So, voting happens on Tuesday. Should be a hoot.
Anyway, here in California there's this item on the ballot known as Proposition 8, which is essentially a measure that would add a line saying that marriage is between one man and one woman to our state constitution. It's fiercely contested, and is the most funded campaign (over $25 million on each side) in the US, second only to the presidential election.
Evangelical Christians, including Focus on the Family and Rick Warren, and other social conservatives in the state have been adamant in their support for the measure, while a smattering of others, including Google and Steven Spielberg, have been taking very public stances against the measure. Chuck Colson went so far as to say that if Proposition 8 does not pass (and thus same-sex marriage remains valid here in California) it will be a modern day Armageddon.
I will be voting against Proposition 8 for a number of reasons.
The primary reason that I will be voting against Prop 8 is because I believe very firmly in the separation of Church and State. I think that the only strong church is one which is free from the whims of our government, and I'm willing to accept that this sometimes will mean that our state will become more secularized. This, however, does not mean that our Church must compromise in any way, unless we see fit. The addition of this line, however, would be the institution of religious principles in an otherwise civil document.
Put another way, I find no compelling argument for Proposition 8 outside of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. I've heard the argument that every major society has held that marriage is between a man and a woman for 5,000 years, which is at least a little suspect. It's true in that I don't know of any source endorsing same-sex marriage over the span of human history, it's hardly true that the notion of marriage between one man and one woman is found throughout that time. For Christians, the Old Testament is filled with example after example of a godly man marrying multiple wives--in fact, this was often a sign of his godliness, as godliness led to prosperity and polygamy was a sure sign of prosperity. It seems to me that the New Testament's introduction of a man being married to but one wife (in Paul's description of a deacon, I believe) is more of a following culture thing than a moral revelation thing.
I certainly could be wrong.
I sat in my pastor's office this past Monday and for an hour and a half we discussed and debated these fourteen words and why they should or should not be added to our constitution. I respect and like my pastor very much, and though we still do not agree on this issue, those feelings have not changed. During the course of conversation, I made a comment to him that I did not understand at the time, but which I somehow still believed to be true. I said that there were Christians on both sides of this issue, and that I thought that those on both sides were right, both were following the will of God.
It was only days later that I kinda started to figure out maybe how that could actually be.
Maybe God cares more about the "why" when we vote than the "what." Maybe God hears my pastor's heart for holiness and redemption in his vote for Proposition 8 (as well as the heart of the rest of the church staff, the rest of the church, most of my friends, and even my girlfriend) but also hears my heart for compassion and justice (and justice in the sense that it is required that you view someone as an equal before you can act justly in relation to them) in my vote against Proposition 8, and God blesses both efforts. I'm reminded of that part in the Bible where Samuel is looking for a new king to anoint after Saul basically blows it. God tells Samuel, "People look at the outside appearance, but I look at the heart." (1 Sam. 16.7, good old Bible Gateway always comes to the rescue)
Maybe this is just what I tell myself so I can sleep at night knowing that I'm standing [what feels like] completely alone within my branch of the faith basically trying to destroy the most basic, time-tested foundation of all of civilization just for some "sinners." Or as one prominent minister out here put it, I'm throwing away 5 000 years of human tradition for just 2% of the population.
I guess I'm just doing what I feel like Jesus would have...standing up for the marginalized in our society. And I know that those of my creed on the opposite side feel the same about their stance, that they are indeed doing what Jesus would have done...standing up for moral truth and righteousness in a wicked generation.
On a slightly unrelated note, I love bluegrass music, and I have no idea why. I just do.
Peace, love, and joy.
Showing posts with label god. Show all posts
Showing posts with label god. Show all posts
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Hooray It's Christmas
I really like the "other" verses of Christmas carols--you know, like you're out with a randomly gathered group of people ringing other randomly selected people's doorbells to sing them some songs (much like I, coincidentally enough, was last night), and after you finish the first verse, everybody just kinda hums except for the one person who actually knows verse two. Well, I'm not that person.
As evidence, I offer last night's adventuring (which is probably the only time Christmas caroling has ever involved trespassing for me): At first, I was doing pretty well, holding my own. In fact, they let me hold the music. So whenever we finished the first verse, I would switch songs, the guitar player would start the next song, and I knew all the words. Soon, though, it became obvious that, of my many skills, holding still is not one of them. So, at the behest of Guitar Guy, I was replaced as music holder.
At the next house, we sang "What Child is This?" a song which, I'm pretty sure, everybody loves but only kinda sorta knows the words. After struggling through the verse, we got to the chorus (aka the part I kinda know), and then--to my horror--jumped straight into verse two. Verse two???
Speaking of verse two, "Silent Night" has a verse two, too. One of the lines in verse two is glories stream from heavens afar. I could have sworn that the line was glories stream from heavens above. You know how when you start singing the wrong word you just kinda switch to the right word in the middle? Well, I do that at least, so several times last night I definitely sang glories stream from heaven's a bar.
Anyway, even though I don't really know them, I really love the other verses of Christmas carols. It's probably just because those songs are really well written in general, and since I haven't heard verse three of "O Holy Night" 72 000 times in my life, I actually listen to the words. The words to verse three (or two, depending who you talk to) of "O Holy Night," by the way, are:
plj
As evidence, I offer last night's adventuring (which is probably the only time Christmas caroling has ever involved trespassing for me): At first, I was doing pretty well, holding my own. In fact, they let me hold the music. So whenever we finished the first verse, I would switch songs, the guitar player would start the next song, and I knew all the words. Soon, though, it became obvious that, of my many skills, holding still is not one of them. So, at the behest of Guitar Guy, I was replaced as music holder.
At the next house, we sang "What Child is This?" a song which, I'm pretty sure, everybody loves but only kinda sorta knows the words. After struggling through the verse, we got to the chorus (aka the part I kinda know), and then--to my horror--jumped straight into verse two. Verse two???
Speaking of verse two, "Silent Night" has a verse two, too. One of the lines in verse two is glories stream from heavens afar. I could have sworn that the line was glories stream from heavens above. You know how when you start singing the wrong word you just kinda switch to the right word in the middle? Well, I do that at least, so several times last night I definitely sang glories stream from heaven's a bar.
Anyway, even though I don't really know them, I really love the other verses of Christmas carols. It's probably just because those songs are really well written in general, and since I haven't heard verse three of "O Holy Night" 72 000 times in my life, I actually listen to the words. The words to verse three (or two, depending who you talk to) of "O Holy Night," by the way, are:
- Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming,
- With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.
- So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming,
- Here come the wise men from Orient land.
- The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger;
- In all our trials born to be our friend.
-
- He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger,
- Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
- Behold your King, Behold your King.
plj
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Someday I'll See Clearly
I don't get it.
There's so much bad in me still. Don't get me wrong: there's some good in me, too, and much more than there used to be. I think that side's winning.
But the fight's not over, I guess.
This is probably a weird post to come back on, after the whole Sentence for September experiment, but I guess this is where I'm at right now. And I wanted to write, so this is what you get.
According to my sidebar, there are only 65 more days until I leave this chapter of my life. I thought it'd be different than it is. I thought I'd spend four years at a Christian school, confront the sin in my life, and walk away victorious and unconquerable. That's just not the case.
I wanted to find a book on my shelf tonight that would give me hope. There are books that I turn to when I feel especially useless or lost or confused, books like this and this. But they weren't here tonight. (They must be in Colorado...)
So I grabbed a new book, one that I had bought for the chapter in it about homosexuality for my senior paper. This book has one of the greatest subtitles ever: "How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel." It's by Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo for those of you who didn't click the link (but I'm going to make you work for the actual title).
Anyway, I opened the book up to the chapter on sin, and I stumbled across something that really struck me, especially in such a time as this. (In case you haven't heard, things are a little tense here at the ORU) Here's how it goes: (this is, btw, from Tony Campolo's response to the chapter by Brian McClaren)
Either way, I guess this is where I'm at.
Always striving.
There's so much bad in me still. Don't get me wrong: there's some good in me, too, and much more than there used to be. I think that side's winning.
But the fight's not over, I guess.
This is probably a weird post to come back on, after the whole Sentence for September experiment, but I guess this is where I'm at right now. And I wanted to write, so this is what you get.
According to my sidebar, there are only 65 more days until I leave this chapter of my life. I thought it'd be different than it is. I thought I'd spend four years at a Christian school, confront the sin in my life, and walk away victorious and unconquerable. That's just not the case.
I wanted to find a book on my shelf tonight that would give me hope. There are books that I turn to when I feel especially useless or lost or confused, books like this and this. But they weren't here tonight. (They must be in Colorado...)
So I grabbed a new book, one that I had bought for the chapter in it about homosexuality for my senior paper. This book has one of the greatest subtitles ever: "How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel." It's by Brian McLaren and Tony Campolo for those of you who didn't click the link (but I'm going to make you work for the actual title).
Anyway, I opened the book up to the chapter on sin, and I stumbled across something that really struck me, especially in such a time as this. (In case you haven't heard, things are a little tense here at the ORU) Here's how it goes: (this is, btw, from Tony Campolo's response to the chapter by Brian McClaren)
A decade or so ago, when television evangelists right and left seemed to be falling by the wayside, I spoke at a denominational meeting of mainline pastors. Before I was on, the master of ceremonies said something like this to the audience: "We must distance ourselves from the likes of Jim Bakker. Men like this have disgraced the church, and we must make it clear to our people that we are not like that."I often find that the times when I am most outspoken about the evils of society or culture or the Church or whoever else are also the times when I am faced with the strongest evidence of my own dark side. I don't know if seeing the specks in other people's eyes just sets me up for walking into a log, or if it's the other way around; I expect that it's the second. It sounds much more like me to run away from my own failures by reminding everyone of someone else's.
His words infuriated me, which explains why I started with words to this effect: "The difference between Jim Bakker and the rest of us is that they haven't found out about the rest of us yet. This is no time to distance ourselves from Jim Bakker, but to acknowledge that what was in him is in us all. The line that separates good from evil does not separate one group of people from another, but runs right down the middle of each of us. Each of us has a dark side--and if the truth were known, each of us would have to run away and hide."
Either way, I guess this is where I'm at.
Always striving.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
A Story about Singapore
Maybe it's just the ORU that's all over me, but wherever I look it seems like I find stories about God.
Like the Muslim who converted to Christianity about a decade ago: he first heard about the Christian God from a fellow prisoner in Babylon, then escaped to travel around the world before finding God in Paradise. He was a very nice man.
But more than that, there's this story about the founding of Singapore which I love.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Like the Muslim who converted to Christianity about a decade ago: he first heard about the Christian God from a fellow prisoner in Babylon, then escaped to travel around the world before finding God in Paradise. He was a very nice man.
But more than that, there's this story about the founding of Singapore which I love.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Unlikely Places: Swimming Continued
If you don't already, allow me to highly recommend reading the comments to whatever this blog is; I've known for a long time that everyone who reads this blog has far more interesting insights than I can conceive of, and the people who comment here serve only to prove that. (I only wish y'all wrote more on your blogs!! I love hearing all that y'all have to say, and hope to hear what it is that you spend your time thinking about!) To start this post, here are some that y'all left on the last post:
"I totally agree, God never intended for us to try and walk it out on our own strength." You know, this is what I was trying, rather violently and unsuccessfully, to say in those flailed words below, so I'm glad that you got it, Jessica. Oh, and I really, really didn't want to do swimming either...but it ended up being one of the greatest experiences of my time at ORU. Look for the lessons.
"In my swimming class, we'd all take turns and watch each other, there was no hiding the fear, either you got over it or you were scared and every one knew which one it was. I kinda wish it was harder to hide our problems in the church. Ya know?" You completely knocked it out, Malia. But, you know, instead of wishing that it was tougher to hide my problems I find I more often wish that I had the courage to admit my problems and deal with them in the context of a healthy community. I think that everyday I'm moving closer to that, but it's definitely a struggle.
How do we find such a healthy community? (which is the segue* now into the meat of the post)
True community arrives whenever we say, a la Aaron Weiss, "If I'm afraid and you're afraid, then we don't have to be afraid anymore," and agree to put down our weapons against one another (isolation, rejection, abandonment, negativity, fakeness, condemnation, et al.) and choose instead to humbly love, one broken piece to the other.
An illustration of this is found in the story of Josh from Beginning Swimming (which is certainly not his real name). I had passed my swimming proficiency test (25m front swim, 25m back swim, 2min tread) very early in the semester, partially because my fear of water was not as developed as many of the others in the class and partially because my feet and hands are like natural flippers, so I've got quite a distinct advantage over the common "well-proportioned" man. Still, I waited until after class so that if I would have failed, as few a number of people as possible would be around to see it.
Josh attempted it a couple of weeks later, after a handful of others had completed various portions of the test. In the middle of class, he got out of the water and told our instructor that he thought he was ready. He began the long journey down toward the deep end. She swam down. We all watched at the edge, standing at the various depths at which we could keep our heads above water by standing on our tip toes.
He jumped in and began swimming toward us on his back. Now, I'm certainly not a swimmer of any merit (I mean, I was in Beginning Swimming). But everybody else seemed to have trouble getting anywhere when they were swimming compared to me. Like, I definitely wasn't fast, but I was always moving when I wanted to be (and even when I wasn't really trying to be). Josh was one of those who splashed a lot and moved through the water very little. It was like one of those nature documentaries, where the great white is devouring the family of sea lions, only the violence on the surface lasted more than mere seconds.
Minute after minute passed as we watched Josh thrash about in the water, fighting with what seemed to be his whole life for every inch. But we weren't just passively watching. We were shouting and cheering and encouraging and doing our very best to will Josh halfway across the pool. But, you know, it's strange now thinking about it--not one of us yelled anything all that practical, or at least, what you'd think would be practical.
You'd think we would have yelled out corrections to his form, or the distance he had left to go, or instructions for every motion, but instead we just yelled out unmitigated support. "You've got this!" "You can do it!" "You're doing great!"
These kinds of things probably would have seemed to ludicrous to an actual swimmer passing by, since Josh obviously wasn't doing very well. But for those of us in the pool, we loved him and we saw only success in each failing stroke. Maybe it was because we didn't know what we were shouting about, or maybe it was because when we looked at Josh, we saw ourselves; our hopes and our fears swam alongside him.
But, strangely enough, he was making it. Whether he was riding on our encouragement or the current from the deep end, he was less than five feet from the ladder which was our finishing mark. And then it happened.
He tried to turn his head to see where he was at. His body failed to properly balance itself. His face ended up underwater. Struggling to surface, he turned himself perpendicular to the path he had been on. We screamed as passionately as we could at him. He was so close. He started to panic. He started coughing. He thought he was going to drown. His hand instinctively grabbed the lifeguard buoy that the instructor had held the whole time.
He had failed. Four or five feet from the finish line, he had failed in front of his friends, peers, and most fervent supporters. There was a silence as he settled his mind and discovered just how close he'd come.
And then we cheered. Josh had failed the proficiency, but what he had done had been an incredible feat of endurance and mental fortitude. And we cheered for him. We knew that he'd pass the proficiency test, sooner rather than later, and that what he most needed at that moment was the same unconditional support which we had given him throughout.
Imagine if the Church was like that.
Instead of everybody yelling what you should or should not be doing instead of what you are or are not doing, instead of the constant judging of whether your Christianity is kosher enough, instead of the disgusting and depraved response of fully rejecting our failures, imagine a Church filled with unconditional support that was actually unconditional.
In the meantime, I wish fully peace, love, and joy to you all.
* I totally thought that this word was spelled "segway" until FireFox red underlined it. After ninjawords and dictionary.com confirmed the incorrectitude, the OneLook Reverse Dictionary came to the rescue.
"I totally agree, God never intended for us to try and walk it out on our own strength." You know, this is what I was trying, rather violently and unsuccessfully, to say in those flailed words below, so I'm glad that you got it, Jessica. Oh, and I really, really didn't want to do swimming either...but it ended up being one of the greatest experiences of my time at ORU. Look for the lessons.
"In my swimming class, we'd all take turns and watch each other, there was no hiding the fear, either you got over it or you were scared and every one knew which one it was. I kinda wish it was harder to hide our problems in the church. Ya know?" You completely knocked it out, Malia. But, you know, instead of wishing that it was tougher to hide my problems I find I more often wish that I had the courage to admit my problems and deal with them in the context of a healthy community. I think that everyday I'm moving closer to that, but it's definitely a struggle.
How do we find such a healthy community? (which is the segue* now into the meat of the post)
True community arrives whenever we say, a la Aaron Weiss, "If I'm afraid and you're afraid, then we don't have to be afraid anymore," and agree to put down our weapons against one another (isolation, rejection, abandonment, negativity, fakeness, condemnation, et al.) and choose instead to humbly love, one broken piece to the other.
An illustration of this is found in the story of Josh from Beginning Swimming (which is certainly not his real name). I had passed my swimming proficiency test (25m front swim, 25m back swim, 2min tread) very early in the semester, partially because my fear of water was not as developed as many of the others in the class and partially because my feet and hands are like natural flippers, so I've got quite a distinct advantage over the common "well-proportioned" man. Still, I waited until after class so that if I would have failed, as few a number of people as possible would be around to see it.
Josh attempted it a couple of weeks later, after a handful of others had completed various portions of the test. In the middle of class, he got out of the water and told our instructor that he thought he was ready. He began the long journey down toward the deep end. She swam down. We all watched at the edge, standing at the various depths at which we could keep our heads above water by standing on our tip toes.
He jumped in and began swimming toward us on his back. Now, I'm certainly not a swimmer of any merit (I mean, I was in Beginning Swimming). But everybody else seemed to have trouble getting anywhere when they were swimming compared to me. Like, I definitely wasn't fast, but I was always moving when I wanted to be (and even when I wasn't really trying to be). Josh was one of those who splashed a lot and moved through the water very little. It was like one of those nature documentaries, where the great white is devouring the family of sea lions, only the violence on the surface lasted more than mere seconds.
Minute after minute passed as we watched Josh thrash about in the water, fighting with what seemed to be his whole life for every inch. But we weren't just passively watching. We were shouting and cheering and encouraging and doing our very best to will Josh halfway across the pool. But, you know, it's strange now thinking about it--not one of us yelled anything all that practical, or at least, what you'd think would be practical.
You'd think we would have yelled out corrections to his form, or the distance he had left to go, or instructions for every motion, but instead we just yelled out unmitigated support. "You've got this!" "You can do it!" "You're doing great!"
These kinds of things probably would have seemed to ludicrous to an actual swimmer passing by, since Josh obviously wasn't doing very well. But for those of us in the pool, we loved him and we saw only success in each failing stroke. Maybe it was because we didn't know what we were shouting about, or maybe it was because when we looked at Josh, we saw ourselves; our hopes and our fears swam alongside him.
But, strangely enough, he was making it. Whether he was riding on our encouragement or the current from the deep end, he was less than five feet from the ladder which was our finishing mark. And then it happened.
He tried to turn his head to see where he was at. His body failed to properly balance itself. His face ended up underwater. Struggling to surface, he turned himself perpendicular to the path he had been on. We screamed as passionately as we could at him. He was so close. He started to panic. He started coughing. He thought he was going to drown. His hand instinctively grabbed the lifeguard buoy that the instructor had held the whole time.
He had failed. Four or five feet from the finish line, he had failed in front of his friends, peers, and most fervent supporters. There was a silence as he settled his mind and discovered just how close he'd come.
And then we cheered. Josh had failed the proficiency, but what he had done had been an incredible feat of endurance and mental fortitude. And we cheered for him. We knew that he'd pass the proficiency test, sooner rather than later, and that what he most needed at that moment was the same unconditional support which we had given him throughout.
Imagine if the Church was like that.
Instead of everybody yelling what you should or should not be doing instead of what you are or are not doing, instead of the constant judging of whether your Christianity is kosher enough, instead of the disgusting and depraved response of fully rejecting our failures, imagine a Church filled with unconditional support that was actually unconditional.
In the meantime, I wish fully peace, love, and joy to you all.
* I totally thought that this word was spelled "segway" until FireFox red underlined it. After ninjawords and dictionary.com confirmed the incorrectitude, the OneLook Reverse Dictionary came to the rescue.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Unlikely Places: HPE 026 and the Story of the Church
As an introduction, I am a theology major at what purports itself as the largest charismatic Christian liberal arts university in the world. This means that I take lots of courses whose course number begins with THE, where we talk about who God is; BIB, where we talk about what he wrote (more or less); and CHRM, where we talk about how to be his body.
One class in the last category, Intro to Youth Ministry, met in the Aerobics Center so that we didn't have to come dressed in the Code (which was a collared shirt, dress pants and shoes). It was great. Some people came dressed in shorts and flip-flops (which was unheard of in those days) and we talked honestly and openly about God and working with teenagers.
As it turns out, the class which has informed my faith in some of the most startling ways, and probably taught me the most about being the body of Christ, met in the room across the hall. HPE 026 -- Beginning Swimming.
I feel at least a little bit obligated to tell some embarrassing story about myself here. I didn't grow up a swimmer; instead, I grew up afraid of most everything: the dark, spiders, heights, water, touching electric poles (not the wires, the wooden poles that they're connected to [or to which they're connected, if you're a grammarian]), lightning, and so on. (I'd like to point out that I have conquered these fears and moved on to new, more rational ones, like failure, rejection, abandonment, isolation, and babies) When I was 9 or 10 my parents decided that it was time for me to learn the things that came early for normal kids, like riding bikes and swimming. So they signed me up for swimming lessons at the local YMCA and I was off. The first couple of lessons were pretty chill: wading around in the shallow end, ducking my head under water, doing the whole hold-on-to-the-wall-and-kick-your-legs-furiously trick.
But then came a day of dread and terror: Jump-Into-The-Deep-End-Day. I couldn't do it. I was just too scared. Looking into the clear, 12-foot deep water, it didn't make sense to me that anything in that water could support me, that instead the Abyss would consume me. And there was this little, 4-year-old girl who just kept doing it over and over again and I was the one standing there in my swimming shorts to chicken to do it.
To make matters worse, this wasn't just a private trauma. No, instead there was a wall of windows directly behind me allowing everyone in the lobby of the Y--everybody's parents, random strangers, and God-knows-who-else--to watch the awkward 10-year-old boy sob and moan about dying if he jumps into the deep end.
So let's just say that swimming wasn't exactly something that I did for fun growing up. As such, I wasn't really in shape to pass the swim proficiency required here for graduation. Which led to me having to take HPE 026 this past fall, an experience I was not really looking forward to that much.
{{A brief interlude whereby I list reasons for hesitation:
Here's why: this class takes people from all different majors, backgrounds, and dorms, and puts them all into this bizarre and, for many, frightening experience that no one's really fully prepared for. It's a completely foreign environment filled with strangers and everyone's self-conscious and everyone's worried that they're going to look stupid--probably because most of us have stories like mine above where they had some shaming experience or recognition of their inadequacy in a very public and affecting way. Sound familiar yet?
This is what the Church is. None of us really have a clue what we're doing and we're all hoping with all our hearts that nobody else notices.
And while I was out there in that pool, treading for the first time in my life in the deep end for the entirety of class, I learned something. You don't go to the pool in order to walk around in the water. You go to a pool to swim.
Swimming is weird, because if you're just watching it looks like you're floating on nothing. On top of that, it is by far the most efficient way in which a person can get through water.
We often use watery imagery in the Church to describe grace ("Hallelujah grace like rain falls down on me") and I think that the metaphor fits here at least as well as it would anywhere else. See, I grew up on this idea that God's grace is like a safety net for when we don't quite measure up. "Oh, you messed up a little, good thing this grace was here to catch your fall."
But now I don't think so anymore. I think that God's grace is the water in the pool. And it was never the point that we walk by our own strength when we're in it, but rather to glide through it in a wholly supernatural way.
I hope this makes sense.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
One class in the last category, Intro to Youth Ministry, met in the Aerobics Center so that we didn't have to come dressed in the Code (which was a collared shirt, dress pants and shoes). It was great. Some people came dressed in shorts and flip-flops (which was unheard of in those days) and we talked honestly and openly about God and working with teenagers.
As it turns out, the class which has informed my faith in some of the most startling ways, and probably taught me the most about being the body of Christ, met in the room across the hall. HPE 026 -- Beginning Swimming.
I feel at least a little bit obligated to tell some embarrassing story about myself here. I didn't grow up a swimmer; instead, I grew up afraid of most everything: the dark, spiders, heights, water, touching electric poles (not the wires, the wooden poles that they're connected to [or to which they're connected, if you're a grammarian]), lightning, and so on. (I'd like to point out that I have conquered these fears and moved on to new, more rational ones, like failure, rejection, abandonment, isolation, and babies) When I was 9 or 10 my parents decided that it was time for me to learn the things that came early for normal kids, like riding bikes and swimming. So they signed me up for swimming lessons at the local YMCA and I was off. The first couple of lessons were pretty chill: wading around in the shallow end, ducking my head under water, doing the whole hold-on-to-the-wall-and-kick-your-legs-furiously trick.But then came a day of dread and terror: Jump-Into-The-Deep-End-Day. I couldn't do it. I was just too scared. Looking into the clear, 12-foot deep water, it didn't make sense to me that anything in that water could support me, that instead the Abyss would consume me. And there was this little, 4-year-old girl who just kept doing it over and over again and I was the one standing there in my swimming shorts to chicken to do it.
To make matters worse, this wasn't just a private trauma. No, instead there was a wall of windows directly behind me allowing everyone in the lobby of the Y--everybody's parents, random strangers, and God-knows-who-else--to watch the awkward 10-year-old boy sob and moan about dying if he jumps into the deep end.
So let's just say that swimming wasn't exactly something that I did for fun growing up. As such, I wasn't really in shape to pass the swim proficiency required here for graduation. Which led to me having to take HPE 026 this past fall, an experience I was not really looking forward to that much.
{{A brief interlude whereby I list reasons for hesitation:
- I had, to that point, made a reasoned and passionate effort to avoid the men's locker room in the AC at all costs.
- Aforementioned traumatic little-girl-being-more-manly-than-me experience.
- My hatred of being wet which, as it turns out, is quite a bit of the whole swimming thing.
Here's why: this class takes people from all different majors, backgrounds, and dorms, and puts them all into this bizarre and, for many, frightening experience that no one's really fully prepared for. It's a completely foreign environment filled with strangers and everyone's self-conscious and everyone's worried that they're going to look stupid--probably because most of us have stories like mine above where they had some shaming experience or recognition of their inadequacy in a very public and affecting way. Sound familiar yet?
This is what the Church is. None of us really have a clue what we're doing and we're all hoping with all our hearts that nobody else notices.
And while I was out there in that pool, treading for the first time in my life in the deep end for the entirety of class, I learned something. You don't go to the pool in order to walk around in the water. You go to a pool to swim.
Swimming is weird, because if you're just watching it looks like you're floating on nothing. On top of that, it is by far the most efficient way in which a person can get through water.
We often use watery imagery in the Church to describe grace ("Hallelujah grace like rain falls down on me") and I think that the metaphor fits here at least as well as it would anywhere else. See, I grew up on this idea that God's grace is like a safety net for when we don't quite measure up. "Oh, you messed up a little, good thing this grace was here to catch your fall."
But now I don't think so anymore. I think that God's grace is the water in the pool. And it was never the point that we walk by our own strength when we're in it, but rather to glide through it in a wholly supernatural way.
I hope this makes sense.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
A Metaphor
I sat down to write an epilogue to close off the Coming Home series. This came out instead. And I don't know where exactly it came from, but I like it very much, and I hope you find something of value in it.
***
Last night as I drifted off to sleep I contemplated running away. Running away from home, from school, from church, from ministry, from friends even. Hoping that I would find God, I guess.
This morning I woke up with a mouth full of blood. Life's like that, sometimes.
When I first woke up this morning, I didn't even realize it. As I was washing my hands, I happened to look in the mirror and spot a little bit of dry, crusty blood attached to my beard where my lips meet on the left side of my face. I opened my lips to survey the damage.
My teeth were this faint, dull brown, and dried blood filled the gaps between my teeth. How blood dried inside my mouth, a place known for its moistness, I don't really know. And I don't really care to either. All that matters is that it was there.
I checked the sutures I can see. From my count in the chair there are somewhere around two dozen in my mouth right now, one-third or so holding together the two ends of a gap on the left side of the roof of my mouth and the rest holding a piece of flesh from up there to the spot where you used to be able to see a screw right at the front of my bottom jaw, just beneath those mostly real teeth. One of the sutures actually connects the gum tissue on the front of my lower jaw to the tissue on the back by stretching over the teeth. It's really very annoying. But the sutures were all solid and no new blood seemed to be entering my mouth.
It tasted awful. I have this bizarre obsession with taste...that's where the whole Listerine thing comes from. The taste thing--if I'm honest and a little bloody in front of y'all right now--I think comes from some article on kissing I found on some dating advice for teens website back when I was in my second or third year of high school. There's a lot of jokes in that sentence just waiting to be formed. Ultimately, I can't decide which is more pathetic: a 16-year-old turning to the Internet for a how-to guide on making out or a 22-year-old remembering it and, in fact, building a whole set of compulsive behaviors on it. Either way, the article had some line written in the language called trendy that said something like "If you can taste anything other than minty-freshness, don't even think about trying to kiss her."
So I became a compulsive gum chewer. It's not that I constantly had girls wanting to kiss me until they experienced my halitosis; I guess I was just motivated by the fear that "The One" would come along and I'd screw it up unless my mouth was screaming FreshMint. Or CinnaBurst. Or WinterFresh. Or MintWinter.
That was a long diversion, the point is that I can't stand bad tastes in my mouth (this has, I think it's safe to say, progressed far beyond this boyhood fantasy of random attractive women wanting to make out with me and developed into an independently paralyzing compulsion; in other words, just because you smell Lister, don't assume I'm looking to lock lips). Morning breath is made significantly worse by the presence of blood. So I walked into my kitchen, grabbed a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water, and began to rinse out my mouth.
I hadn't thought anything of it until I started typing up this entry and thought that it would make a killer hook to write: "I woke up with a mouth full of blood." Connecting it to my thoughts of leaving everything last night just made the hook better. Maybe they'll think I'm a drug addict, or I got the crap beat out of me, or that I did run away. Then they'll read.
And then it all seemed so clear.
I have wounds. We all have wounds which we bring with us on our spiritual journeys. Mine don't really come from before I was "saved," since life before I was four was pretty peachy, but I think we can pick up wounds after that, too. Maybe we're even more likely to--I don't know. A lot of Christians give off the impression that that's not the case, that salvation is just some big healing moment and no longer are we capable of anything negative; I guess I just think they're wrong.
I think of salvation more as sutures...the metaphor could even expand. Salvation is this soft tissue graft. Something from above gets sewn into us--when they do it, they have to harm the tissue their attaching the graft to. Last time they scraped and cut and burn...this time they just cauterized it with a laser. This way the tissue will start its natural healing process, grab onto the graft, and grow together.
Unfortunately for us (maybe, I'm still not sure), this takes time. And what we get in the meantime is these sutures. They hold everything in place, but it's not perfect yet. The tissues are still independent, growing slowly into one flesh. Jesus set up the relationship between us, the Father, and himself as "I in them, you [the Father] in me, that they may become perfectly one." I think we're just in the suture phase.
And sometimes, because these tissues haven't all connected yet, there's blood. There's pain. And, more than occasionally, I look at myself and I see the blood in my mouth. The failure. The disconnect between the me in me and the One towards whom I claim to be ever trying to progress. That's where the blood comes from, the pain; it's not from the new tissue, it's from that spot where the old tissue and the new tissue haven't yet come together to form one tissue.
Last night, I saw the disconnect in my life as clearly as I saw the blood in my mouth this morning. I wanted to give up. I wanted to leave. I wanted to hold it in, close my mouth and run somewhere where I would never have to smile, so that no one could ever see that inside of me was blood and a chaotic jumbling together of string and flesh.
This morning, the first step was so obvious: grab water, rinse out the blood.
Tonight the first step is so obvious.
The title of this blog is transparency|inaction. In that spirit, then, I just want to say that while my mouth is disgusting, and sometimes the sutures can't quite hold, and some days I'm going to wake up with blood in my teeth--while all that is true, I'm proud of my sutures, because they speak to a hope for tomorrow rather than yesterday's failure. I smile wide, bloody teeth and all, because they speak to a grace that I can't at all comprehend. And as for my disgusting mouth: a day is coming when this will be a finished work, and God himself will cleanse me from all the guilt of my sin.
Please bear with me (as I promise to with you) until then.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
***
Last night as I drifted off to sleep I contemplated running away. Running away from home, from school, from church, from ministry, from friends even. Hoping that I would find God, I guess.
This morning I woke up with a mouth full of blood. Life's like that, sometimes.
When I first woke up this morning, I didn't even realize it. As I was washing my hands, I happened to look in the mirror and spot a little bit of dry, crusty blood attached to my beard where my lips meet on the left side of my face. I opened my lips to survey the damage.
My teeth were this faint, dull brown, and dried blood filled the gaps between my teeth. How blood dried inside my mouth, a place known for its moistness, I don't really know. And I don't really care to either. All that matters is that it was there.
I checked the sutures I can see. From my count in the chair there are somewhere around two dozen in my mouth right now, one-third or so holding together the two ends of a gap on the left side of the roof of my mouth and the rest holding a piece of flesh from up there to the spot where you used to be able to see a screw right at the front of my bottom jaw, just beneath those mostly real teeth. One of the sutures actually connects the gum tissue on the front of my lower jaw to the tissue on the back by stretching over the teeth. It's really very annoying. But the sutures were all solid and no new blood seemed to be entering my mouth.
It tasted awful. I have this bizarre obsession with taste...that's where the whole Listerine thing comes from. The taste thing--if I'm honest and a little bloody in front of y'all right now--I think comes from some article on kissing I found on some dating advice for teens website back when I was in my second or third year of high school. There's a lot of jokes in that sentence just waiting to be formed. Ultimately, I can't decide which is more pathetic: a 16-year-old turning to the Internet for a how-to guide on making out or a 22-year-old remembering it and, in fact, building a whole set of compulsive behaviors on it. Either way, the article had some line written in the language called trendy that said something like "If you can taste anything other than minty-freshness, don't even think about trying to kiss her."
So I became a compulsive gum chewer. It's not that I constantly had girls wanting to kiss me until they experienced my halitosis; I guess I was just motivated by the fear that "The One" would come along and I'd screw it up unless my mouth was screaming FreshMint. Or CinnaBurst. Or WinterFresh. Or MintWinter.
That was a long diversion, the point is that I can't stand bad tastes in my mouth (this has, I think it's safe to say, progressed far beyond this boyhood fantasy of random attractive women wanting to make out with me and developed into an independently paralyzing compulsion; in other words, just because you smell Lister, don't assume I'm looking to lock lips). Morning breath is made significantly worse by the presence of blood. So I walked into my kitchen, grabbed a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water, and began to rinse out my mouth.
I hadn't thought anything of it until I started typing up this entry and thought that it would make a killer hook to write: "I woke up with a mouth full of blood." Connecting it to my thoughts of leaving everything last night just made the hook better. Maybe they'll think I'm a drug addict, or I got the crap beat out of me, or that I did run away. Then they'll read.
And then it all seemed so clear.
I have wounds. We all have wounds which we bring with us on our spiritual journeys. Mine don't really come from before I was "saved," since life before I was four was pretty peachy, but I think we can pick up wounds after that, too. Maybe we're even more likely to--I don't know. A lot of Christians give off the impression that that's not the case, that salvation is just some big healing moment and no longer are we capable of anything negative; I guess I just think they're wrong.
I think of salvation more as sutures...the metaphor could even expand. Salvation is this soft tissue graft. Something from above gets sewn into us--when they do it, they have to harm the tissue their attaching the graft to. Last time they scraped and cut and burn...this time they just cauterized it with a laser. This way the tissue will start its natural healing process, grab onto the graft, and grow together.
Unfortunately for us (maybe, I'm still not sure), this takes time. And what we get in the meantime is these sutures. They hold everything in place, but it's not perfect yet. The tissues are still independent, growing slowly into one flesh. Jesus set up the relationship between us, the Father, and himself as "I in them, you [the Father] in me, that they may become perfectly one." I think we're just in the suture phase.
And sometimes, because these tissues haven't all connected yet, there's blood. There's pain. And, more than occasionally, I look at myself and I see the blood in my mouth. The failure. The disconnect between the me in me and the One towards whom I claim to be ever trying to progress. That's where the blood comes from, the pain; it's not from the new tissue, it's from that spot where the old tissue and the new tissue haven't yet come together to form one tissue.
Last night, I saw the disconnect in my life as clearly as I saw the blood in my mouth this morning. I wanted to give up. I wanted to leave. I wanted to hold it in, close my mouth and run somewhere where I would never have to smile, so that no one could ever see that inside of me was blood and a chaotic jumbling together of string and flesh.
This morning, the first step was so obvious: grab water, rinse out the blood.
Tonight the first step is so obvious.
The title of this blog is transparency|inaction. In that spirit, then, I just want to say that while my mouth is disgusting, and sometimes the sutures can't quite hold, and some days I'm going to wake up with blood in my teeth--while all that is true, I'm proud of my sutures, because they speak to a hope for tomorrow rather than yesterday's failure. I smile wide, bloody teeth and all, because they speak to a grace that I can't at all comprehend. And as for my disgusting mouth: a day is coming when this will be a finished work, and God himself will cleanse me from all the guilt of my sin.
Please bear with me (as I promise to with you) until then.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Coming Home (Part 3/3)
This post is part three of my story. Parts one and two can be found here and here, respectively.
There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.
This story is all true.
***
I sat down on my bed and I read the book. And I stopped for dinner out with friends, an unexpected second chance to actually say goodbye (which I had apparently neglected) and hang out one last time before the social winter of summer.
As vaguely as I can, I want to explain a perhaps peculiar belief of mine. Growing up, I never really understood why we pray over every meal. It was cultural in my family; that is, it was what we did. I couldn't imagine a meal without it anymore than a meal without plates. Each of us kids would take turns praying over the meal, an honor which had a lot to do with my salvation from a dead-end life of debauchery at the age of four.
I've always been a thinker, though, and this was one of the first beliefs passed down from my parents that I began to question and examine within any sort of what I would now call a theological construct. When I was in junior high, I linked this practice to the description in Daniel of Daniel's thrice daily prayer routine. "This has been misapplied," I thought, and felt smarter than everyone around me, peons still chained to this belief in prayer before meals.
As it turns out, that's actually in the Bible a little bit later as well. I think. I can't really find it right now. I did find that we should definitely pray over our meals if we suspect they may have been offered as pagan sacrifices. Anyway, with the biblical knowledge of the four of you who read my blog, I'm sure I'll soon find out where every proof-text for the necessity of praying over a burrito is in the Bible.
And it's a good thing, I guess. It fosters an attitude of thanksgiving and fellowship with God and all. And that's all really good. I don't know, it's just, it feels like posturing to me. And that's really difficult for me. I approach these things from the mentality that I would rather be known by people as the worst heathen and known by God than seen as a spiritual giant among men and yet not actually possess any sort of meaningful relationship with God.
This was supposed to be a short tangent. What I'm getting at, I guess, is that I'd rather show a waitress that such a thing as Love or Charity is with a great tip than be remembered as the guy who prayed ostentatiously over the meal and also made a huge deal out of being gratted--as if the server's decision. It's difficult for me to write about this without using terminology that is unnecessary--or at least improper for a future youth pastor--so I'll end by saying that God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of this crap. Everyone in food service knows that Christians are cheap and rude; could we possibly more reflect the antithesis of Christ, who gave his all in loving service for us?
But dinner was good.
I returned to my room and spent the rest of the night more or less alone, reading. I woke up the next morning, and read more. When I got the call that my car had been finished, I was honestly a little bit disappointed. During the quiet times of my ride over to the dealership, I tried to imagine a way to drive and read at the same time. I was that hooked on this book.
I started my drive and successfully navigated the craters sprinkled along the first twenty or so miles of 412. I stopped for lunch at about one o'clock; I bought a box of Ritz crackers and a liter of Mountain Dew from a Conoco that was built into a Subway that shared its space with an Indian casino. It was one of the more disjunctive experiences of my life, and disjunction is my chief delight, so that's really saying something. A woman won $72 from a nickel slot machine while I was waiting in line. Actually, I was just standing behind someone who was standing at the register, talking to the clerk. Which, while it sounds like standing in line, was actually just wasting time, since the old man I was standing behind was the casino/restaurant/gas station's security guard.
And Kansas was.
I'm very proud of that last paragraph. It almost substitutes for those five or so hours of driving in a remarkably straight line through Kansas without actually missing anything of my experience. Amazing.
One of the real highlights of my drive westward comes when I hit the town of Genoa, Colorado. According to wikipedia, my source for basically everything, a little less than 200 people live in Genoa. Holding my I-70 in Colorado speed of 80mph, it takes me less than half a minute to enter and exit the town. Main Street is only three-tenths of a mile long.
But the town is 5500 feet above sea-level and most everything between it and the Rockies is lower than that, so on a clear day you can actually see the Front Range from Cheyenne Mountain to Pikes Peak, even though you're still about 100 miles out. It's pretty exciting and a good way to get me excited about the drive about 8.5 hours in. I looked for a picture, but I couldn't find one. So you'll just have to take my word for it.
Anyway, that's what happens on a clear day. On this day, though, storm clouds billowed over Limon (a major junction town in the plains of eastern Colorado) and so, instead of mountains, I could only see a thick sheet of rain between myself and my home. But what's a little water, right?
Wrong. As it turns out, by the time I hit Limon right around dusk, a tornado warning had been issued and marble sized hail was pelting my car. I couldn't really see anything so I pulled off I-70 and hung out under an overpass for a while. I listened to the seventh and eighth innings of the Rockies-Reds game texting my family to try to find out what the forecast was for where I was. The conversation went something like this:
Me: weather limon?
Them: oh well it looks pretty dark out there. might rain.
Me: def raining and hail. any forecast?
Them: im at mall
At this point I broke off communications and waited for the storm to let up, which it did shortly thereafter. I started down the home stretch of my long journey, a two-lane highway numbered 24. About a mile into the road, I received two text messages from my mom and a call from my dad, all telling me to wait in Limon. Apparently, the storm I had just been in was only the first round in a powerful two-punch combo, the second of which was already raising all sorts of hell south west of me, traveling toward me up the highway I needed to use to get home. So I went into my second Subway/gas station of the day, reclined in a booth facing the window, and read some more of my new book.
The hail started small, but it was golf-ball sized within a dozen seconds or so. An old deaf man came up to me and we had a whole conversation about the hail and driving in it and tornadoes. I only kinda know what we said. I think he probably felt the same way. All those years of charades-esque theatre exercises really come in handy every now and then. My phone rang--or buzzed, since my phone is almost never audibly on--and I tried to excuse myself from the company of my new friend in a way that wouldn't seem rude. He quickly understood and wandered off to discuss the weather with someone else. I kinda felt like I was showing off, holding my phone up to my ear and gloating before a deaf man "Look what I can do!" But I wasn't and I don't think he felt that way. I just worry, I guess.
My dad was on the other end of the line. They had transformed my house into a veritable storm tracking bunker, and he instructed me to start my drive home right then. The first storm had left Limon, the second storm would be north of 24 by the time I intercepted it, and a third storm (which had just recently appeared) would remain south of 24 until I made it to the Springs. With all the excitement I could hear in his voice, I felt bad telling him that the wrath of God was still being poured out on Limon outside. But I did promise him that I would leave as soon as it let up, and I reminded him that I don't get cell phone service between Limon and the Springs, so if anything changed he would need to let me know right away.
Within a minute or two, the hail moved out. The tornado warning was still active, so nobody else left the truck stop with me when I dashed out to my car and sped out onto 24. In fact, as I got going on the highway, it became clear that I was the only one trying the run right then. As Limon faded in my rear view mirror, I began to feel alone and afraid. I cataloged the towns I would pass through to get to the Springs, trying to engage my mind on something other than the storm. Matheson, Peyton, Calhan, Falcon, Simla. I couldn't shake from my head the fact that, prior to all my trips to and from Tulsa, the only times I ever heard of these towns were when the meteorologist on TV would be frantically pleading for the people of these towns to seek shelter from tornadoes.
Because of the way that the storms were configured that night, there was constant lightning all around me. I should have mentioned this in the prologue in part 1 of this saga, but I'm also kinda afraid of lightning. I know, I know...not really a grown up fear. And I know that many of you see the wonder and power of God in it, and blah blah blah; but, for me, any time something is both wildly unpredictable and nearly certainly fatal, I get a little wobbly-kneed. Oh, and thunder's loud and loud noises scare me too.
I've never felt so completely alone as I did that night. Probably. I mean, I've never felt so actually alone as I did that night; the plains were pitch-black, no one else was in sight, and my cell-phone couldn't even provide me with the potential of human contact. But I've felt more lonely, I guess--hopefully that's a distinction that makes sense outside of my head. Either way I couldn't help but think of the stories where the disciples are out on the boat in the storm and then Jesus shows up in some way and calms everything down.
And we're so hard on the disciples. "What an idiot! Peter steps out on the water and then gets scared...I mean, Jesus is right there!" "They hang out with him all this time and they still don't realize what kind of power he had..." But you know what...forget that. It's scary being out there in a storm, all alone and dark and exposed. And they were way more exposed than I was.
It was intense, and there were portions where I was driving through two and three inches of hailstones lying on the road, pooling the water into the two narrow channels which the tires of the few intrepid somewhere before me had cut through the ice. I stayed hunched over my wheel until--a few miles before Falcon, I guess--I noticed that the lightning in front of me had kinda subsided. I started to examine the sky to check my assumption. And then I saw it.
That star was probably the most beautiful I've ever seen. It meant the sky ahead was clear. It meant that the rain and the hail was over. It meant that I was actually going to finally get home.
That star is a lot of things.
I was home with my family within twenty minutes. And I was happy and at home again.
After everybody else went to bed, I sat alone on the couch in my parents' living room and I finished the book.
***
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
An epilogue? Hasn't this been long enough already?
keep watch
There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.
This story is all true.
***
I sat down on my bed and I read the book. And I stopped for dinner out with friends, an unexpected second chance to actually say goodbye (which I had apparently neglected) and hang out one last time before the social winter of summer.
As vaguely as I can, I want to explain a perhaps peculiar belief of mine. Growing up, I never really understood why we pray over every meal. It was cultural in my family; that is, it was what we did. I couldn't imagine a meal without it anymore than a meal without plates. Each of us kids would take turns praying over the meal, an honor which had a lot to do with my salvation from a dead-end life of debauchery at the age of four.
I've always been a thinker, though, and this was one of the first beliefs passed down from my parents that I began to question and examine within any sort of what I would now call a theological construct. When I was in junior high, I linked this practice to the description in Daniel of Daniel's thrice daily prayer routine. "This has been misapplied," I thought, and felt smarter than everyone around me, peons still chained to this belief in prayer before meals.
As it turns out, that's actually in the Bible a little bit later as well. I think. I can't really find it right now. I did find that we should definitely pray over our meals if we suspect they may have been offered as pagan sacrifices. Anyway, with the biblical knowledge of the four of you who read my blog, I'm sure I'll soon find out where every proof-text for the necessity of praying over a burrito is in the Bible.
And it's a good thing, I guess. It fosters an attitude of thanksgiving and fellowship with God and all. And that's all really good. I don't know, it's just, it feels like posturing to me. And that's really difficult for me. I approach these things from the mentality that I would rather be known by people as the worst heathen and known by God than seen as a spiritual giant among men and yet not actually possess any sort of meaningful relationship with God.
This was supposed to be a short tangent. What I'm getting at, I guess, is that I'd rather show a waitress that such a thing as Love or Charity is with a great tip than be remembered as the guy who prayed ostentatiously over the meal and also made a huge deal out of being gratted--as if the server's decision. It's difficult for me to write about this without using terminology that is unnecessary--or at least improper for a future youth pastor--so I'll end by saying that God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of this crap. Everyone in food service knows that Christians are cheap and rude; could we possibly more reflect the antithesis of Christ, who gave his all in loving service for us?
But dinner was good.
I returned to my room and spent the rest of the night more or less alone, reading. I woke up the next morning, and read more. When I got the call that my car had been finished, I was honestly a little bit disappointed. During the quiet times of my ride over to the dealership, I tried to imagine a way to drive and read at the same time. I was that hooked on this book.
I started my drive and successfully navigated the craters sprinkled along the first twenty or so miles of 412. I stopped for lunch at about one o'clock; I bought a box of Ritz crackers and a liter of Mountain Dew from a Conoco that was built into a Subway that shared its space with an Indian casino. It was one of the more disjunctive experiences of my life, and disjunction is my chief delight, so that's really saying something. A woman won $72 from a nickel slot machine while I was waiting in line. Actually, I was just standing behind someone who was standing at the register, talking to the clerk. Which, while it sounds like standing in line, was actually just wasting time, since the old man I was standing behind was the casino/restaurant/gas station's security guard.
And Kansas was.
I'm very proud of that last paragraph. It almost substitutes for those five or so hours of driving in a remarkably straight line through Kansas without actually missing anything of my experience. Amazing.
One of the real highlights of my drive westward comes when I hit the town of Genoa, Colorado. According to wikipedia, my source for basically everything, a little less than 200 people live in Genoa. Holding my I-70 in Colorado speed of 80mph, it takes me less than half a minute to enter and exit the town. Main Street is only three-tenths of a mile long.
But the town is 5500 feet above sea-level and most everything between it and the Rockies is lower than that, so on a clear day you can actually see the Front Range from Cheyenne Mountain to Pikes Peak, even though you're still about 100 miles out. It's pretty exciting and a good way to get me excited about the drive about 8.5 hours in. I looked for a picture, but I couldn't find one. So you'll just have to take my word for it.
Anyway, that's what happens on a clear day. On this day, though, storm clouds billowed over Limon (a major junction town in the plains of eastern Colorado) and so, instead of mountains, I could only see a thick sheet of rain between myself and my home. But what's a little water, right?
Wrong. As it turns out, by the time I hit Limon right around dusk, a tornado warning had been issued and marble sized hail was pelting my car. I couldn't really see anything so I pulled off I-70 and hung out under an overpass for a while. I listened to the seventh and eighth innings of the Rockies-Reds game texting my family to try to find out what the forecast was for where I was. The conversation went something like this:
Me: weather limon?
Them: oh well it looks pretty dark out there. might rain.
Me: def raining and hail. any forecast?
Them: im at mall
At this point I broke off communications and waited for the storm to let up, which it did shortly thereafter. I started down the home stretch of my long journey, a two-lane highway numbered 24. About a mile into the road, I received two text messages from my mom and a call from my dad, all telling me to wait in Limon. Apparently, the storm I had just been in was only the first round in a powerful two-punch combo, the second of which was already raising all sorts of hell south west of me, traveling toward me up the highway I needed to use to get home. So I went into my second Subway/gas station of the day, reclined in a booth facing the window, and read some more of my new book.
The hail started small, but it was golf-ball sized within a dozen seconds or so. An old deaf man came up to me and we had a whole conversation about the hail and driving in it and tornadoes. I only kinda know what we said. I think he probably felt the same way. All those years of charades-esque theatre exercises really come in handy every now and then. My phone rang--or buzzed, since my phone is almost never audibly on--and I tried to excuse myself from the company of my new friend in a way that wouldn't seem rude. He quickly understood and wandered off to discuss the weather with someone else. I kinda felt like I was showing off, holding my phone up to my ear and gloating before a deaf man "Look what I can do!" But I wasn't and I don't think he felt that way. I just worry, I guess.
My dad was on the other end of the line. They had transformed my house into a veritable storm tracking bunker, and he instructed me to start my drive home right then. The first storm had left Limon, the second storm would be north of 24 by the time I intercepted it, and a third storm (which had just recently appeared) would remain south of 24 until I made it to the Springs. With all the excitement I could hear in his voice, I felt bad telling him that the wrath of God was still being poured out on Limon outside. But I did promise him that I would leave as soon as it let up, and I reminded him that I don't get cell phone service between Limon and the Springs, so if anything changed he would need to let me know right away.
Within a minute or two, the hail moved out. The tornado warning was still active, so nobody else left the truck stop with me when I dashed out to my car and sped out onto 24. In fact, as I got going on the highway, it became clear that I was the only one trying the run right then. As Limon faded in my rear view mirror, I began to feel alone and afraid. I cataloged the towns I would pass through to get to the Springs, trying to engage my mind on something other than the storm. Matheson, Peyton, Calhan, Falcon, Simla. I couldn't shake from my head the fact that, prior to all my trips to and from Tulsa, the only times I ever heard of these towns were when the meteorologist on TV would be frantically pleading for the people of these towns to seek shelter from tornadoes.
Because of the way that the storms were configured that night, there was constant lightning all around me. I should have mentioned this in the prologue in part 1 of this saga, but I'm also kinda afraid of lightning. I know, I know...not really a grown up fear. And I know that many of you see the wonder and power of God in it, and blah blah blah; but, for me, any time something is both wildly unpredictable and nearly certainly fatal, I get a little wobbly-kneed. Oh, and thunder's loud and loud noises scare me too.
I've never felt so completely alone as I did that night. Probably. I mean, I've never felt so actually alone as I did that night; the plains were pitch-black, no one else was in sight, and my cell-phone couldn't even provide me with the potential of human contact. But I've felt more lonely, I guess--hopefully that's a distinction that makes sense outside of my head. Either way I couldn't help but think of the stories where the disciples are out on the boat in the storm and then Jesus shows up in some way and calms everything down.
And we're so hard on the disciples. "What an idiot! Peter steps out on the water and then gets scared...I mean, Jesus is right there!" "They hang out with him all this time and they still don't realize what kind of power he had..." But you know what...forget that. It's scary being out there in a storm, all alone and dark and exposed. And they were way more exposed than I was.
It was intense, and there were portions where I was driving through two and three inches of hailstones lying on the road, pooling the water into the two narrow channels which the tires of the few intrepid somewhere before me had cut through the ice. I stayed hunched over my wheel until--a few miles before Falcon, I guess--I noticed that the lightning in front of me had kinda subsided. I started to examine the sky to check my assumption. And then I saw it.
That star was probably the most beautiful I've ever seen. It meant the sky ahead was clear. It meant that the rain and the hail was over. It meant that I was actually going to finally get home.
That star is a lot of things.
I was home with my family within twenty minutes. And I was happy and at home again.
After everybody else went to bed, I sat alone on the couch in my parents' living room and I finished the book.
***
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
An epilogue? Hasn't this been long enough already?
keep watch
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Coming Home (Part 2/3)
This post is part two of my story. Part one can be found here.
There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.
This story is all true.
***
Tulsa is a bizarre place. I suppose it's because of how incredibly Christian the whole city is, but you can't seem to do much of anything without dealing with folk who are in the ministry.
Even so, I'm still always a little wary of telling people I go to ORU. ORU is a really polarizing place, for anybody who's heard of it--which, in Tulsa is everybody; they seem to either love it or hate it, both with very valid reasons. Nobody is knowledgeably indifferent. So when I got the smiling "Oh yeah?" that's always the response from the tow truck driver as we were pullling out of the QT parking lot, I thought that I might just be beginning a very long and uncomfortable ride.
Then the driver (I hate me referring to him as "the driver" and "the tow truck driver," too; the truth is I just never caught his name, or if I did I didn't care enough to remember it. Either way is a strike against me, not him) said, "I used to--back when I was in high school here--I used to go up to 41st and Harvard, up at ...'s--" He paused.
"Oh yeah?" I responded, faking like I belong in Tulsa and can actually communicate with anyone who really knows the city. Apparently, he was in the middle of a sentence, as he just kept going.
"...and it seemed like every time I went up there Brother Roberts was in the chair next to me getting his hair cut." A longer pause.
"That's funny," I said, sounding every bit as clever as I'm capable, I'm sure.
It was at this awkward pause in the conversation that I first noticed that we were listening to the country-western-Christian radio station...a combination I've stumbled across only in the bizarre milieu of Tulsa's brackish waters of cowboy and charismatic.
And so then he asked me what I was studying. And I told him that I'm a youth ministry major.
An aside is necessary here: I have no shame about my major (I can hear Prof Spears doing his "I am not ashamed of the gospel!" pastor impersonation here, which, if you ever have the opportunity, is completely worth hearing), but I really do prefer to live in peace with people and not hear them tell me about how I'm wasting my life or hear them tell me how teenagers are just all going to hell or hear them patronize me with a "Well, I suppose somebody has to reach out to them, too." It's gotten to the point where I've seriously contemplated manufacturing semi-pseudo-majors to tell people, especially people who -gasp!- I know that aren't Christians. Like maybe I'll tell them that I'm an Ancient Near Eastern Lit major. Or something.
Anyway, it was here that he told me that he was in the ministry as well, something which I still don't really understand his meaning. But, regardless, I asked him how he'd gotten here. Or there. I guess it all depends on how gripped by my story you feel at this point.
He had grown up in Tulsa. He was born in Birmingham, but only because his dad had traveled down there on the thin hope of finding work. All of his extended family, on both sides, lived in Tulsa at the time and, before his memory began to record everything, his immediate family returned. He had gone to school at OU for a time before enlisting. He served some eight years in the military before he became a golf pro. Seriously. Somewhere in Tulsa, there is currently a tow truck being driven around by some guy who probably still could beat the crap out of you and anyone you actually know at golf. And probably miniature golf, too.
Anyway, he worked as a golf pro (which is not the same as a professional golfer) in Tulsa for twenty-five years or so before he felt like God had called him to give it all up to enter the ministry. He served basically as an intern or a disciple to some local Pentecostalish evangelistish guy, signing up for a year-long commitment. About halfway through the year, one of the guys who was supporting the ministry he was working for offered him a job working for him.
Another aside. I know lots of y'all probably watched Friends or Seinfeld or ER or something else hip and relevant in the 90s and early 00s, but while I was in junior high and high school I watched a lot of Matlock. It's a great show. You can actually game plan the show based on what time it is. "Oh, we're at 30 minutes in, there's about to be a red herring and a black dude (whether it's Tyler or Conrad) is about to get beat up." Recently, while it was still on the air, I was heavily addicted to The First 48, which is a documentary show about homicide investigations.
All this to say that I love trying to solve mysteries. So when the driver got to this point in his story, I assumed that the job was somehow going to be related to driving a tow truck. Maybe some of you made that same assumption. Maybe some of you have already skipped a couple of paragraphs down to see how this all ends.
I was wrong, as it turns out. This man--not the driver, but the one offering the position--had invented the world's fastest workstation computer. "Wow," I said, pretty genuinely impressed.
"Yeah," he replied, smiling. "I was the only one who ever sold one. The guy fled the country before any of us could figure out that it was all just a scam. We had all invested, too; my wife and I had put in $200,000, our whole life's savings."
"Oh man," I tried to sound sympathetic. Don't get me wrong; I totally felt bad for the guy, it's just that that amount of money doesn't sound real to me. I can't remember the last time that I had $200 in my bank account.
"Yeah," he continued. "Once the money was gone, that just led to more problems, which led to the divorce." The ease with which he said this part was the really really troubling part. I didn't know how to respond. Divorce is awful for everyone involved, is about all I can figure. I tried to exhale.
"Look at that!" he half-shouted. His excitement was palpable. "That guy's lost his whole wheel!"
There was, in fact, a car stranded on the side of the highway with only three wheels and a distraught looking man standing outside of it. I guess when you're around this kind of stuff all the time, it just becomes a game to see the craziest stuff.
We never got back to talking about his life. I have no idea how this amazing golfer who had savings in the six figures ended up driving around in a diesel powered behemoth, running chain under cars and taking those who could pay from places of brokenness to somewhere where there was restoration, in some sense or another. Within minutes we were at the Saturn dealership.
The waiting room was long and narrow with a TV at one end, a row of windows along the long wall connecting the service area to this holding cell, a row of chairs opposite and facing the windows, and a dining-type table with chairs that rocked slightly in the other end of the room. The lights only worked on the TV half of the room and a woman was sitting, reading some romance novel at the table. Another college-aged looking guy was standing up close to the TV, his backpack in the chair closest to it. He was talking on his cell-phone to someone from church. Well, I don't know that he was talking to somebody from church, but he did call him brother a lot and use a bit of other Christianese, and I watched so much freaking Matlock that I'm pretty sure I'm right. Oh, and the TV was on TBN; this is Tulsa, after all.
And so I sat down, pretty near the center of the room and pulled out the other half of my sandwich and ate and watched them push in my so so sad car. This lasted precisely two minutes and 47 seconds, at which point I needed a new stimulus. I watched the TV for as long as I could before I thought my eyes would start bleeding. (That lasted not so long.) So I pulled out a book and began to read.
An interlude goes here. I want to put in a separate title, that would say something like "The Story of the Book," but I'm afraid that that will be too confusing. So just imagine that there's a big bold title here. Unless that confuses you. In which case, imagine a happy place, take four deep breaths, and continue reading.
It was wrapped in newspaper with some sort of marker writing scribbled onto it. I think it said "From: K.... To: Tim" but I'm not sure, I didn't actually read it. (PS, not really a fan of including names of other people on my blog. it kinda feels like i'm outing them or something. just kinda realized that just now.) I wonder what that says about me. I mean, I can't even emotionally invest enough in an interpersonal relationship that I read what the other person hands to me?
Anyway, it felt like a book...and I was confused. What book could it be? The irony in this moment is that this was one of those we've-had-conversations-about-you-getting-me-this-gift-and-I-still-am-surprised moments I seem to have frequently. It's a good thing that I enjoy surprises because otherwise my absentmindedness would get really annoying really quickly. I tore the paper off. I smiled. She smiled back. This was supposed to be my last night in Tulsa til August, and she tried one last time to persuade me to come partake of 31 cent scoop night at Baskin Robbins with a large group of our closest friends. She was successful in this pursuit, though that's completely irrelevant to the story.
The book was Blue Like Jazz, and it was about three o'clock on Thursday afternoon when I started it. I kinda didn't want to like it...I don't like liking cool things. But it was just so freaking cool.
I couldn't put it down. Every minute it took the mechanics to figure out what was wrong with my car was just giving me more of a chance to read. When they finally came out, they had bad news. I needed two wheels, and they only had one. Another would be coming in the next morning. My RA came and picked me up, and I returned, a little defeated, to my now empty dorm room.
***
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Part 3/3 should be up by Monday. Oh, and it's probably going to be even longer. Sorry.
There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.
This story is all true.
***
Tulsa is a bizarre place. I suppose it's because of how incredibly Christian the whole city is, but you can't seem to do much of anything without dealing with folk who are in the ministry.
Even so, I'm still always a little wary of telling people I go to ORU. ORU is a really polarizing place, for anybody who's heard of it--which, in Tulsa is everybody; they seem to either love it or hate it, both with very valid reasons. Nobody is knowledgeably indifferent. So when I got the smiling "Oh yeah?" that's always the response from the tow truck driver as we were pullling out of the QT parking lot, I thought that I might just be beginning a very long and uncomfortable ride.
Then the driver (I hate me referring to him as "the driver" and "the tow truck driver," too; the truth is I just never caught his name, or if I did I didn't care enough to remember it. Either way is a strike against me, not him) said, "I used to--back when I was in high school here--I used to go up to 41st and Harvard, up at ...'s--" He paused.
"Oh yeah?" I responded, faking like I belong in Tulsa and can actually communicate with anyone who really knows the city. Apparently, he was in the middle of a sentence, as he just kept going.
"...and it seemed like every time I went up there Brother Roberts was in the chair next to me getting his hair cut." A longer pause.
"That's funny," I said, sounding every bit as clever as I'm capable, I'm sure.
It was at this awkward pause in the conversation that I first noticed that we were listening to the country-western-Christian radio station...a combination I've stumbled across only in the bizarre milieu of Tulsa's brackish waters of cowboy and charismatic.
And so then he asked me what I was studying. And I told him that I'm a youth ministry major.
An aside is necessary here: I have no shame about my major (I can hear Prof Spears doing his "I am not ashamed of the gospel!" pastor impersonation here, which, if you ever have the opportunity, is completely worth hearing), but I really do prefer to live in peace with people and not hear them tell me about how I'm wasting my life or hear them tell me how teenagers are just all going to hell or hear them patronize me with a "Well, I suppose somebody has to reach out to them, too." It's gotten to the point where I've seriously contemplated manufacturing semi-pseudo-majors to tell people, especially people who -gasp!- I know that aren't Christians. Like maybe I'll tell them that I'm an Ancient Near Eastern Lit major. Or something.
Anyway, it was here that he told me that he was in the ministry as well, something which I still don't really understand his meaning. But, regardless, I asked him how he'd gotten here. Or there. I guess it all depends on how gripped by my story you feel at this point.
He had grown up in Tulsa. He was born in Birmingham, but only because his dad had traveled down there on the thin hope of finding work. All of his extended family, on both sides, lived in Tulsa at the time and, before his memory began to record everything, his immediate family returned. He had gone to school at OU for a time before enlisting. He served some eight years in the military before he became a golf pro. Seriously. Somewhere in Tulsa, there is currently a tow truck being driven around by some guy who probably still could beat the crap out of you and anyone you actually know at golf. And probably miniature golf, too.
Anyway, he worked as a golf pro (which is not the same as a professional golfer) in Tulsa for twenty-five years or so before he felt like God had called him to give it all up to enter the ministry. He served basically as an intern or a disciple to some local Pentecostalish evangelistish guy, signing up for a year-long commitment. About halfway through the year, one of the guys who was supporting the ministry he was working for offered him a job working for him.
Another aside. I know lots of y'all probably watched Friends or Seinfeld or ER or something else hip and relevant in the 90s and early 00s, but while I was in junior high and high school I watched a lot of Matlock. It's a great show. You can actually game plan the show based on what time it is. "Oh, we're at 30 minutes in, there's about to be a red herring and a black dude (whether it's Tyler or Conrad) is about to get beat up." Recently, while it was still on the air, I was heavily addicted to The First 48, which is a documentary show about homicide investigations.
All this to say that I love trying to solve mysteries. So when the driver got to this point in his story, I assumed that the job was somehow going to be related to driving a tow truck. Maybe some of you made that same assumption. Maybe some of you have already skipped a couple of paragraphs down to see how this all ends.
I was wrong, as it turns out. This man--not the driver, but the one offering the position--had invented the world's fastest workstation computer. "Wow," I said, pretty genuinely impressed.
"Yeah," he replied, smiling. "I was the only one who ever sold one. The guy fled the country before any of us could figure out that it was all just a scam. We had all invested, too; my wife and I had put in $200,000, our whole life's savings."
"Oh man," I tried to sound sympathetic. Don't get me wrong; I totally felt bad for the guy, it's just that that amount of money doesn't sound real to me. I can't remember the last time that I had $200 in my bank account.
"Yeah," he continued. "Once the money was gone, that just led to more problems, which led to the divorce." The ease with which he said this part was the really really troubling part. I didn't know how to respond. Divorce is awful for everyone involved, is about all I can figure. I tried to exhale.
"Look at that!" he half-shouted. His excitement was palpable. "That guy's lost his whole wheel!"
There was, in fact, a car stranded on the side of the highway with only three wheels and a distraught looking man standing outside of it. I guess when you're around this kind of stuff all the time, it just becomes a game to see the craziest stuff.
We never got back to talking about his life. I have no idea how this amazing golfer who had savings in the six figures ended up driving around in a diesel powered behemoth, running chain under cars and taking those who could pay from places of brokenness to somewhere where there was restoration, in some sense or another. Within minutes we were at the Saturn dealership.
The waiting room was long and narrow with a TV at one end, a row of windows along the long wall connecting the service area to this holding cell, a row of chairs opposite and facing the windows, and a dining-type table with chairs that rocked slightly in the other end of the room. The lights only worked on the TV half of the room and a woman was sitting, reading some romance novel at the table. Another college-aged looking guy was standing up close to the TV, his backpack in the chair closest to it. He was talking on his cell-phone to someone from church. Well, I don't know that he was talking to somebody from church, but he did call him brother a lot and use a bit of other Christianese, and I watched so much freaking Matlock that I'm pretty sure I'm right. Oh, and the TV was on TBN; this is Tulsa, after all.
And so I sat down, pretty near the center of the room and pulled out the other half of my sandwich and ate and watched them push in my so so sad car. This lasted precisely two minutes and 47 seconds, at which point I needed a new stimulus. I watched the TV for as long as I could before I thought my eyes would start bleeding. (That lasted not so long.) So I pulled out a book and began to read.
An interlude goes here. I want to put in a separate title, that would say something like "The Story of the Book," but I'm afraid that that will be too confusing. So just imagine that there's a big bold title here. Unless that confuses you. In which case, imagine a happy place, take four deep breaths, and continue reading.
It was wrapped in newspaper with some sort of marker writing scribbled onto it. I think it said "From: K.... To: Tim" but I'm not sure, I didn't actually read it. (PS, not really a fan of including names of other people on my blog. it kinda feels like i'm outing them or something. just kinda realized that just now.) I wonder what that says about me. I mean, I can't even emotionally invest enough in an interpersonal relationship that I read what the other person hands to me?
Anyway, it felt like a book...and I was confused. What book could it be? The irony in this moment is that this was one of those we've-had-conversations-about-you-getting-me-this-gift-and-I-still-am-surprised moments I seem to have frequently. It's a good thing that I enjoy surprises because otherwise my absentmindedness would get really annoying really quickly. I tore the paper off. I smiled. She smiled back. This was supposed to be my last night in Tulsa til August, and she tried one last time to persuade me to come partake of 31 cent scoop night at Baskin Robbins with a large group of our closest friends. She was successful in this pursuit, though that's completely irrelevant to the story.
The book was Blue Like Jazz, and it was about three o'clock on Thursday afternoon when I started it. I kinda didn't want to like it...I don't like liking cool things. But it was just so freaking cool.
I couldn't put it down. Every minute it took the mechanics to figure out what was wrong with my car was just giving me more of a chance to read. When they finally came out, they had bad news. I needed two wheels, and they only had one. Another would be coming in the next morning. My RA came and picked me up, and I returned, a little defeated, to my now empty dorm room.
***
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Part 3/3 should be up by Monday. Oh, and it's probably going to be even longer. Sorry.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Coming Home (Part 1/3)
Before I begin, I want to apologize for the length; I'm not going to cut it down any more than this, though, because this is the first bit of writing I've felt good about for some time. Take your time with it if you need to, parts 2 & 3 won't show up for a few days.
There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.
This story is all true.
***
First and foremost, I have some slightly embarrassing confessions to make. If you try to corner me on any of these in real life, I will deny that they are true. But we'll both know that they're true, because you just read them and I wrote them and we'll feel just like spies or bank robbers or two children who've stumbled upon a great and mysterious faerie land that we want so badly to tell everyone else about. But we won't. Get it?
One, I am a very slow reader. And I'm not talking about the technical, making letters into words and words into sentences part of reading, but the sitting still and focusing on something in front of me for hours on end part of reading. The last book that I read of my own volition was The Ragamuffin Gospel, which I loved. It took me nine months.
Two, I am kinda sorta afraid of the dark. Like not a lot, and not if anybody else is around, but it just takes me a few minutes to get accustomed to being alone in the dark.
Three, I don't actually know how to change a flat tire. I mean, I'm aware that there's this whole jack up the car, use tire iron, put spare on process to it--but I've never actually done it. I don't think it'd be that hard...I mean, they make directions, right? I'm really good at following directions...
OK, I think that's all that's really necessary at the start of all of this. Now we can descend gracefully into a story of coming home.
***
This story actually begins at the start of last week, but I don't really want to tell it from there. So instead, I'll start in the middle.
It was raining. I don't mind rain, I even kinda like it, but I absolutely hate being wet. It'd been raining in Tulsa pretty heavily off and on for a couple of days and the ground had already had its fill of water. Puddles were forming everywhere, and since I was rocking my Chucks, walking from the GC to Saga had never been so difficult. I arrived, ate some breakfast, and prepared myself for what was already shaping up to be a long day.
It was 8.25 when I poured the green Tabasco sauce (my most recent love affair) onto my eggs-and-other-various-breakfasty-things plate, and I still had to load my possessions into my Saturn Ion, clean (fervently) the room, and procure the Holy Grail of finals week (an RA's signature on my dorm check-out sheet) before noon. The morning was pretty stressful, but thanks mostly to the work of DW, my roommate, I was able to get signed out at 12:15, and on the road by 12:30.
I picked up my foot long BMT at Subway, as is my custom, with a bag of Sun Chips and a root beer and settled in for ten hours of pure joy behind the wheel of my car through some of the most consistent terrain God ever designed on this Earth.
In order to leave Tulsa, I have to do this weird etch-a-sketch type maneuver where I start by heading north on 75, then go about a mile east on 244, before turning west onto 412, which takes me most of the way out of Oklahoma. I remember it as a dance step. Anyway, right after merging onto 412, which is under construction, I found my way into a vacuous cavern of a pothole hungry for tires along the right side of the right lane.
Eight inches doesn't sound like much. At 70 miles per hour, it sounds like you broke the whole passenger side of your car off. Then the grinding noise starts. I never lost control or even felt like I was close, which was pretty incredible considering I was holding my sandwich the whole time. Also, I never even thought about swearing. But I was scared. Mainly of having to change a tire. I credit my hours of running from cops in Grand Theft Auto for this; say what you will about murder, drugs, prostitution, and profanity, but that game gave me a serious leg up when it comes to driving through difficult situations.
As I pulled over, on a bridge (which is totally not what you're supposed to do), I joined a line of about eight or nine other vehicles who had also hid the pothole-o del muerte. I looked into the passenger side mirror of my car, seeing if I could see any damage. The fact that I could see warped edges of the rim stretching inches out away from my car was my first clue that something was more wrong than a spare could fix.
I called my mom. She put my dad on the phone. I got out of the car and surveyed the damage: both passenger side tires, rims, and wheels were done. Finito. The police were now on the scene, blocking off the lane which had claimed two perfectly good wheels from my now forlorn looking car, so I walked over to them to see what I should do. They wanted me off the bridge, and said that they would come down and escort me off the highway once the road crew arrived.
Devoid of any other options, I retrieved the rest of my sandwich from my car, sat down on the guardrail halfway between my car and the cops, and had a picnic.
About twenty minutes later, one of the patrolmen drove up to my car and, with the words "You ready to try this?" sent me to my car to get it to the QT at the next exit. As it turns out, mucho difficult to drive without tires on half your wheels...it seems like everything's going to explode at about 30. I made it to the QuikTrip, there in North Tulsa, at which point the officer literally said "You're safe here, but I wouldn't go too far in any direction." I thanked him for the advice and, for the first time, examined my surroundings. A chain link fence surrounded the QuikTrip. A chainlink fence with barbed wire at the top. I locked my doors.
It was shortly after this that she drove up and parked in the space next to mine. I had heard her engine making strange noises as she used the same exit I had just used to leave 412, distracting me from my reading; I watched her the whole way in. There was a baby in the car with her, in whatever it is that you put a baby into while in the car with a blanket over the handle, making a little tent. And I smiled, I felt comforted with the knowledge that people--rich, poor, black, white, North Tulsan, Springfolk--are all the same.
But she didn't get out at first. I thought that was odd. She had parked quite a way from the store. I tried to focus on my reading. She was out of her car now, looking under the hood. There were tears in her eyes. Just when I was beginning to debate offering help of some kind, she got back into her car and got out her cell phone. Surely she has help on the way, I thought.
She rolled the passenger side window halfway down. It was warm and humid by this point in the day; not hot like August, but not weather for sitting with your infant in a car. I tried desperately not to notice. My car was hermetically sealed; I had my A/C running. I had a drink. I tried again to focus on my book. I tried to send my mom a text message that the tow truck would be another half hour.
Just then, the loud, terrible beeping of a truck in reverse captured my attention. The tow truck had arrived. I got out of my car and greeted the very nice, older gentleman walking toward me. We chatted about how quickly he had gotten there (he had been downtown filing some paperwork) and how I had gotten myself into this predicament. And then there she was.
She was standing outside her car, now, with her baby in her arms, tears streaming down her face. She called out for help. She asked the tow truck driver to help her. She asked how much it would be; she didn't have insurance, so the driver told her that the rate was something a mile. I don't remember what it was, but I know now and I knew then that it was too much. She pleaded; the auto shop was just up the road a block or two. He said OK.
I sat there. I wanted to say "Take her first, then come back for me. She has a baby. She needs help." But I didn't. I couldn't? No, that's not it. I just didn't. And I hated myself for it. And I still hate that part of me for it.
The tow driver lifted my car onto his flat bed. I kept my back to her and her car. Before we left, he went over to her and said one last thing. I couldn't hear him over the idling engine, and his back was turned so I couldn't even read lips.
I hope it was good news.
Then I climbed into the truck and we were on our way.
***
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Part 2/3 should be up by Tuesday of next week.
There are roughly 684 miles between my spot in upper lot and my parking spot on the road alongside the house across the street from my home. It's a journey I've made at least a dozen times in the past few years; I thought that I knew every last stretch of road I would come across. But as it turned out, God had plans for using that very same road to stretch me.
This story is all true.
***
First and foremost, I have some slightly embarrassing confessions to make. If you try to corner me on any of these in real life, I will deny that they are true. But we'll both know that they're true, because you just read them and I wrote them and we'll feel just like spies or bank robbers or two children who've stumbled upon a great and mysterious faerie land that we want so badly to tell everyone else about. But we won't. Get it?
One, I am a very slow reader. And I'm not talking about the technical, making letters into words and words into sentences part of reading, but the sitting still and focusing on something in front of me for hours on end part of reading. The last book that I read of my own volition was The Ragamuffin Gospel, which I loved. It took me nine months.
Two, I am kinda sorta afraid of the dark. Like not a lot, and not if anybody else is around, but it just takes me a few minutes to get accustomed to being alone in the dark.
Three, I don't actually know how to change a flat tire. I mean, I'm aware that there's this whole jack up the car, use tire iron, put spare on process to it--but I've never actually done it. I don't think it'd be that hard...I mean, they make directions, right? I'm really good at following directions...
OK, I think that's all that's really necessary at the start of all of this. Now we can descend gracefully into a story of coming home.
***
This story actually begins at the start of last week, but I don't really want to tell it from there. So instead, I'll start in the middle.
It was raining. I don't mind rain, I even kinda like it, but I absolutely hate being wet. It'd been raining in Tulsa pretty heavily off and on for a couple of days and the ground had already had its fill of water. Puddles were forming everywhere, and since I was rocking my Chucks, walking from the GC to Saga had never been so difficult. I arrived, ate some breakfast, and prepared myself for what was already shaping up to be a long day.
It was 8.25 when I poured the green Tabasco sauce (my most recent love affair) onto my eggs-and-other-various-breakfasty-things plate, and I still had to load my possessions into my Saturn Ion, clean (fervently) the room, and procure the Holy Grail of finals week (an RA's signature on my dorm check-out sheet) before noon. The morning was pretty stressful, but thanks mostly to the work of DW, my roommate, I was able to get signed out at 12:15, and on the road by 12:30.
I picked up my foot long BMT at Subway, as is my custom, with a bag of Sun Chips and a root beer and settled in for ten hours of pure joy behind the wheel of my car through some of the most consistent terrain God ever designed on this Earth.
In order to leave Tulsa, I have to do this weird etch-a-sketch type maneuver where I start by heading north on 75, then go about a mile east on 244, before turning west onto 412, which takes me most of the way out of Oklahoma. I remember it as a dance step. Anyway, right after merging onto 412, which is under construction, I found my way into a vacuous cavern of a pothole hungry for tires along the right side of the right lane.
Eight inches doesn't sound like much. At 70 miles per hour, it sounds like you broke the whole passenger side of your car off. Then the grinding noise starts. I never lost control or even felt like I was close, which was pretty incredible considering I was holding my sandwich the whole time. Also, I never even thought about swearing. But I was scared. Mainly of having to change a tire. I credit my hours of running from cops in Grand Theft Auto for this; say what you will about murder, drugs, prostitution, and profanity, but that game gave me a serious leg up when it comes to driving through difficult situations.
As I pulled over, on a bridge (which is totally not what you're supposed to do), I joined a line of about eight or nine other vehicles who had also hid the pothole-o del muerte. I looked into the passenger side mirror of my car, seeing if I could see any damage. The fact that I could see warped edges of the rim stretching inches out away from my car was my first clue that something was more wrong than a spare could fix.
I called my mom. She put my dad on the phone. I got out of the car and surveyed the damage: both passenger side tires, rims, and wheels were done. Finito. The police were now on the scene, blocking off the lane which had claimed two perfectly good wheels from my now forlorn looking car, so I walked over to them to see what I should do. They wanted me off the bridge, and said that they would come down and escort me off the highway once the road crew arrived.
Devoid of any other options, I retrieved the rest of my sandwich from my car, sat down on the guardrail halfway between my car and the cops, and had a picnic.
About twenty minutes later, one of the patrolmen drove up to my car and, with the words "You ready to try this?" sent me to my car to get it to the QT at the next exit. As it turns out, mucho difficult to drive without tires on half your wheels...it seems like everything's going to explode at about 30. I made it to the QuikTrip, there in North Tulsa, at which point the officer literally said "You're safe here, but I wouldn't go too far in any direction." I thanked him for the advice and, for the first time, examined my surroundings. A chain link fence surrounded the QuikTrip. A chainlink fence with barbed wire at the top. I locked my doors.
It was shortly after this that she drove up and parked in the space next to mine. I had heard her engine making strange noises as she used the same exit I had just used to leave 412, distracting me from my reading; I watched her the whole way in. There was a baby in the car with her, in whatever it is that you put a baby into while in the car with a blanket over the handle, making a little tent. And I smiled, I felt comforted with the knowledge that people--rich, poor, black, white, North Tulsan, Springfolk--are all the same.
But she didn't get out at first. I thought that was odd. She had parked quite a way from the store. I tried to focus on my reading. She was out of her car now, looking under the hood. There were tears in her eyes. Just when I was beginning to debate offering help of some kind, she got back into her car and got out her cell phone. Surely she has help on the way, I thought.
She rolled the passenger side window halfway down. It was warm and humid by this point in the day; not hot like August, but not weather for sitting with your infant in a car. I tried desperately not to notice. My car was hermetically sealed; I had my A/C running. I had a drink. I tried again to focus on my book. I tried to send my mom a text message that the tow truck would be another half hour.
Just then, the loud, terrible beeping of a truck in reverse captured my attention. The tow truck had arrived. I got out of my car and greeted the very nice, older gentleman walking toward me. We chatted about how quickly he had gotten there (he had been downtown filing some paperwork) and how I had gotten myself into this predicament. And then there she was.
She was standing outside her car, now, with her baby in her arms, tears streaming down her face. She called out for help. She asked the tow truck driver to help her. She asked how much it would be; she didn't have insurance, so the driver told her that the rate was something a mile. I don't remember what it was, but I know now and I knew then that it was too much. She pleaded; the auto shop was just up the road a block or two. He said OK.
I sat there. I wanted to say "Take her first, then come back for me. She has a baby. She needs help." But I didn't. I couldn't? No, that's not it. I just didn't. And I hated myself for it. And I still hate that part of me for it.
The tow driver lifted my car onto his flat bed. I kept my back to her and her car. Before we left, he went over to her and said one last thing. I couldn't hear him over the idling engine, and his back was turned so I couldn't even read lips.
I hope it was good news.
Then I climbed into the truck and we were on our way.
***
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Part 2/3 should be up by Tuesday of next week.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Beef Nuggets ~or~ Why I'm Single
And as I wrote, I bled; big, hot, scarlet drops fell onto the parchment, forming stars and lights and shapes and heavens. [...] But when I started to stop bleeding, I realized that there was nothing left; no more fear, no more joy.
-- How the Pale and Shriveled Man Died
Tonight at dinner, conversation happened. I guess that's a very poor way to begin this story; it really smacks of lazy exposition...as in "Here we are in Spain."
Regardless, I was at dinner in a conversation with several good friends about how girls are leeches which suck life out of me. But that's not what I sat down to write; if you want to have that conversation with me, I'm sure we could sometime, but tonight is hopefully going to be something else.
The discussion of how I just so amazingly stay single came to a point of identity: am I being me or am I being someone else. Unfortunately for me, this question was asked by someone who knows me pretty well, so I couldn't just ignore it with the whole you-don't-know-me Jenny Jones response. I responded nonetheless pretty quickly that I was being me. And I believed it. I mean, I don't feel pressured at all by the people around me to behave in a certain way. I just do my thing.
But I haven't been able to get away from the question. And I guess the answer's not as simple as I wish it was. Here's why:
I'm not really sure if this is a legit reason, before I begin. Maybe it isn't. But illegitimate or not, it's my reason for this.
The person who knew me better than anyone else in the world sent me an IM over the summer that she could never be anything more than just friends with me, and then (much) later sent me an e-mail that tritely dismissed me from her life.
There's obviously much more to the situation than that. But that's not really important, and I don't know that this is the venue, if there even is a venue for that. Everything you need to know about that whole saga is right there.
I used to struggle for an answer as to what I had said or done wrong to drive her away. I don't know that there was anything that I could have done differently to change the outcome. She certainly had plenty of opportunities and solid reasons throughout the year to get rid of me, but she never did. Why over the summer?
My answer: Convenience.
And that's scary. I want to pause here to make sure that you aren't hearing something that I'm not saying--God only knows who reads this blog and who knows what about my life and those involved in it. This is not a tirade about how awful a person this girl is or was. I was so interested in her because she was, and still is, such a great person. Now that that's out of the way...
What scares me about this is that this is something which I am: convenient. The voices which gently sing me to sleep ask me if I'm even capable of a real relationship and point out that if I died, people would be sad about it for a few weeks, but then return to the status quo. Don't get me wrong--I understand that these things aren't true...but these are the echoes that haunt me, the questions that remain at the close of the day.
If I'm convenient, I'm disposable. Which is where the beef nuggets come in to play. I don't know how much time y'all have spent in the jerky aisle of a convenience store, but there are these disgusting abominations of meat byproduct sold there known as 'beef nuggets.' They look like dog food, and scare even the most seasoned colon right out of---well, this is just getting gross.
I think that's what I've been this year: beef nuggets. Inspiring curiosity, but also sending out the message to everyone to keep their distance.
I guess if you never get picked up you never get thrown away, right?
Looking back, this has kind of been the pattern to my life: girls get really involved with me until something better comes along, or until it just gets too arduous to deal with me anymore.
Wouldn't it be cool if this post ended with some revelation that made all that crap seem better or worth it?
Here's my best shot:
Take heart: though I don't know why pain is part of life, everything I do know about God, I learned in those dreadful times.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Monday, March 5, 2007
The Fear of Silence
One of the traits that's endemic to the little corner of Christianity that I'm tucked into right now, the charima-pentecostal corner, is the emphasis on making noise. We love our God, and we shout and sing and dance and cry out in angelic tongues about it. It's often communicated, overtly or otherwise, that if we're not being loud, we're not loving God, or at least not to the degree which we could be.
If you spend any time at ORU, or many other places with an emphasis on vocal worship, you will certainly hear this verse quoted and or paraphrased on a near weekly basis:
Psalm 22:3 KJV
In fact, in chapel last Friday, the speaker made a brief mention of the verse, which is what really led to this whole thought. I turned there in my handy dandy NRSV. I had thought that the verse sounded familiar. Here's how that psalm begins
The first part is one of the Seven Sayings of Christ on the Cross, which, I think is where I remembered it from. But what really caught my attention is that we have really knocked out the natural tension of these three verses in favor of the simpler, more incantational formula |[us+praise=presence.of.God]|. And so then I was thinking about God's silence.
And then our speaker referenced the story of God appearing to Elijah. Which, I checked, and found:
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the NRSV reading is by far the minority reading of the text, but it's a legit one. And it carries some interesting implications with it.
Is our difficulty in finding God in silence based in our fear that God is silent sometimes?
I'm not so sure.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
If you spend any time at ORU, or many other places with an emphasis on vocal worship, you will certainly hear this verse quoted and or paraphrased on a near weekly basis:
But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
Psalm 22:3 KJV
In fact, in chapel last Friday, the speaker made a brief mention of the verse, which is what really led to this whole thought. I turned there in my handy dandy NRSV. I had thought that the verse sounded familiar. Here's how that psalm begins
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.Psalm 22:1-2 NRSV
The first part is one of the Seven Sayings of Christ on the Cross, which, I think is where I remembered it from. But what really caught my attention is that we have really knocked out the natural tension of these three verses in favor of the simpler, more incantational formula |[us+praise=presence.of.God]|. And so then I was thinking about God's silence.
And then our speaker referenced the story of God appearing to Elijah. Which, I checked, and found:
He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.1 Kings 19:11-12 NRSV
Now, I'll be the first to admit that the NRSV reading is by far the minority reading of the text, but it's a legit one. And it carries some interesting implications with it.
Is our difficulty in finding God in silence based in our fear that God is silent sometimes?
I'm not so sure.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Deja Vu: A Relationship Existentially: Wal-Mart
Tonight was weird.
I was reminded of so many different things tonight. That's what was weird about it.
And I would be reminded in weird deja vu ways, like I couldn't actually remember what this was hearkening back toward, just that it was somehow hearkening back. I guess it was just a night facing the wrong way.
I remembered seepage, storage bins for clothes, speeding back through the parking lot and screaming at each other so that we could get her keys. I remembered getting donuts just because I was already out there, 16 Blocks, and telling secrets via an IM guessing game.
But more than anything other, I remembered a story that went down before any of the rest of that.
It was a little over a year ago, when it was just starting to get coolish at nights down here. I was out with the girl who was occupying all my time (either with her presence or her phantom staring back at me in my mind), and I was really nervous. We were, I suppose, interested in each other. I was filling my car up with gas, chatting with her through the door she'd opened for just such a purpose.
At this point a man walked up and accosted me. He asked how things were going. I could sense where this was going to take me. He looked me in the eye and told me this long story about how he needed just $24.78 in order to pay his rent at the Days Inn just down the street. He told me all about how he had done the whole Seed-Faith thing and he was just broke now from having given it all away, and I closed her door.
I told him that I didn't have the money. He looked at my car, at her, and he looked back at me and called me a liar. I don't think she could hear. On second thought, my car isn't very sound proof. She may have. I hoped that she didn't. I told him that I really didn't have any money, that all this--except her, I suppose--was my parents' money, not mine. He said something rude.
As I started to walk back around to the other side of my car, I told him that we'd definitely be praying for him. He told me not to. "Don't pray for me, pray for yourself. You don't know God, man," he said. I told him to have a good night. He walked away.
I went out and had a great night.
But it gnawed at me. Had I done something wrong? We talked about it and she took my side. She said that God would provide what the man had needed, and if it wasn't me it wasn't me.
The next morning I was driving to church, prepared to teach about Micah 6.8 ("He has told you, O Man, what is good, and what does YHWH require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."), and it just gnawed at me and rang in my heart. "You don't know God."
And tonight was kinda like that.
God, please know that I did the best I knew how; please bless my (probably failed) attempts at walking out this faith that you've entrusted to me. God, know that whatever I did or didn't do that I did it all with the best of intentions. God help me.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
I was reminded of so many different things tonight. That's what was weird about it.
And I would be reminded in weird deja vu ways, like I couldn't actually remember what this was hearkening back toward, just that it was somehow hearkening back. I guess it was just a night facing the wrong way.
I remembered seepage, storage bins for clothes, speeding back through the parking lot and screaming at each other so that we could get her keys. I remembered getting donuts just because I was already out there, 16 Blocks, and telling secrets via an IM guessing game.
But more than anything other, I remembered a story that went down before any of the rest of that.
It was a little over a year ago, when it was just starting to get coolish at nights down here. I was out with the girl who was occupying all my time (either with her presence or her phantom staring back at me in my mind), and I was really nervous. We were, I suppose, interested in each other. I was filling my car up with gas, chatting with her through the door she'd opened for just such a purpose.
At this point a man walked up and accosted me. He asked how things were going. I could sense where this was going to take me. He looked me in the eye and told me this long story about how he needed just $24.78 in order to pay his rent at the Days Inn just down the street. He told me all about how he had done the whole Seed-Faith thing and he was just broke now from having given it all away, and I closed her door.
I told him that I didn't have the money. He looked at my car, at her, and he looked back at me and called me a liar. I don't think she could hear. On second thought, my car isn't very sound proof. She may have. I hoped that she didn't. I told him that I really didn't have any money, that all this--except her, I suppose--was my parents' money, not mine. He said something rude.
As I started to walk back around to the other side of my car, I told him that we'd definitely be praying for him. He told me not to. "Don't pray for me, pray for yourself. You don't know God, man," he said. I told him to have a good night. He walked away.
I went out and had a great night.
But it gnawed at me. Had I done something wrong? We talked about it and she took my side. She said that God would provide what the man had needed, and if it wasn't me it wasn't me.
The next morning I was driving to church, prepared to teach about Micah 6.8 ("He has told you, O Man, what is good, and what does YHWH require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."), and it just gnawed at me and rang in my heart. "You don't know God."
And tonight was kinda like that.
God, please know that I did the best I knew how; please bless my (probably failed) attempts at walking out this faith that you've entrusted to me. God, know that whatever I did or didn't do that I did it all with the best of intentions. God help me.
Peace, love, and joy to you all.
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