Heyday

It's time for this body to catch up to my soul.

I've started making actions out of faith for faith. It's a little like conducting an experiment, and it's working.

This morning I danced in the kitchen at 6:40 as my oatmeal cooked in the microwave. The radio was blasting. Grandma gets up at 5:30, but doesn't put her hearing aids in until about 7:30, so when she turns the radio on, boy does she turn it on. Lord love 'er.

The radio is always on. It fills this muffled house. I like the noise, and I'll dance to it, even if it's always tuned to our local Christian station. Grew up listening to that station, even gave money to it when I was a pipsqueak. I think their mission is critical, but I also think it is profane. Most churches, most Christian-anything seems profane when compared to the sacredness, the high-holiness, of God.

But if I keep scratching Christian-anythings off the list, soon I'll be left with nothing but lead. Soon I'll be alone. If I turn the radio off because it's not good enough, instead of appreciating its potential and recognizing that "hey, they are preaching the gospel," I accomplish nothing except to fulfill my desire to enforce limits. All I am doing is limiting the capabilities of hard-working people, limiting God by saying He can't use something so...umm...lame, and— Limiting myself.

I limit myself—and God's proffered gift to work in and through me—when I dwell on the past; when I let other people offend me, make me anxious, or make me cry; when I am particular about the location I live in; when I blame things on my personality; when I let one uninspired and emotional, grammatically-incorrect-to-boot worship song ruin the entire service for me; when I let struggling Christians influence my belief about Jesus' power to change; when I turn my back on the church; when I let my mind run on autopilot at all hours and drag me into darkness; when I let my life in America negate everything I ever learned and believed about myself and God and others and beauty and the church and history and brotherhood and reconciliation while I was in Italy.

Pathetically, that's what it all comes down to: Italy. Six months out of 22 years, but I keep coming back to it. I have an effervescent faith over there. A deep calm in my soul when I am over there. A purpose. Every time I come home, I lose it. 

That is not right. The Italian version of myself is not a fake version. It's the more real, more eternal version of myself. My body unites with my soul when I am there.

Living in America shouldn't hydrolyze me. It shouldn't make me compartmentalize. No matter how much people don't get along, no matter death, no matter minimum wage, no matter the doctor saying "there's really nothing we can do, but you'll be fine, just live with it," no matter the absence of Alps—

I don't want to limit myself anymore.

This is not Italy, and I've never been more home than I am now. But I am not limited.

I'm not letting it happen anymore. My soul is hollering and won't shut up and my mind is giving in to its blessed cacophony.

And somethings happening. I'm scared to use the word "transformed." I dared to admit to my Mom when I last saw her that I've been in a better frame of mind as of late.

That is what it is, though: seeing everything in new frames. Frames that were built strong and tight out of the best lumber because—dang what grace!—I was raised Christian and my parents, church, friends, and school taught me a thing or two. And those frames are pretty because I've lived in beautiful places my whole life. And they will endure forever because of God. He provided all the materials, built them so they would fit my unique line of sight. But He gave me freedom, said I don't have to use them if I don't want, and either way, mourning and doubting or joyfully submitted He will save me because He's merciful.

But my day to day existence would be better—indeed, could be one hell of a celebration—if I used His frames.

Day to day, minute by minute companionship with someone is what I've needed. A stable source of goodness that promises to be present in every single day of my life, so that no matter what happens with my body, family, church, career, or country I can have hope.

What do you know, I found that companionship with my triune God and everything is changing.

...Just like every Christian radio, book, preacher, friend, etc, said it would. I want to lay some blame and say they didn't emphasize how hard it would be to get here, or how worth it it was once you got there. But I guess they did. I'm not making excuses. I'm done analyzing this whole process. All this time alone, I'm tired of myself. 

So I dance alone before breakfast in the greenish, pre-thunderstorm light, and study at night, alone, as Grandma dozes. I run alone, sleep alone, and it's still lonely and a little sad and some things wrack my nerves, but it doesn't crush me. The routine of the days is still busy-monotonous, but there's an undercurrent of energy, this feeling that anything could happen. And even if it doesn't, even if the day passes as another boring day, the theme du jour was still good. Because I experienced intimacy with God. 

I'm scared to publish this because when I do then people will know I'm in a better frame of mind and they might make me stay this way.

Maybe I should wait for my blog's 10th anniversary. Its only 3 weeks away. I could back out, write something existentially reflective, recap the past 10 years.

...10 years...

What's 3 weeks in 10 years?

10 years in eternity?
 

There is so much incomprehensible math and beauty and truth, why waste my time letting evil tip the scales? It's having its heyday alright. But what's a heyday in eternity? Any time I've been given, I want to redeem.

No One Said Anything About Safe

Midsummer and late afternoon, the storm was breaking the tension. I hurried around, jumping over suitcases and boxes and books, and closed the windows. They were old windows, extra sticky from the damp weather, and I struggled to shut them. It thundered and lightninged, and the power blinked. I was tired but on edge. We'd spent the past two days moving the rest of our belongings out of our house on the farm up to the barn. With barely a one-week notice we had renters moving in the next day. Renters who plan to buy.

—————

They're not the only ones to move in this weekend. In some twist of fate (God's beautiful, merciful plan? Yes. Sometimes I think he might be laughing, but I know he's not. That's not who he is.) I'm back again. Back on this dirt road in the Pennsylvania hills, the place I called home for 20 years, the place I'd spent the past two years putting to rest.

I did put it to rest. Being back, digging it up again, isn't very funny.

At first, I thought this move might be my chance to have one last, drawn out goodbye. I'd clean the house, work on little projects maybe, spend hours on the disc swing hanging from the big maple and let the motion carry my thoughts to things above.

But now there's voices coming from our blue house, there's two boys in the yard, and a chocolate lab runs to meet me when I walk past. I'm happy for them; happy the house will be filled with family and friends again.

—————

All I'm left with are memories. They are beautiful memories, but as I relive again while I live here, they are being colored by the person I am now, the present I am currently living, and it tarnishes them. The beautiful memories ache. The memories of sin and sickness fester. Now I'm making new memories here. Memories of quiet, of solitude, of...death.

The memories are all chaff. Smoke in my mirror. I'm closer to death—the death of my childhood, my expectations, of relationships, and the death of a person—but I'm also closer to eternity. That is why I am here. If I live with my grandmother as her companion, help her around the house, sing a little so it's not so quiet, maybe her eternity-centered faith will rub off on me.

I heard her talk on the phone to a very old friend. "Gene was such a blessing to me. I miss him. But if God wants me here on earth still, I will wake up every morning with joy. And I do."

She longs for heaven, for her final homecoming, where she will be with Jesus and Gene, her best friends, forever. But she won't "let the longing slay her living." That's how strong her faith is.

—————

I know my wish for a permanent home is not unnatural, and that is comforting. I was created to have a stable home to come home to every night. I was created to have a permanent home, family, father. But I was also created with a measure of freedom. Adam freely(-ish?) ate the fruit and humanity fell, lost the permanency. We are doomed to wander as refugees, questioning ourselves and all of life to death; or, we ignore the questions by turning up the music, paper-chasing, drinking a 7th beer, sharing the sheets with someone different every year or month or day.

Whichever way you do it, it's hard and unfulfilling and the questions remain unanswered. We are living God's Plan B for the world (thanks for sharing your wisdom there in the driveway, Nick).

Yet, O happy day, Plan B is better than Plan A. Somehow. Someway. It takes faith to see.

I lack faith.

—————

Grandma does not. She may be physically blind (it's a good thing because it means she can't see how often I tear up and my face gets hot from the emotion) but her spiritual vision is less smokey than mine. The past few years, I'm not sure I've stopped grieving. I'm starting to think I will grieve my whole life.

—————

I want to blame it on my culture. The information revolution has waged war on orthodoxy. Christianity gets branded and mass marketed. Our heroes fall not because they were cut down with swords or burned at the stake for their refusal to deny Christ, but because they didn't do a good enough job of covering the tracks they left behind when coming home from their latest sin.

I despise how American culture influences me. I despise how my genetics influence me. When challenged by my peers, I despise how my upbringing influenced me. (They say I'm this way because it's how I was raised. I tell them I can think for myself, but they don't necessarily listen. I blame their not listening on how they were raised.)

Pretty soon, am I not despising the way God made me? He is sovereign over which nucleotides wound into my strands of DNA. He placed me in this American culture, knew I'd make the jump from the 90's to the double aughts and knew what affect my iPhone would have on me....and He planned accordingly. He was and is sovereign over my family, over my childhood on the lane, and now over this time on the lane when I'm 22.

When I compare the life I've been sovereignly given to the lives of others, who He is also sovereign over, I say, it's not fair!

I say that. And I cry. Faith does not say that. Faith trusts, faith rejoices.

I do rejoice. If I didn't, I'd have ended this long ago.

—————

As a teen, I spent a lot of time lying on my back on the hardwood floor of my loft bedroom, staring up at where the rafters meet, forming an upside down "V" above me. Saturday I laid there again for a while, for the last time. It was a long day. The moment we finished is when it started to rain, when I walked down the lane to finish unpacking, just after we'd finished packing (confused yet?).

That wasn't the first time this summer it had rained on cue. July 14, we all stood in the cemetery, forming a crowded half-circle around a casket draped with the glorious Stars and Stripes. We disbanded after the gun salute and a prayer. The notes of "Taps," trumpeted into the humid air, still hung there as the half-globe sky mourned the loss of a captain, a father, a friend, a husband.

—————

When my two living grandparents—my maternal Papa T and my paternal Gramma—sit side-by-side on the sofa and visit it is strange. Two mourning halves that don't make a whole.

————— 

In the past, I've tended to spend too much time alone. It's why I've tried to make future plans around groups of people, whether SBI or, like I'd been hoping to, moving to EDH this fall. I turned my back on the latter to come live with my grandmother. I couldn't bear the thought of her being alone in this sprawling country house. She has the South Wing, I have the North Wing. But I chose the bedroom on the southernmost end so I'd get sunlight all day. It filters through the locust trees. It dances on the hundreds of flowers out in the garden. The neighbor girls take care of the garden. Another friend cleans the house, and another did some repair work. One set of cousins does the mowing. Aunts and uncles take care of countless other important things, from groceries to bills to "did you take your pills?" — Everything not only to the power of ten, but the power of love.

It takes a village.*

I'm just here to make some noise. Once I turn 25, on a cellular level my body will start the dying process. For now, at 22 years old, I am a body my Grandma can use when her's doesn't do what it used to.

Mostly, I am here to just be.

*In no form whatsoever is that statement an endorsement of H. R. Clinton. I just like the way the words go together.

—————

A couple years ago, when the questions were burning (they never stop), my mother wrote me a note on a torn-out page of a magazine (she's hipster that way). Of course I saved it.

"Perhaps (forse) your responsibility is not to change the world in a Big Way. Maybe it's to just be. Be in the all-encompassing love of God. To "find yourself" different there. Whether the things you do - big or small - change the world is not the objective. All you need to do is this: Abide in His amazing (grace - love) presence and let it fill you and spill out of you so when you come across an orphan, a widow, Cindy Boohoo [family joke], a neighbor, a brother - an enemy - you have something to give to them. It's all God's love - you in Him - He in you - spilling over from your heart. That will be the change that changes the world in Big and small ways."

—————

God is big and I am small. August 11, Maryah and I drove south to visit our long-time comrades. We four hiked up, up, up a leafy trail until we reached the rocky outcropping. A Virginia valley spread out before us; earth and sky met hazily in the distance. The breeze was lovely. The moment did not feel real. Partly, it was surreal being with Hannah in person. We are very close friends, but living far apart means we have seen each other about once every year or two, and the past few times the average length of any visit has been a pathetic hour. Also, I was sleep deprived, which messed with my head. But, again also, I have trouble grasping reality in general. Life is so strange. It is a mystery.

—————

Job was the first written account inspired by God. And it's a mystery. It's a book that sets the tone for the rest of Scripture.

"If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against God? If you are righteous, what do you give to him?"

We all multiply words without knowledge.

 —————

The infinite Creator God can be known. He's also a mystery I fear. This strange mixture of fear and love is what keeps me having faith.

"When I am afraid I will trust in You."

My first night sleeping here, during one of my wakeful spells, I heard noises and yes, they scared me. I realized it was all women and children on this end of the lane that night. I am very glad the people moved into our blue house and that the head of the family is a big strong man-at-arms. It's lonely out here, so far from everything, and I want to feel safe.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the king, I tell you."

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God is the King.