pretty lies & horded scars

i say i want to give you all of me
a pretty lie
You're pure & beautiful
& i try to be beautiful


You don't need ugly
nobody wants to see that anyway


here's the pretty
ignore the rest


i say i want to give you all of me
i lie
horde my scars
to pick in the dark
when i am alone


when i am pretty
You can see me again


I'm saving you, really
You don't know what You're asking


so it's better
better if You wait
wait 'til the mask's in place


ugly truth is
i live with devils
don't trust angels


& I'm afraid
all i'll end up with?


pretty lies & horded scars

stuck on step 3

There's a series dealing with temptation I've been following. And the more I hear, the more I realize I am infinitely weak in the places where I pay the least attention. No news means no new news, so I just keep doing what I've been doing. It must be working if I've made it this far, and besides, it's not really a sin if you can justify it, right?


Except that I don't buy that.


There are truths that are true whether I want them to be true or not. And there are sins that are sins whether I think they are or not.


Why? The quickest and most humbling answer is: Because I'm not God.


Oscar Wilde glibly stated once, "I can resist anything, except temptation." But temptation's really the only thing worth the effort to resist; partly because it's so personal, and partly because anything that difficult to resist has to have a reason for it to be so difficult in the first place.


And I'm just stubborn enough to resist because it is difficult. It's one of the reasons I'm a Christian; like Gilbert K. Chesterton stated, "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." 


And a big part of trying to be a follower of this Christ I read about is shedding the parts of my self that don't show Him, or worse, I try to hide from Him.


One of the points made in the series was that temptation shows our attempts to meet legitimate needs in illegitimate ways. For instance, Christ was tempted after 40 days of desert nothing (except heat, heat, no food, and more heat) to turn stones to bread. He was legitimately hungry; He certainly had the power to change any thing that is into something else entirely.


He'd changed water to wine. Why not change stones to bread?


The quickest and most obvious answer? God had a plan. That wasn't part of it.


It doesn't matter if the idea had been presented on day 4 or 35 or 41. If Christ had given in to His hunger on any day, He would have made a choice that was His body's, and not part of God's plan. He could have had bread, but if He did, there'd be no Calvary. 


No third day. No hope eternal.


There would just be undeniable, unrelenting, irresistable temptation.


Because temptation is never solely about what's being offered. It's always more about what's being denied and the cost.


I wrestle almost daily with an addiction I walked away from 3 years ago. There was no support group, and I still shy away from talking about that time in my life.


It's a sore spot, because it's still a temptation. 


Comparing what I've gone through and what I do to keep myself from falling back into the skin of that person I used to be, I've noticed I keep stumbling over step 3 in the 12 Steps.



Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God


Truth? I. Don't. Want. To.


As different as life is now, as much healthier I am, and as much I know, I know this is a better life, I still don't want to acknowledge that I have to be dependent on Someone Else.


I don't want to turn my will and my life over when I have the power and the ability and can turn my own darn stones, thank you.


But temptation, trying to fulfill a legitimate need in an illegitimate way, took me a dark place of aloneness, pain, and fear, so I am forced to admit that I don't consistently make the best choices for my self.


Which leaves the option of salvation, fulfilling a legitimate need in a legitimate way; and of falling forward into the Hands that don't justify my sin.


But that love me - undeniably, unrelenting, irresistibly.

dandelion fluff & prayers forming

My mom fainted at church Sunday. Supposedly, it was incredibly graceful. She lowered herself to place her $4 on the communion rail, and felt dizzy. She tried to stand back up, and that’s all she remembers.

Now she ambles about the house heavily, leaning on her walker. When she stands, a black knee brace clings to her right knee, which is pale and poofy without it.

And another day passes where I watch my mom seem more broken and aged than she really is.

And there’s nothing I can do to make it better, or heal her faster.

But on the upswing, her spell was seen by an EMT, and he says she didn’t have a seizure. Given the symptoms and what he saw, he suspects that her blood pressure meds are too high, and her blood pressure’s too low. That means we’ll need to tell the psychiatrist, and the neurologist, and the general practitioner.  Then we’ll need to get a second opinion, maybe look at finding another doctor to add to the group.

Which means another trip to Oklahoma, but farther north and more involved this time. We’ll take copies of all the records of what’s happened so far. Copies of all the medicines she takes, her symptoms, the test results from when she was in the hospital, the results from the tests afterwards. We’ll have to pack her CPAP, inhalers, and walker, and clothes for a few days because there’s no way to know how long we’ll be there or where else we might have to go to see whomever we’re sent to see.

But there is hope now because something is different. Because someone saw something we couldn’t show anyone else.

I have seizures, I know seizures. I can say when I am having a seizure, or if someone else is. I can say when what’s happening is not a seizure. But there’s a world of things that are not-seizures; things that are scary, things which leave bruises and that leave the person affected shaken.

My mom is not having seizures, and we’ve said that for almost 8 months now. Now, something is different, and it’s being heard.

Because someone who knows more about the things that cause bodies to fail and falter said what it was not.

I’ve been thinking about what is, and what is not recently; about what is, and about what I think is because I see it that way.

What I know is true is that it hurts to see my mom like this. It hurts in ways I don’t have words for, and scares me. I wake up when I hear her call, scared she’s hurt herself again. I sleep rarely and not deeply, trying to hear if she needs me.

What I know is true is that this is gift. Every day shows me something else I wouldn’t trade knowing or learning about my mom. Things I thought were valuable before pale and fade. Curious things, like the broken figurine from her 16^th birthday, have become little jewels. Soft moments, when the dogs sleep guarding her, or the cat buries into blankets, purring like a muscle car, become pictures in my head that get us both through the times when the pain ravages.

What I know is true is that I love my mom. And my mom loves me.  The fainting, the weakness, the crazy emotion from the pain, and the presence of time passing with no notable improvement somehow has become a background to this hard story of me becoming an adult responsible, and my mom learning she can trust me to mother her well.

I could talk about what worries me in the future and why, what I might need to prepare for, how all of this could turn out, but this collection of moments seems too weighty and holy for idle commentary. This passage, this season that has come to pass blew through our previous lives as if they were dandelion fluff. There is no returning, but there is much before us.

Yesterday, my mom placed her widow’s mites on a communion rail.

Today, I give thanks for the harder roads that make a virtue of suffering.

Tomorrow, tomorrow is another day, another prayer in the forming.