-ed program I'm doing now to get the infamous degree.
I used to struggle with feeling inferior because I didn't take the "normal" path. But now I think of who I would have been if I had kept my nose in the textbooks and gone straight from academic pressure in high school to academic pressure in college for four incubatorial years (is that a word?)... and I know it wasn't the right place for me. It wasn't God's place for me. And it wouldn't have made me more like Him or showed me what I was supposed to see of Him. Which is all that matters.

Back to the guy. Running into this guy scared me not because I'm really ashamed of the last five or six years, but because I am aware (and ashamed) that I have not been living up to those years recently. It took me some serious reflection to figure this out.

I don't have a 'field' yet. I'm not three years from becoming a surgeon. I'm not sure what I'm here for specificially. But I know WHO I am here for, and I have not been living up to that with all my heart and soul and passion. I was unsettled by this encounter because I suddenly felt unambitious and sedentary. I have been passionless and robotic lately. Meeting up with this guy and looking back on my past five years helped me to realize once again that I am excited about God, and that is who I am. That is who He has made me through the odd variety of things He's taken me through. And I need to express my gratitude for the gifts of the past five years by being unashamed and living out the lessons with joy. With all the energy and excitement and strength that other people pour into their goals.

Just because I don't have a specific earthly goal of my own to be ambitious about doesn't mean that I can't be just as alive, passionate and confident as superstudents...I can be MORE so, because I get to be passionate about the Living God who is worthy of receiving ALL the combined weight, color and noise of ALL the earth's passions.

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this here, really; it's kind of personal and I'm still in prayer and thought about it. But for whatever reason, here it is. I guess I just want to shout that I'm AWAKE again (!) because God is worth shouting about!...God has given me some amazing lessons and experiences and people and places and trials and joys over the last few years, and I want to live up to them, seize them and share them and live out what I DO know, even though there is so very, very much that I DON'T know. It's time to stop focusing on my weakness, real and true though it may be, and begin focusing on His strength again. It's a fine balance, isn't it, remaining aware of your own weakness yet not wallowing helplessly in it? The strength of Jesus Christ is in me, and I am proud of that. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses...I think I ignore the words "boast" and "gladly" there too often.

So running into this very nice future surgeon helped to shake me awake from a stupor I've been in for weeks...God has some amazing and unexpected ways of working. I can be excited about and proud of what He's done in my life and where He's taken me.
This is long. And wordy. Shall I toss it out into the great unknown? Sure, why not.
God is so good. He is so forgiving and so beautiful and He is love and He is mystery and He is justice. I will live in the bright orange joy of that forever.

in celebration of the completely undeserved grace of God to me over the past five years; a quick fly-over...(with way too few pictures of important people and places...I don't have a lot on my computer :-) ):

the point.

do you fail all the time, spiritually?
I do.
do you disconnect with God and start living on autopilot, like a sleepwalker? I do.
do you sometimes just want life to be like your dreams, bizarre though your dreams may be, just because it's easy and there you just are, without choosing?
I do.
Are these necessary cycles? Am i "doomed" (destined?) to repeat them forever, just so I can come to Jesus freshly again? Maybe. Sort of.

Do we make a big enough deal of the fact that this is the POINT? The point of Christianity? That we fail and fail and fail again and are loved and forgiven and loved and forgiven, ad infinitum...?
Do those of us who are passionate about Jesus get so caught up in being 'revolutionary' and passionate that we forget to talk about this? So caught up that we forget to tell everyone at the rallies and the worship sessions that when they go home, they will fail? Have "passion for Jesus" and "vision" replaced "works" as the words that blind us to grace?

Maybe we should talk about our failing, acknowledge it, and spread the word that it is forgiveable, that it is forgiven every day, that it is taken into account in God’s mind long before He gave Himself up for us, and long before we decided to get ‘revolutionary.’
Revolutionaries weeping in miserable repentance…are there more of them out there?

Repentance is good. Conviction is from the Holy Spirit.
Hopelessness is not. Self-hatred is not. Giving up because you didn't live up to your own vision-- giving up to sink into a sleeplife--is not of Jesus.

How often do we really hear and get that this is the whole point: we will fail and God knew that and He loved enough to pay for it so He could forgive and we could live joyfully...over and over again. See, that makes me want to come back.

That makes me want to wake up: The father running out to meet His son, His daughter, not to scold, but to embrace and say "let's go on. I love you." This is the message we're spreading, this is why we can be joyful, not militant, in our passion for Jesus.

I keep learning this over and over again in a million different ways. Maybe someday it will sink in permanently and become the fiber of my being. We're all "disabled," folks. And no one's hiding it from God.

GOD talks about Himself.

"Am I only a God nearby,"
declares the LORD,
"and not a God far away?

Can anyone hide in secret places
so that I cannot see him?"
declares the LORD.
"Do not I fill heaven and earth?"
declares the LORD.

-Jeremiah 23:23-24

cottongrass in greenland

east of eden

I saw the Elia Kazan movie 'East of Eden' this afternoon. It's a film interpretation of Steinbeck's novel, which I haven't read; I imagine if I did, the people and atmosphere I would picture as I read would be very different from the film.

But that doesn't mean this isn't an excellent film. It really is. I'd say that's mostly because of James Dean, though the whole thread of thought about Cain, Abel, acceptable offerings, and the dangers of self-righteousness...that's pretty important as well. . . . . But there's something about James Dean. I found a commentator that I think captured it pretty well. (Does anyone care about this? It doesn't matter. I'm sharing it anyway... Maybe you've seen a James Dean movie and maybe you've been drawn to him. )

So the commentator (Rosey Golds) writes:
"...with traditional Hollywood actors or those from the British theatre tradition (Lawrence Olivier for example), you feel … safe. As if nothing can go wrong. You feel you're watching great art through a great 'performance'. And, oddly enough, this distances you from the performer. You simply don't have to worry about them. You know that even if something disastrous or humiliating happens to their character, they'll still manage to retain their dignity. Not so with James Dean.

Dean is authentically awkward, authentically demoralized. . .To watch the Method actor is to engage in voyeurism. To watch the Hollywood actor is to watch a 'presentation'. The Method actor's spontaneity, his deep introspection and vulnerability, the fact that he has drawn his character from his own life experience results in an audience genuinely flinching at what they see. James Dean was one of the best actors at making people flinch — and one of the best at being humiliated. It is this humiliation that is the key to his charisma."

I think that is a very good attempt at capturing the man and the character(s) he plays in words. He does make you flinch. Like real people do. People shouldn't be easy to 'figure out.'

Maybe if I am easy to figure out, I'm putting on a stock character instead of letting my unique and God-created character out. Like Hollywood acting vs. Method acting.
Sometimes I try too hard to make myself 'understandable.'

Toledo

from the Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach song "Toledo"...

But do people living in Toledo
Know that their name hasn’t traveled very well?
And does anybody in Ohio
Dream of that Spanish citadel?

I like this bit o' songage; all the things it gives little glimmers of--the discrepancy between ancientness and history-forgetfulness, between Europe and America, the absurdity of things, the whole "would a rose by any other name smell as sweet" question...shifting identity and wistfulness for something else. Lots of stuff in a little paragraph about Ohio. Good job, Elvis 'n' Burt.

Go saddle the sea

Go saddle the sea, put a bridle on the wind,
before you choose your place.





















(I found this little quote in a book for young folk called 'Go Saddle the Sea,' by Joan Aiken. I've read a couple of her kids-ish books on the side for amusement and general non-televised entertainment lately. Anyway, back to the point. I don't know if this is a real proverb or one invented for the book, but it caught my imagination and my experience and clothed them in imagery. The whole idea of widening perspective in order to be able to see where and whom you truly are. It also makes me want to cross an ocean in an open boat with magical people.)

louis and lions

As I sit here with Louis Armstrong sailing through the air, hot coffee in my belly, the glow of a lamp against a gray and windy evening, and the joy of Jesus in the room...
A couple more thought-inducements from Charles Williams's 'The Place of the Lion,' before too much time elapses and I forget the spirit of the book:

Anthony considers going to the little club of dabblers in metaphysical philosophy, to talk to them about combating the descent of the Archetypes upon the world:
“Some of them might help: they couldn’t all want Archetypes coming down on them, not if they were like most of the religious people he had met. They also probably liked their religion taken mild—a pious hope, a devout ejaculation, a general sympathetic sense of a kindly universe—but nothing upsetting or bewildering, no agony, no darkness, no uncreated light.” (P.74)

How often is that me? Wanting the reality, the truth of God, of Jesus, to come in a watered-down, gentle sitcom-with-a-laugh-track form...something smaller than me... when really it is so much greater; really it is something than can swallow me whole. Something where I can finally lose myself in the beauty of my real purpose--worshipping the Greatest.

Anthony to Damaris about the REALITY of the situation, the REALITY of “ideas”:
“What I think is of no matter,” he answered. “Have I pretended it was? It’s the thing that matters: the truth is in the thing. Heart’s dearest, listen—the things you study are true, and the philosophers you read knew it. The universals are abroad in the world, and what are you going to do about it? Besides write about them.”
“Do you seriously mean to tell me,” she said, “that Power is walking about on the earth? Just Power?”
“Yes,” he answered, and though she added before she could stop herself, “Don’t you even know what a philosophic universal is?” he said no more.
(P.106)

Damaris is so sure that "ideas" are containable, are different from Reality. She will find out in a terrifying way that God is not just an 'idea.'
For now we see through a glass darkly...
face to face someday!!!

points of communion

places on the earth where God lifts the veil of everydayness from your eyes and you are stunned into silence by the way things really Are.

night after night
alone under a pink mosquito net
but not alone at all.
There You were.
And here You are.
(southern Philippines, October-November of last year.)

Charles Williams

have you read any Charles Williams? One of the Inklings--you know, "the C.S. Lewis group." I guess it could just as well be called the Charles Williams group. Anyway. His book "War in Heaven" has been an answer to prayer for me. Continues to be. Challenging and terrifying and wakening. Now I'm reading his "The Place of the Lion," which is more excerptable, so I want to share bits.

There is a character called Damaris; she's a scholar working for a Doctorate in Philosophy who plays around with ideas endlessly, writing papers and making diagrams and having discussions...but with no sense of the Reality behind those ideas. Until the Truth begins to break in on the visible world in a whole new way. Amazingly, there is someone who sees into the innocent, ignorant heart of this woman and loves her, even as she treats him very callously, as an 'idea'... These are his (Anthony's) thoughts on her at this time of incredible change in the universe:

“But she wouldn’t, she would go on thoughtfully playing with the dead pictures of ideas, with names and philosophies, Plato and Pythagoras and Anselm and Abelard, Athens and Alexandria and Paris, not knowing that the living existences to which seers and saints had looked were already in movement to avenge themselves on her. “O you sweet blasphemer!” Anthony moaned, “can’t you wake?” Gnostic traditions, medieval rituals, Aeons and Archangels—they were cards she was playing in her own game. But she didn’t know, she didn’t understand. It wasn’t her fault; it was the fault of her time, her culture, her education—the pseudo-knowledge that affected all the learned, the pseudo-skepticism that infected all the unlearned, in an age of pretence, and she was only pretending as everybody else did in this lost and imbecile century. Well, it was up to him to do something.”

from p.73 of The Place of the Lion, by Charles Williams

eat a brownie, wear a cape.

When the weather changes, something goes funny in me. Does this happen to you? After months and months of feeling heat envelop me when I step out the door, suddenly--very suddenly--there is cold, and it seeps into the house and makes me wear socks and borrow a polar fleece cape of my mother's.

Something about the change...first it's exciting, a little unsettling but exciting...makes the world feel like something completely new. Knocks me off balance. Reminds me of Canada, of England, of Europe, of Pennsylvania. Places that I just pass through. It shocks me that the feeling of these places can penetrate where I live. Surely I should expect it by now, the switch from hot to cold. Yet it shocks me deep every time. Suddenly I can't seem to just get on with things as I normally do; I'm stumped. I wander around aimlessly. My hands are cold. That's weird. Basic questions about my own existence take the place of specific concerns and plans. I look at things that I'm supposed to do, or am planning to do, and I think 'what??' What are these things?

Cold makes me feel like there should be a special event tonight. A concert or a party or a family get together. Must be that Christmas instinct. On the planet Winter, I feel like an alien.

...And all this because it's dropped below 80F.
Don't laugh at me, people from cold places. It's been in the high 90s and the 100s here since forever.
time to eat a brownie.

happythought

I never thought that I could fly
Over the moon in ecstasy
But nevertheless, it's there that I'm
Shortly about to be...

I've got a golden ticket,
I've got a golden ticket,
I've got a golden chance to make my way...
and with a golden ticket, it's a golden day.

Your love broke through...

this morning I spotted a book on the shelves of the wee church library in which I was sitting for a 'newcomers' class at the church I'm going to. I'm not totally sure what I'm doing in the class. But I think God sat me right beneath this book.
I had to check it out. I think I've seen it other places before. Isn't it funny how a book's time in your life sometimes is a long time in coming?

It's the book 'No Compromise. The Life Story of Keith Green.'

It's not the best writing in the world, and maybe it's not even the full-color picture of his life. But it's a person's story, told from the heart. So I'm almost done with it, have hardly been able to put it down today. Testimony books and I are like that.
Melanie, dear one, if you find this, know that your reconnecting me with Keith's music has been a blessing to me. How I miss you.

He's been gone since before I was born. Yet in his philosophy, his passion, Keith feels like the friend I wish were here; we cry out about so many of the same things. So this book was a challenge today, a challenge, a comfort, a friend. Maybe I'm not so crazy after all. Maybe I could even be even 'crazier' and it would be okay...

So many of us find grace, really find and hold onto and treasure GRACE--Abba-love--as a next-phase in our walk with and toward Jesus. Isn't that interesting? It's like a next-stage after striving so hard, wanting so much to be better for Jesus, and then realizing how broken you are and how impossible that is.

I like what Keith wrote in 1980 in his journal: "I used to think discipline and self-control was a natural by-product of a supernatural holiness and revival. but now I see that lack of self-discipline is keeping my holiness (which I already have in Jesus) from controlling my life an coming to the surface. This is a brand-new view, and I believe I've isolated the enemy's greatest stronghold in my life at this time... Discipline is not holiness--nor the way to holiness--it just helps you maintain it."

And feelings are not God, are not always right. But what a gift from Him they are. I wonder if we are so eager to keep ourselves from drowning that we disregard them as a precious tool that He uses if we place them in His hands. It's a tricky tightrope. But God sings. God weeps. God inspires. Let's let ourselves FEEL, as well as know about, His holiness and His glory.

pieces d'aujourdhui

I am about to eat a Limited Edition coffee flavored KitKat. Food with "limited edition" on it always intrigues me and then always ends up at BigLots. Go to Big Lots. You'll see.

It feels as though half of my heart is far far away in the Ukraine.
it is.

Walking to work today I found the word for how I have been feeling. Expectant. It's not a bad feeling. Just restless, uneasy, unsettled. When I realize what the feeling is, I actually realize it's a good feeling. But it's easy to mistake it for unhappiness. I feel like something's going to happen, like things are going to change, like the world is strange and God is stirring up my insides and the way I see. I like being able to hold onto an awareness that the world is strange. That's a blessing. But i also feel like I'm living some strange life that was assigned to me. Who's skin am I in?

Music today... Hem's CD "Rabbit Songs", which is so nice to study by and have as background to live against. Delirious's "Find me in the river".

Today's reading... Genesis, from Jacob and Esau to the end of the book. What a crazy, crazy bunch of people. What a crazy, crazy story. It's not the story we've been told, told in bits in Sunday School. It's so much stranger and bigger and more cohesive. Things aren't packageable in little wee lessons with corresponding flannel figures and easy morals for the day. This stuff is pre-Mosaic law, pre-temple, pre-a lot of revelation of God. Whom were these men, these 'patriarchs,' worshipping? Whom were they hearing, wrestling, questioning?
El. YHWH. God Almighty.
How little they knew OF Him compared to all the revelation we are privileged to have today, through the Word, through Christ Jesus. Yet how much they KNEW Him, the real Him.

How far we have to go. How much more of Him is there yet to be revealed?

Work thoughts: Do you think kids are really supposed to be put in large groups as they are in daycares, etc.? maybe it's just that I'm not made to be a leader of large groups of kids, but I'm not so sure that it's even right or natural for things to be this way. If I ever started any kind of childcare it would be a new breed where every kid or every two kids had just one adult assigned to them, and group-coming-together activities were planned creatively, cooperatively and joyfully.

Melanie, I miss you.

that's really all that's on my mind and heart right now
except for my prayers for you and my thoughts of where you must be and my wonderishness at how you are feeling and what you are experiencing.

be well, dearest friend. it is well with our souls.

pieces of today

last dream of the morning: a dream of love and acceptance, a person who saw and cared. a hand held.

waking up: I am a new creation, no more in condemnation; here in the grace of God I stand...

studying: on the 'theology of relationships' that flows through Genesis 2-3... "Yahweh, the true Creator God and God of Israel, created humanity personally and desires only good for them. Of course this original fellowship was ruined by sin, but this does not make ours tory of the original relationship irrelevant for later readers. The same Yahweh revealed here is the Yahweh who delivered the Israelite readers from Egypt. His care and concern have not changed though the ideal circumstances have. He still wants to be with His people."
(from From Creation to the Cross by Albert H. Baylis).

thinking: reading Genesis really makes you sensitive to any pettiness in yourself. A wide view, a big picture, an all-of-time sense, the Big Plan... this makes one feel small in a very good way. A way that is enveloped in the sovereignty of Yahweh. What grace He shows, to want to be with His people. His people me, His people you, His people Israel.

music: I can see that my hands are trembling, I can see that my legs are weak...and I know that my heart is hurting, and I know that my soul, it aches...and I know that it seems I'm failing but I will overcome... (how?) OH LORD, I AM STRONG IN YOU, OH LORD I'M WISE IN YOU. OH LORD, I AM FREE IN YOU, so I will overcome.....
...and on the road to beautiful, my seasons always change...
...a love where there doesn't have to be a rule for it...
You're a revolution...I wanna be revolutionary...
How great Your love for us, how great our love for You...
(Charlie Hall, Andy Smith who has the honor of being Mel's brother, David Crowder band)
We ARE on the road to beautiful, to seeing God face to face, directly, as in Eden but even fuller, better, purer. Our road to beautiful is bigger than any one of us. My job today is to love, and to be free in Jesus.

work: six little wee babies exploring tiny pieces of the world, their attention and energy totally focused on a bouncing Tigger or a little piece of plastic... how little we change as we grow.
why is it that many people can so easily love a baby, yet they are so cold and unaccepting of different adults...when we all have the same shortcomings and nearsightedness? Babies seem to love just about everyone. Become as little children...

Oi! Dancin' boy!

What do you call a happy muffin? :-)

Oh, Mel, I miss you.
Life is moving a little too fast for me all of a sudden, and I am feeling a little more alone in it than I really am. Maybe it just takes a little time to adjust when you change places and when you are just getting used to having this incredibly joyful treasure of a sisterperson in your life again, and the in one swift motion, she's gone. Again. Makes me a little scared to get so close to a person, because it's so confuzzling to lose them. Knocks the wind out of me. It's so much firmer, stabler...and colder... to just be separate from everyone, to think that I'm on my own, that no one else but Jesus really really really truly cares or understands. And it's true in a way--He understands as no one else can and He's always with me in a way no one else can be. There's nothing like the relationship I've been given with Him.

Yet guess what, Kate? Human relationships can be so blessed by Him, so used by Him, so wonderful--more so than I ever really believed till, as the song says, 'till there was you.' It's honestly a little bit of a scary revelation because it means the possibility in the world of so much more pain than was possible when I was so much more cut off, so much 'safer' by being on my own island. But it's a beautiful revelation at the same time. More beautiful than scary. Because it's a window into the love of God, that He would give me a friend like you and a friendship like this. To realize that depth and wonder and seeking God wholeheartedly can be found not only in solitude, but in glorious 'running partnership.' We knew this before. But this past week has given me the gift of feeling it again, and to a new depth. BE STRONG AND COURAGEOUS, says the Lord.

I love to booooogie on a Saturday night.
And on we go......

thank you for your prayers

having a pretty hard time emotionally; camp training starts tomorrow. no time to post, but thank you for your prayers...
love
kate

findthekitty 

We have the most beautiful kittens living in our backyard now. They brighten my days. I had to take findthekittypictures because they are a bit skittish...

Sent two by two -- you and Jesus

"He wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them,
not as "professionals" who know their clients' problems and take care of them,
but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known,
who care and are cared for,
who forgive and are being forgiven,
who love and are being loved.

Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead...[but] laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.

We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God."

Something to chew on. I'm putting it up as a way to help myself chew on it longer and get this thought deeper into me-- and myself deeper into this thought.

It's from Henri Nouwen's 'In the Name of Jesus.' How broken we all are, especially me, and how loved! How small are the differences between our levels of brokenness and wisdom, when compared with the huge gulf between us and the holy, all-wise God. We're all in the same boat, all 'handicapped'... and yet Jesus makes something electrifyingly beautiful out of us when He brings us together in His love!

yesterday evening. 

In the cathedrals  

Cathedrals

(a song by Jump, Little Children)

In the shadows of tall buildings
Of fallen angels on the ceilings
Oily feathers in bronze and concrete
Faded colors, pieces left incomplete
The line moves slowly past the electric fence
Across the borders between continents

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is

In the shadows of tall buildings
The architecture is slowly peeling
Marble statues and glass dividers
Someone is watching all of the outsiders
The line moves slowly through the numbered gate
Past the mosaic of the head of state

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is

In the shadows of tall buildings
Of open arches endlessly kneeling
Sonic landscapes echoing vistas
Someone is listening from a safe distance
The line moves slowly into a fading light
A final moment in the dead of the night

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is...

And my soul wells up in hallelujah... 

"He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind..."

I am reading the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Have you read it?

Entering its world intensifies a longing I'd forgotten I had, one I didn't know how to voice. It's a longing for life to be this way, for people to see this way and speak this way -- slow and wondering. The world my heart sees and rejoices to be alive in is the world she is writing about. It stands at odds with the world we've built, of busyness and titles and papers and 'success'.

It's a longing for other people to see the existing marvelous, to help me live there by joining in. I still hope and plan to live seeing this world of bizarre and uncountable Created wonders as the real one. Partly because I just don't have it in me to live in the busyworld.

While watching Tinker creek on a sunny evening when the sunlight would suddenly catch the scales of a fish and flash, while petals float along the creek surface...she writes,
" So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world's turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water
... When I see this way I see truly.

I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name. Litanies hum in my ears; my tongue flaps in my mouth-- Ailinon, allelulia! "

What a world of unwordable wonders we live in, and how often I stumble through it without seeing.

"Do you love me?"

"Knowing God's heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begin to invade the human soul this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any conditions or limits."
-Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus

To be fully known and yet STILL fully loved...

From Don Miller's In Search of God Knows What:

"It must have been wonderful to spend time with Christ, with Somebody who liked you, loved you, believed in you, and sought a closeness foreign to skin-bound man. A person would feel significant in His presence. After all, those who knew Christ personally went on to accomplish amazing feats, proving unwavering devlotion. It must have been thrilling to look into the eyes of God and have Him look back and communicate that human beings, down to the individual, are of immense worth and beauty and worthy of intimacy with each other and the Godhead. Such an understanding fueled a lifetime of joy and emotional health among the disciples that neither crowds of people jeering insults, nor prison, nor torture, nor exclusion could undo. They were faithful to the end, even to their own deaths.

People don't go out and get tortured and arrested for somebody who doesn't love them... I know in my heart that they were not living the lives they lived or dying the deaths they died because they were doing something "right." Sure it was right, but these guys must have been loved by Christ, and their motivation came primarily from this idea. There is no other explanation for their devotion...It is true that it is a powerful occurrence to have somebody look you in the eye and say you are worth something. ...[Jesus] went around looking people in the eye to tell them they were beautiful, that He stood as a rock for them, a Being who, for the rest of their lives, they could look back to and hear in their minds, and envision in their memories, God saying to them the world had been lying, and you are indeed beautiful."

......................

I want to spend time imagining this, letting it become real, God Himself, Jesus Christ, looking back at me, even me, directly, and loving me, even while He knows everything in me; cutting to the core and saying "I LOVE YOU." When I try to follow that thought, even for just a second, I get this twinkle, this briefly overwhelming rush of sensation that says "now THAT is rest. now THAT is motivation." It says "this is HOME."

No, Kate, you are not humble. It's even deeper. Keep going.

while personwatching at an outdoor theater in Illinois last summer, I saw an example of what love is not, and then turned and saw that in myself.
I want to think about humility tonight so I'm reingesting what God showed me that afternoon.
Wrote:

Love is not petting someone for agreeing with your opinions, boosting your ego, making you feel right or powerful or better than any other human being.

Don't seek this self-glorification in love--you won't find it in the real thing. You don't deserve it in anything. And no one deserves to be your flunky.
Love seeks to glorify God together.
Love learns, is open to growth
is humble.

Love for God's created ones is not buying and settling up for yourself first, living in comfort and building up your identity, prettying yourself and priding yourself on your opinions, tastes.

Humility is deep, deep, deeper still...
Look, see the danger of priding yourself on understanding, or on having opinions, of trying to "make something of yourself"
only God can make something of me.

subtle traps; pride is so see-through and empty.
and all beauty is found in holiness
its Source.
everywhere you see beauty, feel the tingle of tender color in a breeze, a breath, a strain
is a clue, a hint, a taste, just one hue
of the explosion, the color cloud
of the Glorious Son of God.

generations

Was looking at some old pictures today, of my grandparents when they were newly married and in missionary training in Mexico, of my dad when he was a college kid coming out of the jungles of Bolivia to go to college in the frozen north of the U.S.. I looked at my mom's wedding book, at the program from their wedding, the songs picked, the Scriptures read. And their faces, their choices, their ways of thinking and being and treating one another... all of this got me thinking about how tremendously true it is that our choices have untraceable ripples.

The way my grandparents chose to live, chose to be within their family, their personalities and ways of looking at the world... these things have permeated my life through my father. They're a part of who I am too, or they've shaped me to resist them. They've shaped so many things. Who I want to be and who I don't want to be, what I think is important and what I have decided is not important. And back and back you could go, and see why my grandparents turned out as they did, and theirs before them, and back and back...

What a tremendous plan God has. Absolutely tremendous and so incredibly, incredibly intricate. The details He has to orchestrate to shape personalities, the events that individuals experience as so so big in their lives, and then they move on, and either remember or forget, and die. But their reactions, the results, the Selves they could never have consciously put together on their own.... these have infinite effects.

The Sara Groves song "Generations" actually spontaneously started playing in another room of the house--by someone else's choice, not mine, right after I'd been looking through these pictures and thinking about this. "Remind me of this with every decision...generations will reap what I sow... I could pass on a curse or a blessing to those I will never know..."

To me right now this is a reminder that even when I may feel there is no one here for me to lead by example, no one for me to be an example to or to help or consistently serve, still I am affecting someone. Of course I am responsible to God, but I AM having an impact on people, too--the 'audience' that will be affected somehow so many years from now, by who I choose to be. I choose to be a Christ-follower in these moments, to let God shape me in these moments that will add up to years, because it is Right. But it's good to know too that it goes even beyond Him and me.

I want to pass on a blessing somehow by being God's, by being joyful, by being a lover of Jesus, by loving others deeply. That's going to be used somehow. It's a thread that God can pick up and weave into His delicate, intricate, tremendous and beautiful Plan. This whole thought is so crazy-amazing.

on hiding in words

From the poem "House of Words," by Herbert Morris

"I, finder of refuge, maker of refuge,
in words, whose life, indeed, was spun of words,
spun and respun, spun once more, then respun,
a life which has itself become a refuge
(words, in a world bordered by blood, on one side,
by the tumult of passion on the other;
the thinness, yes, the thinness of one's life..."

I hide in words and abstractions. And I put barriers between myself and the living God by doing this. When I feel far from Him again, feel unforgiveable and give up on myself, I can look back and see that I've slipped into making Him an abstraction again, making Him a concept in a labelled jar on a shelf, or making Him a trunk full of baggage that is not really Him. I get tired and fireless when I follow a 'lifestyle' or a 'conceptual framework' or a discipline rather than following Jesus. Jesus is not an identity for me or a word for me to throw around like a common label. He is a Person. And He goes deeper than words. Really. Deeper than these words. Deeper than any catchy turn of phrase or dramatic sentence. He's REAL. What a relief to know there is actual purity in the universe. Pure intent, pure motives, pure honesty, pure communication, TOTAL purity. I think that's part of the definition of holiness.

reservations

blogs are a little scary to me. I'm wary of wallowing, of dramatizing, of getting self-centered or trying to sound a certain way for whoever. Because these are things I know are in me. these are reasons I stopped doing just about anything artistic for public consumption.

i just set this up so i could comment on Mel's blog. But I find myself weirdly drawn to it, I guess just the desire to create something. This isn't going to be a consistent thing. I don't have the time, energy or desire for an online obssession. I don't like what it would do to me. I don't really want to be aware of an audience while I write, other than the Audience of God.

But the urge I feel to share thoughts of God in order to make myself think, and maybe, who knows, to get some True Thoughts from other people... this is pretty strong today, and so for today at least this is an active Thing. Sporadic, it will be. Mostly things I have already written, it will be. Stopped if I become self-focused, it will be. Mmmm. The pull of sharing is strong in you, young blog.

Hernando. My study companion. 

for Mel

Hey Mel, this is for you. I am now official so I can become a PostingWhirlwind on your blog. I love you and I thank God for you. Thank you for your sistership.