How Faint the Whisper

It is easy to think of people in my life who have far more reason to protest difficulty in slowing down to hear God than I do. I have no husband or children. I only work part time, and I have a semi-subconscious but tenacious tendency to avoid any solid commitments to activities beyond work and church. I have all sorts of time on my hands, and a lot of it is spent alone. As I recite to myself these reasons that listening should be easy and natural, my other, more defensive self (which for the sake of simplicity we'll say is looking out at me from the mirror), points at her head and protests, "Do you know how loud it is in here?" Since I'm talking to myself, I'm inclined to agree with her. And then I remember that it's probably loud in there for everybody,  kids or no kids, full time or part time or unemployed, married or single, old or young. 

How I wish it were easier to hear Him. To know that He is speaking. I happened across this phrase, "How faint the whisper we hear of him," while I was reading. It's from the book of Job (26:14), and it has a context and all kinds of other considerations that automatically complicate the meaning of the actual phrase. I can't just yank it out of its place in the text and make it say what I want it to say. Nevertheless, I'm not trying to write an expository paper here. Feel free to look at the context yourself and see what you can make of it. Suffice it to say that this phrase is preceded by a stunning passage about God's power. God's power in the big things, like the stretching out of the heavens and the stirring of the oceans. And these big things, Job says, are just the fringes, just hints of what He can really do. The reversal that comes next is what means something to me: "how faint the whisper we hear of him!" In light of all this, what a paradox that it is so hard for us to hear Him! I can see how Job, deprived of every good thing in his life, surrounded by self-righteous friends who spoke extremely ill-timed truths, lamented the faintness of what we can hear of God. I can't really understand Job's pain, because his story is an extreme one. I don't think it can be used as a parallel to a life like mine in which I've been given a great deal more than I've lost. The thing is, though, that God's silence perplexes everyone at one time or another. I think if anyone says it doesn't, they must be lying. I could be wrong about that, but it's what I think. 

This is a bit of a rambling post. These are my thoughts this Christmas Eve (well, it's Christmas Day by now). I'm learning some things about God which are hard to reconcile with a lot of my lifelong assumptions. God doesn't play by my rules. He values freedom. He's not concerned with making me comfortable (please note that I love being comfortable). Did I mention He does what He wants? And before you say, "No duh, Em," understand what I mean by "learning." I don't mean "reading in a book that lists a bunch of God's characteristics." I also don't mean "affirming as consistent with what I read in the Bible." I mean learning as in "Hey, God is an actual person, not an idea, and He isn't just what I want him to be." It's uncomfortable stuff, in the "letting go of your security blanket" kind of way. Or, if you're a Narnia fan, rather like Trumpkin the dwarf's first meeting with Aslan. 

Anyway, my mind is buzzing with so many other ideas and thoughts that I'd love to talk about. I think this is as far as I can constructively go tonight. Something in me is really desperate to get this posted, so I'm not doing half as much editing as I normally do. Hope you'll all forgive me. I encourage you to spend some time this Christmas letting the Incarnation regain its sheer astonishment for you. If you have a copy of Reaching for the Invisible God handy (it's by Philip Yancey), try reading the 11th chapter. Ok, signing off now.

The Passing of Dorian Gray

No, not Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. My Dorian Gray. Some of you knew him, some of you didn't. Dorian Gray was the lovely little blue betta who has been my companion these two years and a few odd months. Ever at war with the image of himself. Yes, the name was a semi-obscure literary reference, but it made me chuckle. Anyway, I'm rambling a bit. I woke up this morning to find that Dorian had...crossed the bar (another semi-obscure literary reference). In short, Dorian Gray is dead. I would be lying if I said that I wept or that I'm devastated. But the title of this blog is Small Happenings, because I think the things that happen every day resonate with deeper meaning. The simple fact is that this morning I discovered with shock and the faintest note of horror that the little creature I'd greeted every morning for over two years was just suddenly not alive anymore. I knew they didn't live much longer than two years anyway, so I thought I was expecting it. Apparently I wasn't, because I dropped what I was holding, gasped, and reflexively stepped away from the tank. I covered the tank back up and walked out the door to leave for work, telling myself I'd take care of him when I got home. On the drive, I kept thinking of an idea that one of my favorite college professers would often talk about. I'll try my best to paraphrase. It went something like this: People say eternal life doesn't make sense, but the truth is just the opposite. We aren't shocked by people living. It's natural and normal to be alive. We're shocked by death. It feels deeply wrong and out of place. Death is the thing that doesn't make any sense. 

Anyway, that's a little heavy for a post about my dead fish. A little on the lighter side, I'm fairly convinced Dorian heard me talking to people on the phone about my cat's imminent arrival and decided that a graceful belly-up death was greatly preferable to being eaten by a feline.

I never was able to take a picture of him that satisfied me. This one will have to do.

How Much More

It's been a while since my last post. It's been an even longer while since I've talked about things of any spiritual significance. This is not because things haven't been happening, but because they take a while to percolate enough to write about them. The last couple of months have really kicked me into "process everything!" mode. Quite unlike myself, though, I've been processing slowly, and without my typical tendency to pressure myself. It has been kind of wonderful.

One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is how God shows up in daily things. This is not, for me, a given in the past few years. I'd like to share a couple of moments whose significance is hard to put into words, except to say that I felt them deeply. I think they made me think of God in ways I hadn't before. 

I was babysitting one evening for the family I nanny for. My fellas (ages 5 and 2) were fast asleep upstairs, and I was relaxing on the couch with a book. I started hearing some noises on the baby monitor and figured one of them was awake. I sat for a little while listening, then decided to go up and check on them. What I didn't yet know was that my 2 year old had woken up and come out of his room to stand at the top of the stairs. We couldn't see each other because the stairway curves, and he was standing there listening. As soon as my foot hit the bottom step, he heard me and called out tentatively, not quite sure if I was there, "Emmy?" These kinds of feelings are hard to describe without sounding super cheesy, but it is what it is: sort of a twist in your heart, a deep tenderness and protectiveness, the kind of love that aches a little. I immediately called out to him so he'd know I was nearby and took the steps two at a time in my hurry to reassure him that he wasn't alone. 

The second moment happened just now. I'm pet-sitting this week, and one of the animals I'm caring for is a sweet little cat named Harley. She has been declawed, and as such is often uncertain of herself in leaping from place to place. I was sitting at the counter in the kitchen and I glanced over and saw her standing on a chair about three feet away, looking intently at me. I could see she wanted to get in my lap, so I shifted one knee slightly closer to her. Never having interacted much with a declawed cat, I expected her to just hop across. My cat would do it in a heartbeat. But instead of jumping, she reached her paw out hesitantly to touch my knee. Afraid to put her weight onto it, she drew back. Suddenly, I understood that while she was perfectly capable of making the jump, she knew that if she slipped when she landed, she would fall off my lap. I straightened out my legs and propped my feet on the chair she was sitting on to make a bridge for her, and she crawled happily across and curled up in my lap. 

I try to be careful with metaphors and allegories, because no one thing is ever truly like another. Nevertheless, comparisons help us understand things that are difficult to process otherwise. I don't think there's any other way to say it: in a way, I'm a child standing at the top of the stairs in footie pajamas, wondering if I've woken up to an empty house. And I'm a cat contemplating a leap with absolutely no certainty that I'll be able to get a grip on my landing place. Matthew 7:9-11 says this: "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!" Matthew appeals to the kindness and tenderness that we are already familiar with in ourselves. What he's challenging us to do is remind ourselves, each time we extend mercy or kindness or love towards someone else, that our love is an infinitessimaly small picture of the love God extends. My heart responded instinctively to a little boy calling out my name. At the time I thought, "I wonder if God feels something like that when I call Him?" My own approach is still tentative, but I think that according to the book of Matthew the answer might be, "How much more does God's heart respond when you call out to him in uncertainty and fear!" I hope so.

Beet Green Smoothies

I've been on the hugest cooking kick lately. Mocha Pots de Creme, meringue cookies, tinga, corned beef and fried potatoes, bread pudding...you name it. Since receiving my new Ninja blender, I have gone even more nuts. Smoothies mostly, but a couple other interesting little experiments too. Last night I was reading a blog by this lady who has a whole bunch of Ninja recipes (Test Kitchen Tuesdays: Healthy Eating and Healthy Living for a Happy Life! I know, not my typical kind of thing). She talks about adding greens to smoothies to boost the whole "health factor." I scoffed. Lady, ain't no way I'm ever drinking a green smoothie. Nice talking to you. Then I read her post about how to disguise green smoothies to fool hapless husbands and children. I have neither, but I thought if it's possible to fool my own hapless self, I could be healthy without feeling like, well, a rabbit. She said to use a couple chunks of beet and the greens, plus fruit. The fruit masks the flavor of the greens, and the beet masks the color. I came home from the grocery store today armed with a bunch of beets and some peaches. I thought I had spinach at home already, but I didn't. A bright idea and a speedy google search later, I rested in the knowledge that the beet greens on my beet bunch would do just as well. A cup of milk, some beet greens, a peach, a couple chunks of beet, and a glop of honey. Into the ninja and blended. My hopes were high. It was a pretty smoothie. Beet red, literally (sorry, couldn't resist). And then I tasted it. It tasted like pureed beet greens. Back when I thought I was going to like it, I was preparing a little bit for this post that ran something like this: "For those of you that are worried at this out-of-character enjoyment of something that's actually healthy, fear not. I'm not going off the deep end. There will still be nights when I make a box of tuna helper and accidentally eat all of it in one sitting." Now that speech is obviated by the fact that my smoothie is terrible. I mean, it's not inedible, but it's only my stubornness that has me still drinking it right now. I'm on a pendulum swing between contempt for myself ("Come on, Em...did you really think you'd like a green smoothie?") and betrayal by that clever wordsmith who talked me into this ("You said I wouldn't taste the greens! You lied to me!"). On a more positive note, the texture is absolutely perfect, and I have great confidence that when I return to my fully sane state and make smoothies with fruit and yoghurt and sugar, I'll be pleased with them. 

Reasons Why I'm Happy

1. This morning as I was backing out of my driveway, I saw kitty pawprints on my back windshield. I love it so much when that happens. Why, you ask? Because there's something beautiful to me in the notion of a little cat creeping up onto the roof of my car in the middle of the night. It reminds me of some of my favorite MewithoutYou lyrics: "A cat came drifting to my porch from the outside cold, and, with eyes closed drinking warm milk from my bowl, thought, 'Nobody hears me, nobody hears me; I crept in so soft. Nobody hears me, nobody hears me,' as I watched six steps off." 

2. During work I was talking to the 13 year old girl I tutor about my grad school plans. Our relationship is still a little tentative, as I've only been working with this family for about two and a half weeks. She said, "If you get into school, will you still get to work with us?" It warmed my heart considerably. 

3. After work I went to the grocery store to take advantage of a sale on milk. Lo and behold, roses were also on sale. This never happens to me. I love roses and I never buy them, and I GOT TEN ROSES FOR FIVE DOLLARS AND THEY'RE SO BEAUTIFUL THAT YOU MUST FORGIVE MY TEMPORARY LAPSE IN GRAMMATICAL CORRECTNESS!!!!!!!! They. Are. So. Beautiful. 

4. When I got home my Ninja Master Prep Professional was waiting on my doorstep. I wasn't expecting it till Friday, and there it was in all its glory. 

I promptly made a ridiculously delicious strawberry peach mango raspberry smoothie.

I'm also planning to take full advantage of its ice crushing capabilities. It came with a little pamphlet that has a couple of recipes, one of which is called Mocha Frozen Fusion Lite. Since I resent anything with the term "Lite" in it (aside from my distaste for anything fat or sugar free, I don't even consider "lite" a real word), I fully intend to replace the skim milk with 2% and the "No-calorie sweetener" with good old sugar. And then it will just be Mocha Frozen Fusion FANTASTIC!

In spite of headaches and some brief periods of having to focus on things that stress me out, it's been a good day. 

My Own Peter Pan

Recently I spent some time reflecting on some moments from the last several months that I wished I had posted about. Then it hit me: Silly Emily! Blogs don't have to be chronological! Just because I didn't write about something immediately doesn't mean I've missed the chance. In fact, I've had longer to mull over those moments, to understand more fully their significance, to make connections that would have been less obvious at the time. Not to worry. That said, unless something significant happens, I'm going to go back in time for at least a few posts. Today's significant memory is the story of a photograph I took.

My parents and I were eating in an outdoor market in Tepoztlan, Mexico. It was the sort of market that moves from place to place each day, so it's roofed completely with tarps. It was raining and water came in at the oddest and most unexpected places. Sometimes you'd find a spot to stand or sit or walk where it seemed dry, and presently a new leak would spring right above you. We were seated on narrow metal benches at a narrow metal table eating ridiculously delicious food. Across from us, there was a big building with a sort of covered porch. Three street musicians were sitting there playing, and they caught my attention. One of them specifically, a young man who I thought was beautiful. I don't use that word in the sense that I typically would (i.e., "Karl Urban is a beautiful man"...*swoon*). I mean that he was simply beautiful, like Peter Pan. I can't think of any other way to say it. I pulled out my camera, ostensibly to "take a picture of the musicians," but really so that I would have an image of this boy who so intrigued me. 

Much to my horror, the battery was dying. Desperate to get at least one shot before it was gone completely, I snapped a picture. Didn't worry about framing the shot, letting it focus, anything. Literally within one second of taking it, the camera shut off and wouldn't come back on. I didn't even get a chance to see the picture. I put the camera away and hoped against hope that I'd ended up with something passable. 

Having left the battery charger in Mexico City, I had to wait several days before I could charge the camera and see what I'd managed to capture. I didn't realize in the moment that he had seen me. It's not a great picture, aesthetically speaking, but it's exactly what I wanted. More, really, because the look on his face is perfect. Instead of just getting a shot of what he looked like, I feel like I got a little piece of his personality here. 

New Nook

 There's been something of a new development in my little "space for thought." I was thrilled when I got to set up my little office in the back bedroom of the house I live in. However, I found I didn't spend nearly as much time in it as I had expected to. This was partly due, I think, to some functionality issues, but that wasn't the entire problem. The atmosphere was...how shall I say it? Close, but no cigar. Didn't cut the mustard. A few bricks short of a load. Okay, that last one means crazy, but you get my drift. Something about it just failed to make me say, "Hey, I believe I'll go spend several hours reading and writing in my office!" 

I just rearranged it, and I believe I may have struck gold. I don't want to speak too soon, because I think my laziness is still quite a factor: should I sit and struggle with great thoughts or watch Netflix? Well, we all know what happens there. The most I can say is that I've finally created a space that I really want to spend time in. In fact, I'm sitting in it at this very moment, writing a blog post. I think it bodes well. 

I may post some more pictures of the layout of the entire room. For now, what matters is my nook, and the way it feels. It's enclosed and small, which is perfect. The light is just right, it's surrounded by books, and I LOVE THIS CHAIR. All right, I'm done gushing.

A Word in Defense of Metaphorical Pigeons Who Don't Like Being Stuffed in Holes

Recently, when asked by some of my parents' friends what my blog was about, I had to stop and think pretty hard about what to answer. I ended up describing it as a "thoughts blog." Granted, that makes me sound like a total narcissist..."Oh, I don't need a theme (nose slightly upturned, sniff). My thoughts are so wildly entertaining, I simply post them unedited! The peasants love it!" Ok, so my imaginary snotty self is perhaps a little exaggerated. I know people don't really see that in me. In fact, being self-deprecating about narcissism is its own kind of narcissism. Point is, I think I have an automatic resistance to pigeonholing. Don't get me wrong, I love mom blogs and cooking blogs and craft blogs. One of my favorite blogs in the world, written by a dear friend of mine, consists mostly of posts about her garden and the chickens and ducks she's raising with her precious family in their backyard in Chicago. It is absolutely fascinating; I never thought I'd say this, but I can't get enough of the chicken stories. If I had beautiful daughters and a backyard full of green goodness and poultry, I'd probably write about that too, though not half so entertainingly as she does.

My life feels like a patchwork. I work in rhythmic cycles of obsession with different interests and ideas. When I first got back to Mexico City I spent a couple hours every day on my piano. I still try to play daily, but that obsession has waned a little, replaced temporarily by my love for Arthurian literature. I spend probably the same amount of time reading Arthurian material as I spent before on the piano. I've been captured by needlework lately, and bought an embroidery hoop and floss and started learning embroidery stitches. I've no doubt the kick I was on just before coming to Mexico City, learning French, will recapture my interest at some point.  I have more interests than I could possibly remember all at at once, and they come cyclically back into my life unbidden. I just want to be able to post whatever is simmering on the brain burners. Sometimes that's deep-ish stuff, like doubt and tragedy and beauty. Sometimes it's just daily stuff, like cooking and crafts. The type of blog that my stage of life would most naturally pigeonhole me into would be that sort of "Trendy Single Girl" blog. Which would mean I'd feel compelled to post recipes involving goat cheese, or a tutorial about how I used mason jars to make something brilliantly original, or (heaven forbid) makeup or fashion tips. I'm not knocking the people that do. They're wonderfully trendy single girls who are living life on purpose, and I like that. I just don't feel like narrowing this to one area of interest, because that interest will wax and wane, and sometimes I just won't feel like posting about crafts or Arthurian literature or food. I realize I could have several different blogs, but something in my unity-loving soul recoils in horror at the thought. The best choice for me, then, is my conglomeration.

I've mentioned some of my current obsessions. A couple more: Bach's Invention No. 13 in A minor; the incomprehensible grace and ease that comes so naturally to cats (perhaps it's because I've been away from her for two years, but I just can't get enough of watching my cat's behavior); my parents' walled garden in the back of the house, which I can see out the window when I wash the dishes, or to my right when I'm playing the piano, or out the sliding glass doors from where I'm sitting now at the bar between the kitchen and the dining room; my friends in Mexico City, with whom my time is so limited and so incredibly precious; helping people find books that they will love. I recently found a quote by Joss Whedon (brilliant man that he is) that fits quite nicely with the philosophy that we find our niche in life when we're creating (more on that, perhaps, at a later date). Anyway, I think it's a good way to end this post. Take it and do what you will with it.

Missionary Kid Moments

I've been in Mexico for a week and a half now. Before coming I thought, "Surely I'll find plenty of things to write about for my blog." I've come to the realization that it's hard for me to write about Mexico. From that was born the knowledge that it's hard for me to talk about Mexico. I don't mean hard in the "painful" sense. I just mean that words do not come easily. When people ask me about Mexico, I stumble along answering as best I can, but I don't ever feel like I've answered well. That's not to say I don't like being asked; when people take an interest in the place I come from, they take an interest in a vitally important aspect of me, one that all too often feels like it has no bearing on my life in the States. Even with my close friends, the things that are unusual about me are attributed to the fact that I'm a quirky, idiosyncratic person. Of course, this is just as often correct as incorrect. Even I can't always separate the things that come from being me and the things that come from growing up in a different country. I know it's easy for people to forget that my childhood was radically different than most of my circle of friends. I don't have an accent or a different ethnicity to remind people that I am Other. I struggled a lot in college with the knowledge that if I did anything socially unacceptable, no one would make excuses for me because I grew up in a different culture. Most people didn't know I had. If I made cultural mistakes, I'd come across as awkward and socially ill-adjusted. That thought was detestable and humiliating to me. There is little more frustrating and embarrassing than saying something completely in earnest and having your friends find it hilarious (and I've always felt thunderously angry at those people who say, "Aww, you're blushing!" People who think blushing is cute are clearly not blushers themselves). But that wasn't what I set out to talk about. I was talking about the difficulty of verbalizing Mexico. Some people, I know, just aren't particularly interested. That's fine; I don't spend a great deal of time asking them questions about their hometown or upbringing either. When I am asked questions, though, they are usually some variant of "What's it like?" The simple answer, which the asker already knows, is "Different." And what he's really asking is, "What's different about it?" How do you describe something someone has never experienced? But it's so important to try, it's so important to who I am to try.

So here's a try. I'm sitting in a little hotel in a city called Oaxtepec, where my parents are having meetings with some other missionaries who work with indigenous people. The courtyard I'm sitting in is surrounded on three sides by two floors of rooms. The third side is the parking lot. There's a swimming pool. I don't know all of the plants in the garden surrounding it, but there's oleander, and little roses, and palm trees. I'm at a cast-iron patio table sitting just outside the hotel restaurant. It's quiet and a little warm and breezy. This is the source of my frustration: what I've just described could be anywhere, and I struggle to find the details that set this in Mexico. The building has a sort of Mexican colonial look. Painted bright yellow, with a dark green scrolled railing around the second floor. Heavy, dark wooden doors. Arched windows. Red tiled roof supported underneath by heavy wood beams. Although visually this area is completely isolated from the city, I can hear buses rumbling by on the street just outside the courtyard. The waiters in the restaurant speaking Spanish to each other (a no-brainer, I suppose, but it's the most comforting sound). The clicking of the lighter as they're getting the gas stove lit for lunchtime (which, by the way, is preposterously late here...I used to eat on that schedule, but now I'm ravenous by lunchtime, which is at about 2:00), and the little whoosh as the gas catches fire. The smell of tortillas heating. The generously applied perfume of the lady sitting at the table next to me, which reminds me of how dearly Mexican men love their cologne. To this day, a whiff of strong cologne stops me in my tracks because American guys hardly ever put on enough for me to smell it. There's a secret look into the mind of Emily you probably weren't expecting. I laugh at myself every time it happens.

Anyway, there's my best attempt. It's time for me to get my stuff put away and go to lunch, where I will eat delectable food that is different from American Mexican food in ways that I will never be able to describe. That's a feat I won't even attempt. I told my mom the first day I was back and she took me to the street market for lunch, "Eating real Mexican food is a quasi-religious experience." Why not? Every good and perfect gift is from above, including Mexican food.

Off down the road

There is something in Southern summer evenings...tonight I went to hear a concert that culminated in a beautiful performance of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. When the concert ended it was about 8:30, but there was still a great deal of light. Light fades so slowly on summer evenings here. It's my favorite part of summer, long sunset followed by long twilight followed by long dusk. The last few minutes of my drive took me through unlit, deserted country roads, and there were hundreds and hundreds of fireflies. It brought to mind one of my favorite poems by J.R.R. Tolkien (it's really a pity he grew to dislike it so much himself). It's the loveliest expression of how beauty tugs at the heart and hints at Otherworldliness.

Goblin Feet
J.R.R. Tolkien

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying:
A slender band of grey
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!

O! the lights: O! the gleams: O! the little tinkly sounds:
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes:
O! the echo of their feet -- of their happy little feet:
O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.

I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,
And where silverly they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!

O! it's knocking at my heart--
Let me go! O let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet - of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

Go ahead, roll your eyes. I saw fairy lanterns tonight, and I loved it.

Present-Tense Doubt

I've been really thinking lately about doubt and the way the church fails to address it. This is not at all intended to be a tirade about how the church is a failure; doubt is a topic that is scary and awkward and uncomfortable. I guess when you feel like there's a lack of candor about something, the best place to start is with some honesty. Doubt has been a continual struggle in my life. The past four years have been particularly plagued with what a dear friend described as "God's persistent silence" in my life. My journey with doubt has been a long and painful one. As far as I can tell, the journey is entering a new stage as I've decided it's something that needs to be talked about, regardless of how frightening and uncomfortable it can be to do so.

Philip Yancey wrote a book called Disappointment With God. It addresses the disappointment people feel when God doesn't turn out to be what they expected. Yancey explains, "I found that for many people there is a large gap between what they expect from their Christian faith and what they actually experience. From a steady diet of books, sermons, and personal testimonies, all promising triumph and success, they learn to expect dramatic evidence of God working in their lives. If they do not see such evidence, they feel disappointment, betrayal, and often guilt. As one woman said, 'I kept hearing the phrase, "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." But I found to my dismay that it is unlike any other personal relationship. I never saw God, or heard him, or felt him, or experienced the most basic ingredients of a relationship. Either there's something wrong with what I was told, or there's something wrong with me.' " The first time I read that passage in Yancey's introduction, I wept. It was sadness and relief and recognition and confusion all wrapped up in one, because I had never heard someone else voice that particular doubt before. The language we so often hear describing how we're meant to relate to God make it seem, like the woman in Yancey's book said, that we should relate to Him like we do to our friends or our family. It's apparently not supposed to bother us that we can't see, touch, feel, or hear Him in any conventional sense. We've forgotten that the idea of a relationship with an invisible God is completely baffling and radically different from everything we're taught to expect in every other area of our lives.    

It's difficult to piece together what I'm really getting at here. I've struggled to formulate a clear idea of the problem, not to mention the solution. I do know, though, that in almost every Christian group setting I've ever been in, doubt has only ever been discussed in the past tense. "Sure," people say, "I've had doubts." It makes it sound so fleeting and trivial. Whether it was deep and terrifying doubt or not, the point is that it's past tense. It's conquered and done, and now that person's just fine. And someone in the group who's wrestling with God's absence keeps quiet and thinks, "There's something wrong with me." Granted, there is. There's something wrong with everyone. But that person, surrounded by apparent spiritual success stories, is convinced that he is broken. Not broken in the Christian sense (which is used to mean humility or vulnerability with God), but un-fixable.

We are deeply uncomfortable with doubt. In an individual sense, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about. As a body, the church is uncomfortable with present-tense discussion of doubt. The most common solution, whether in a group or one-on-one, is to meet it with Scripture, or throw apologetics at it, or suggest greater faith or more prayer. To try to counter doubt with answers. The problem is that like many who have been raised in the church, I have heard nearly every argument and answer that people can hand me. I think in the end it's a heart issue (which is a "Sunday School Answer" that happens to be deeply true) that can't be resolved with proof. Perhaps everyone's instinct upon reading this post will be to think about how they can help me fix it. I promise you, you can't. I've sought help with this so many times, thinking if I just talked to the right spiritual person I could figure things out. The fact is that if God is real, and if He still cares about me, then it's up to Him to deal with me. It has occurred to me that, in terms of His purpose, it's possible that talking about doubt is the best thing I can be doing right now. If it serves to bring about more honesty in people's lives, that's a good thing. At potlucks, I always step right up to the table in that awkward, "Who's going first?" moment, because I know it frees everybody else to just fall in line. Maybe that's what I'm doing here.

For the record, my house church group is comfortable with doubt. They're comfortable with my doubts. I don't think I'd be able to write about this if I hadn't first been able to come to them and say, "Hey, this is where I am." And to their eternal credit (seriously, if anything gets eternal credit, it's moments like these), they have not gone into "Fix-it" mode. They've loved me, prayed for me, and reached out a hand (often literally) to let me know I'm not alone. Their response has been what I'd consider the ideal for how the church should confront doubt. They're not obsessed with giving me answers. More often than not, they have questions for me. Sometimes after I share, they're just silent with me for a moment. Other times they point out ways they see God working in my life, even if I can't see it myself. They live their lives alongside mine so that I can see how God is real to them. Honestly, that may be the most important and useful thing they've done.

This is not a post designed to get anybody worried about me. What I'm going through is normal. I think if more people understood that, fewer people would be conflicted and guilty about how hard it is to know God. If what the Bible says is true, then that "I'm broken" feeling is completely accurate. We don't know how to reach God. The part that's a lie is thinking that no one else is broken. Everyone is. And I think the language Christians use perpetuates the belief that everyone else has it together. That doubt is just a minor hiccup in the victorious Christian life. The reality is that doubt is a part of every believer's walk; belief wouldn't mean much if there were no doubt to overcome ("blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed," John 20:29). The church's role, I believe, is not a simple one. It's a process, and results are not guaranteed. It means being faced with questions that may be unanswerable and letting other people into your life, whether you are struggling with doubt or seeking to help a doubting friend. In an attempt to give a summarized and applicable statement, I'd say this: the best thing you can offer a person struggling with doubt is community.

Life in the Margins

I've been thinking lately about the way I deal with time. I'm well aware that I'm not a truly busy person. I don't have children or a husband or (at the moment) a full-time job. I have all the time in the world, but I stress about time. Maybe my anxiety stems from a semi-subconscious awareness that I waste a lot of it. I especially stress out about delays, about changed plans, about the unexpected. I think I learned in college to micro-manage every minute of my time and just never really stopped, or at least never lost the feeling that I ought to be doing it. A couple of weeks ago, a chance acquaintance was talking about creating margins in life. Showing up early, leaving late, scheduling extra time around planned events, just to see what shows up during those times. The idea resonated with me immediately as a solution to some of that anxiety and as one way to make sure I was fully engaged in the life I have right now.

It reminded me of some writing advice I found in Fiction Writer's Brainstormer by James V. Smith, Jr. He says, "Most of the time we are so lacking in self-awareness that we are not aware of moving around in a fog. We let the noise of daily life overwhelm us. We sink into trivial things like gossip and news items that have spawned countless talk shows without adding much enlightenment to our lives. Or we drift along in the raging torrent of racket created by our popular culture" (35). He goes on to challenge his readers to wake up. Listen. Absorb. Take notes. Explore possibilities. Engage in the world around you rather than just passively taking it in. I have a post-it note bookmarking that page, and along the top I wrote in capital letters. "WAKE UP." I honestly don't blame television or popular culture. It's up to me to decide whether I'm going to just  take what's handed to me or wrestle with it and dissect it and find what's valuable in it. It's up to me to cultivate the life of the mind so that it can actually produce something worthwhile. 

Back to margins. A few days after encountering the idea of creating margins, I ran into a living example. Sometimes I'll pop into the 24 hour Walmart on my way home from house church on Monday nights, usually around elevenish. Night owl that I am, wide awake and several hours away from bedtime, I do more relaxed browsing than businesslike shopping. I wasn't thinking about this at the time, but my occasional Monday night shopping is a naturally occurring margin in my life. That night I found my way back to the Sporting Goods section, since I was planning a weekend camping trip. There was an employee shelving some things, a guy who looked to be around my age. I asked him a question about something and ended up having a chat with him about my upcoming camping trip. He was pleasant, kind, and decidedly Southern. Moments after he moved on to another aisle to continue his work, a folding table he'd just set up fell over with a resounding crash. He came running back around the corner and said with evident relief, "Good Lord, I thought something had done fallen on you!" I cannot describe how adorable it was. After I'd finished my shopping, I went out to the car and put my grocery bags in the trunk. Somewhere between the trunk and the driver's side door, something terrible happened to my car key. I don't know how it happened, but the key was badly bent. I did my best to bend it back and managed to get the door open. No matter how I tried, though, it wouldn't start the car. I was starting to feel a little panicky. I wasn't sure who to call, since all of my friends are gainfully employed and try to go to bed at a decent hour. And then it dawned on me. I had a new friend in Sporting Goods who loved hunting and fishing and rock climbing and other such outdoor endeavors. Surely he would have some idea of what to do. Sure enough, he declared with great confidence, "This is Walmart, they got everything!" He took a hammer and knocked that thing straight within seconds, then decided that it still had a little twist to it and took care of that problem with a pair of pliers. My key was right as rain, and it started the car with no problems. As I turned it in the ignition, I chuckled to myself and thought about how well that "margin-making" had turned out for me. This is not to say that making margins and connecting with people will always have direct and visible benefits. I don't think that's the point. But I do know that if I hadn't stopped to chat with him, it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to go back in the store for help.

I don't want to turn this into a New Years Resolution type thing, and I think it's a little cheesy to "challenge my readers." Maybe I just want to encourage you to try a little of what I'm trying; create space in your life for the unexpected and see where it takes you. Step back from the routines of your daily life and try to see things you didn't see before. Perhaps even try doing that literally: lie down on the floor of your living room and look at everything from that perspective. Look at the city or town you live in and try to see patterns and shapes and lines you've never noticed. Try to notice something new about someone you see every day. Really make it a point to take on the ideas that come your way and figure out what you think about them. Make connections between concepts, and ask people around you what they think. Don't just absorb; create. I don't know what you'll find, or what I will. I have a notion that's the point. 

Time for a bit of a change...

I have a little business to attend to in this post. A friend and very faithful reader of mine left a comment on my Facebook note protesting the name of this blog (Diary of a Flop). I had been toying with the idea of a change but had resisted it for mostly sentimental reasons, which I will describe as briefly as possible. In defense of the name, it was never intended as a self-deprecation. A dear friend from college was once struggling to find the right word to describe his perception of me. After a few moments, he settled on "flop." I flop when I walk. When I'm speaking, I flop my arms around flamboyantly for emphasis. I flop when I hug people, I flop when I sit down, and I flop when I laugh. Granted, this was all a comical, affectionate conversation between friends. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I agreed with him. After that conversation, I wrote the following: "I'm an odd, funny person who flops through her life doing the best she can, and sometimes making a clumsy mess of everything. As a writer, I must admit that most of my best work just 'flops out'." I was pleased with the way I'd managed to draw all the disparate elements of my life into a whole, to discern a pattern. Sure, it was a pattern of awkwardness and that odd balance of success and failure that accompanies growing up. It was my life, though, and I liked the feeling of embracing it with a sort of wry, self-aware humor. The title resonated with me then, but time has passed and I do feel I've outgrown it. Of course, I still wouldn't be willing to change the name unless I had a new one that I really felt good about. However, I've been posting my "Small Happenings" Facebook statuses (or statusae, as I like to call them) for quite a while now, and people seem to like them. Honestly, I like them too. They're a way to train myself to see the details in the world around me. Anyway, what is this blog but a sort of expansion of my "Small Happenings" statuses? It fits, I think.

In Underland

I'm not sure how to begin this story. Suffice it to say that if writing is a way of processing experience, that's what I intend to do in this post. I'd like for it to be beautiful in a poignant sort of way. I'd like for it to be meaningful, to draw a thread of connection between events and ideas. Sometimes a writer achieves that without consciously trying to, but I have no motivating concept, no point that I'm trying to draw from what I'm going to relate. It's just what happened, and it made me sad and thoughtful and confused.

I took an Amtrak train to Atlanta on Friday to spend the day with the family I worked for last year and their homeschool co-op on a field trip to Legoland. We enjoyed our day, and the family I'd come with stayed in Atlanta while I caught the train back to Clemson with another family from the same co-op. My seat-mate was this family's little boy, John Mark. He spent most of the beginning of the trip making sure I was watching him play his Nintendo and the rest of it asking me if I was hungry. He desperately wanted to be taken to the dining car, and his parents weren't keen on the idea. Much as I sympathized with his deep longing, I didn't budge.

He'd finally quieted down a little, and I was reading a magazine. It was about a quarter to nine when the train began to slow, then stopped. For the first minute or so, no one seemed to notice, but as time stretched on, the passengers grew restless. Someone returning from the dining car said he had seen fire out beside the train tracks. At one point, an attendant hurried through the car carrying three or four fire extinguishers.

As the minutes dragged on, information filtered through the car. I had no way of knowing how accurate it was, because there was only one brief announcement on the PA system explaining that we had hit a car and were waiting for the police to release the train. The man across the aisle from me talked to some policemen in the dining car and told us that 2 people had been killed. Around 11:00 I fished out a notepad and a pen and wrote for the next half hour or so:

There's something particularly tragic in train deaths. Maybe it's the relentlessness of a train's movement. They can't stop. Train drivers can't keep from killing people. There is no indication at all of what to expect. It's like Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum in the boat in Underland.

I wrote down details about my surroundings, like how unexpectedly kind the man across the aisle was to offer me a sip of the very last cup of coffee they handed out before the dining car closed. Or how I looked over at John Mark, curled up in his seat asleep, and thought that children look like angels when they're sleeping. How when you're sitting in a stopped train at night, you can drive yourself half crazy trying to tell if it's inching along slowly, staring out a pitch black window until you're dizzy, convincing yourself you can see the silhouettes of the trees moving against the sky. The hum of the idling engines and the air conditioning and hushed conversations.

We sat completely still for four hours. The relief when the train finally started moving was beyond words, as was the frustration and anger when it stopped again only a few minutes later so that the crew could clear the wreckage of the vehicle off the front of the train. We were stopped for another forty five minutes. I was beyond being sad or pensive; I just wanted to be home. There were a few moments where I really felt like I was never going to, like I was just going to be on that train for eternity. And at the same time I was disgusted with myself for being concerned with a delay when people had died. We made it to the station in Clemson at ten minutes after three. It took me another twenty minutes or so to drive home, on the phone with my best friend so I wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel. I dropped into bed at a quarter to four, twenty four hours after I had gotten up to catch the train to Atlanta.

I've spent the last several days processing exactly what it is that I'm supposed to feel about the whole affair. I found out Saturday that three people had been killed, not two. I don't know if I should be more affected by it or less. Honestly, I don't know how affected I am. I only know that it has meaning, and that I was compelled to write it down. Maybe it'll begin to make more sense to me when I come back to read this later.

Spinning Like a Madwoman

I recently picked up a new hobby. I'd been considering getting into handspinning for some time, but I assumed that the only way to go about it was to spin on a spinning wheel. Those are large and expensive, and I knew just from the prices I'd seen that buying wool for spinning isn't cheap either. It seems like it would be, but the sources are typically yarn specialty shops and so forth. I guess when  your yarn history is made up of mostly buying Red Heart Super Saver, the idea of paying 4 or 5 bucks an ounce for wool kind of kicks you in the gut. And as for the spinning wheel, I didn't want to go out and buy some expensive behemoth and then find that I didn't like spinning. All in all, my ruminations (see what I did there? sheep and alpaca are ruminants...I just made a livestock joke!) had led me to conclude that handspinning would just have to be one of my many "someday" crafts.

When my extremely sweet sister-in-law gave me a 25 dollar gift certificate for Etsy for Christmas, I didn't make the connection right away. The possibilities were endless, and I spent several starry-eyed hours browsing the wonders and delights of people's crafty, creative products. And then I saw it. A handspinning kit, complete with a drop spindle, wool, and beginner's instructions. I did a little internet research, watched some youtube videos, checked out three library books, and decided that now was the time to learn to spin. Imagine, if you will, my despair when I realized that the Etsy shop I was planning on purchasing this kit from did not accept gift certificates. It didn't take me long, however, to realize that if there was one shop selling handspinning materials, there would be others. Soon I had shopped out a lovely little spindle and 4 ounces of blue wool.

Beginning to spin was harder than I'd thought it would be. Of course, I expected it to be difficult, but I have dexterous fingers and I thought my years of knitting and crochet would have some effect on my success at spinning. The first session was semi-disastrous. I couldn't for the life of me get the wool to draft properly (drafting means pulling a small amount of wool out of the larger piece of roving).The result was knobbly, twisted too tightly, and all around just pitiful. Before starting my second session, I watched a couple of videos I hadn't seen yet, and they gave me the idea to separate the larger roving (the "rope" of wool) into several thinner pieces so that I have less drafting to do. That worked like a charm, and my second, third, and fourth sessions were much better. Much less breaking of the yarn, fewer times dropping the spindle, much less frustration. That was when my dexterous fingers kicked in. My yarn isn't perfect...the diameter of the thread tends to vary more than I'd like, but I suppose that will change with time.

Anyway, this post may be fantastically boring, but I just wanted to share my newfound hobby.