love's reflection

I was getting ready for work and my mind was wondering. I thought about some of the choices I’d made recently, and how badly I’d handle chances to be good.

I thought about this guy I knew and what an ass his recent choices had made him appear to be.

And this story popped into my head.

There was a prince of a guy riding through the countryside. His long, Pantene-like hair flowing through the breeze, he looked around at the country that would so be his soon. The donkey he was riding brayed as the road narrowed, and the prince, aggravated, beat his ride to make the animal move faster.

He was a jerk, but he could be. He was a God-chosen prince. He was beautiful, rich, and owned farther than the eye could see of a peaceful, beautiful land… so why not?

Anyway, the ass was riding an ass. And as he passed a tree, those luscious locks tangled themselves up in a tree. The donkey turned around to the prince. He brayed to himself at seeing the prince, and (in my head, at least) said, “Wow, man. You really are an ass! You could have moved slower, and not gotten your hair tangled. You could have gone a different way, and avoided the tree altogether. But you had to go this way, this fast.”

The donkey kept laughing, leaving the prince hanging, angry and humiliated.

I laugh because I so relate to that tale… and it’s not usually until I am hanging by my hair, in a place where what I thought I knew turns into something unfamiliar and scary that I’ll admit I have a very carefully constructed view of power; that my power is solely based on perspective.

Last week, I heard another story. A friend went to the funhouse at the state fair last fall. He was there, chasing kids and making funny faces in the warped mirrors, when a little girl obviously done up for a pageant came in with her family.

Her mom lead her to the mirror that makes you look fat, and the little girl started to tear up. The mom lead the little girl to the super-thin mirror, and the little girl started crying. The mom led her to the third mirror with the warped S-shaped reflection, and the girl just broke down.

Another female family member saw all of this, and brought a little compact mirror out of her purse. She offered it to the little girl, and she stopped crying.

What do the two stories have in common? Perspective and uncertainty.

We need to know who we are. We have to know what truth is, and we have to be able to trust it.

We have to choose to trust it.

When my mom collapsed, I freaked out. I didn’t know what to do or who to trust. It didn’t matter what the tests said or didn’t, because they didn’t fix anything. They all said she should be fine, and they charged us for the lack of information.

As far as I was concerned, and have been, and probably will be for a while, hospitals are where people I love go to die.

And there are those that would tell me this is an issue with a spiritual answer, and I agree with them, as that’s something I’ve said before. When my mom wasn’t hooked up to tubes looking like every breath cost her.

But truth is truth, no matter the angle or perspective. Otherwise, it’s not truth.

So, believing that, what do I do?

There’s a verse from a letter written by Paul, that talks about letting your requests be known to God, and for years (most of my life, really) people have read that to mean “whatever your issue is, pray about it.” Or worse, if you have a problem, it’s because you haven’t prayed about it.

But what if that’s not what that means at all?

What if that verse is really saying, you are hurt by this thing you care clinging to which is not God… so why is that? What is it about that ______ (job, person, house, responsibility) that offers you a fuller, more completely safe place than God?

What if it’s just a subtle request for you to turn the Lover of your soul first?

One of my mom’s favorite rants is that if the Church were doing its job, there wouldn’t be a need for counselors or jails or food stamps. There’d be less government watch-dogging, and more effective good in the world.

The first step in that is for each and every one of us to admit that we just don’t trust God.

It can start with me: I don’t trust God. I don’t believe that He’ll use me ever again. I honestly believe that someday, He’ll wake up and realize how screwed up I am and how rough around the edges and horrid and messy… and He’ll leave.

Or worse yet, He’ll stay and resent me for being the way I am, wait for me to go off on Him (again), and He’ll just stop responding.

See? Here’s a secret: I’m really a prince with an ego issue… and part of me will always be that little girl, seeing herself as warbled and warped, not really sure what I look like to other people and scared that what I feel isn’t really true.

But… here’s a bigger secret, one I really can’t deal with sometimes: God knows already. He loves me anyway.

06.26.11

On July 26th, while I was at work, my mom was home, collapsed on the couch unable to move. She had her cell, so she called 911. She spent the next three days in the hospital, being poked and prodded and tested. The tests came up clean, but she is still having the spells that first put her in the place of needles and iodine.

It's been 20 days since then, and life has shifted. Sleep means less, time means more. Money is tight, tension is constant. 

But subtle things have changed for the better.  Packing up the walker for when we go out makes for a great upper arm workout. And it means she's not plugged into some machine in some building far away. Helping her out of bed or off the couch reminds me that she wouldn't let just anyone help her a few years ago, and I can give thanks for that, too.

There are different questions running through my head: how many forms do we need to fill out? How many copies do we need to request of the test results? So this form goes there, but this forms goes somewhere else? Even though it asks for the same information? How do we pay for that? What test do we need to have taken now?

There are still no answers, although we have a very rough timeline of this lasting at least six months. She can't drive, lift anything over 5 pounds, and has difficulty walking across our 900 square feet house.

The strongest, most energetic person I know wears out eating a Subway sandwich.

It has been, bar none, the hardest, most painful, most beautiful experience of my life.

I hate that she hurts - and hurts all the time. I hate that she can't speak soft words and there's always this edge of anger because she just can't take deep enough breaths. 

I despise that we just keep finding more questions, and fewer answers... and there should be a rule that the longer the word,the  less it should cost.

I wish I could rant against the drugs that fix a symptom, but don't really affect change. But they make the migraines bearable, and every little bit helps.

Most of all, though, I wish I had my mom back.

Weighty Beauty, Haunting Clarity & Stephen Hawking

Andrew, one of the pastors at my church, started a series today about the beginning of the world. He said that the first verse in the Bible was basically the first line in a really good book, and set the tone. Immediately, I thought of all the really good books that have really, really good opening lines:

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”

“It is a truth universally known that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.”

“It was a dark and stormy night.”

And really, the Bible is the best book I’ve ever read.

It’s full of stories and histories and people I can relate to. All the great themes are there, too – sin and redemption (of course), but also wars and wanderings, poetry and praises, rants at a quiet God and chapters and chapters of birth records, infinite beauty, the end of the world with angels and demons and incest that brought down a nation, too, just for good measure.

Andrew continued, saying that he sees the first part of Genesis as a creed, a statement of faith, written in the form of a song. There’s a rhythm, repetitive and comforting, telling the story of a God creating a world where we happen to live.

What it isn’t is a logistical wonder. It doesn’t make logical sense; there’s not an exact timeline to follow. One doesn’t start at the edge of darkness, meander through the dinosaurs and end up with a tidy little flow into the third millennium. What the first chapter of Genesis does show is who God is, and consequently, who we are in relation. And that makes for a very worthy introduction.

Andrew continued, drawing a parallel between going to the first Creation story and looking for a timeline to seeking information about the shepherds from John’s telling of Christ’s birth. Almost everyone knows the Christmas story from Luke, resplendent with angels and shepherds on hills and Mary smiling beatifically.

And here’s what John has to say: “The Word became a human being and lived here with us. We saw His true glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father. From Him, all the kindness and all the truth of God have come down to us.” (John 1:14)

No shepherds. No angels. No candy canes. Weighty beauty, granted, but one wouldn’t look for an overstuffed inn in John. Conversely, there is a haunting clarity to John’s words that one cannot find in Luke’s more detailed telling.

There is beauty and answers to hard questions offered in each Scripture. But if the wrong questions are asked, all of the good remains hidden, like staring at poetry written in an unknown language.

That thought really started my mental train rolling out of the station, because it’s very rare for even a semi-liberal Christian to make the statement that any thought is just…. wrong.

But the statement was made, and like a mini A-bomb, the thoughts rippled after. If I read a single, given Scripture with an expectation of a particular answer, what other ideas or answers am I not allowing to come to me? What could I be denying in my single-mindedness?

What answer do I really want Scriptures to give me? Why am I even approaching a holy book with the idea that it serves me?

There was, curiously enough, a special on the Science Channel tonight, dealing with the argument of science explaining the creation of everything, versus religion’s. Stephen Hawking explained his stance, ending with the statement that God (if He exists – which Hawking doesn’t believe) wouldn’t have the time to create the Big Bang, which created the universe.

Andrew made the comment at the beginning of his lecture this morning that he doesn’t really believe that the debate between how science says we got here versus how Scripture describes it really matters at the end of the day. He believes that there are other issues far more worthy of debate, time and energy – like the condition of your soul and mine; like suffering – anywhere, everywhere; like how each and every one of us has a responsibility to make the world a better place for every single one of us, whether we like each other or not.

I have to agree; But I find it very, very interesting that Stephen Hawking thinks that God didn’t have the time to create us. And because, in Mr. Hawking’s mind, God lacked the time, this proves God couldn’t possibly exist.

And at this point, I have to confess (although I fully acknowledge it’s petty), I wonder this: when Christians are narrow-minded, it’s called judgmental. What is it called when scientists do it?

My pettiness and Hawking’s limited logic tend to make one very striking point: we’re both imperfect, and we are the problem. Flawed and imperfect humans skew everything, because we can’t see where we’re weak or lacking.

There are reasons why it took Galileo in the 1600s to figure out the Earth was not the center of the universe – and it wasn’t just because the Church wanted it to not be true. Humans, although we have brilliant moments, are not masters of the universe. We learn more completely in groups, in community.

It’s the arrogant and lonely who think otherwise, and their clay-footed, pedantic logic will show.