My days drift away like smoke

Taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are those who trust in Him. Psalm 34:8

Mostly, as I am rereading Lewis’ A Pilgrim’s Regress, I am impressed with my margin comments from the last time I waded through this dream. It is a conversation with a previous me, in a different time and space.

“What must I do?” said John.

“You must take off your rags,” said she, “and you must dive into this water.”

“Alas,” said he, “I have never learned to dive.”

“There is nothing to learn,” said she. “The art of diving is not to do anything new but simply to cease doing something. You have only to let yourself go.”

“I think,” said John, “that if it is all one, I would rather jump.”

“It is not all one,” said Mother Kirk. “If you jump, you will be trying to save yourself. As well, you would not go deep enough.

And how John managed it or what he felt I did not know, but he also rubbed his hands, shut his eyes, despaired, and let himself go. It was not a good dive, but, at least, he reached the water head first.

Because right now I am doing the Psalm 102 thing, the smitten heart, pretty much emoting with one of those black-outlined hawks perched on the old broken down eucalyptus trees that haunt this neighborhood. I am like a sparrow, lonely on a housetop.

But lament is this long learning, hard like eucharisteo. Lament is a cry of belief in a good God, a God who has His ear to our hearts, a God who transfigures the ugly into beauty. -Voskamp

Taste and see that the LORD is good.

 I remember when I first memorized Psalm 34. I was in the refugee camp. Each day was also broken into five-minute chunks, which was all I could trust God with, to carry me through anything for five more minutes.

That was my first stripping-down moment.

“I see,” thought John to himself. “They have brought me here to kill me.” But he began, nevertheless, to take off his clothes. They were little loss to him, for they hung in shreds, plastered with blood and with the grime of every shire from Puritania to the canyon: but they were so stuck to him that they came away with pain and a little skin came with them.

And I was alone and sick and with a sick baby and with so many decisions to make every moment in a language that I didn’t quite understand; life and death surrounded me.

And He whispered, as I made my way down the dirt road carved by heavy rains and heavy trucks and rubbled with loose gravel so it was easy to slip and fall, “Dive in. Dive into me.”

And I also rubbed my hands, shut my eyes, despaired, and let myself go.

Because I definitely jump into Hillenbrand pool every day, I know the difference.

Let hope not be obscured by night,

But may faith’s darkness be as light.

Belief is a verb.

Jesus replied, “This is the work that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on, and have faith in His Messenger].” John 6:29

Come Thou long-expected Jesus

Born to set your people free;

From our fears and sins release us;

Let us find our rest in Thee.

Voskamp also struggles with the trust issue. She writes: I refuse to relinquish worry, a babe that a mother won’t forsake, an identity. Do I hold worry close as this ruse of control, this pretense that I am the one who will determine the course of events as I stir and churn and ruminate?

This stands in direct opposition to what He directs, tenderly commands: Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. An untroubled heart relaxes, trusts, leans assured into His ever-dependable arms. I can’t fill with joy until I learn to trust: may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow.  The full life, the one spilling joy and peace, happens only as I come to trust the access of the Lover, the Lover who never burdens His children with shame or self-condemnation but keeps stroking the fears with gentle grace.

Belief in God has to be more than mental assent, more than a clichéd exercise in cognition. Even the demons believe. What is saving belief if it isn’t the radical dare to wholly trust?

Last night a few of us met around some spinach salad, some cheese, some grapes, some crackers and a bottle of wine. Such a beautiful home, filled with flickering candles and bright colors and photos that exactly capture a moment. The question at hand is how do we impact a community for Christ. Each of us pours out our life in service: mentoring low-income kids from the wrong side of 22^nd, bathing the city in prayer from every possible angle and catalysting (yep I tried to turn it into a verb) hands and feet of Jesus from all over, attending endless task force meetings about this bond issue or that six lane corridor including two transit lanes voted on last night, immersing her head into the depths of biblical exposition, and me, well, longing that May This Day Matter in These Lives.

And Colby reminded us that really we are naïve if we think we can just be good and nice, and that will declare our position as Christians, followers of Jesus, because honestly, there are a bunch of nice people out there doing good. And lots of them do it better than we do. And we explored the idea of love, beyond the Pharisee love of loving our friends. It’s loving those enemies. Loving those who persecute you. So we may be the sons of your Father in heaven. This is how we will be known. And honestly we Christians are not particularly known for this.

Because belief is a verb.

And the question of the week is about risk. If we believe that we are a new creation, then we can take that risk. Because we really believe. Or at least we are whispering: I believe. Dear Lord, help my unbelief.

The joyous risk that oddly enough ties into the Follow Me love. The Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me risk. Not the stir and churn and ruminating grip of control that is not risk. If I am serving because my eyes are on Him, serving out of trust in Him, it will be known by the bubbling over delight. It will be known that I trust that He has my back and I can absolutely let go. Most of all it will be known that I actually believe all this stuff; it's not some dusty doctrine choked down or just a ticket through the golden gates. I am to love the LORD with not just all of mind, but with all my heart and all my soul and all of my body as well.  And in the same way, to love my neighbor.  Love that will be permeated with the full life, with no reservation or holding back, the life overflowing with joy and peace, and always pointing to Him. Giving thanks to the LORD for His mercy and wonders He does for His children.

Release, lean into the sharp curves of life with the wind pushing back my hair, a huge smile on my face, and even peddling as fast as I can go, not just with a death grip on my brakes.

Let them give thanks to the LORD for His mercy and the wonders He does for His children. For He shatters the doors of bronze and breaks in two the iron doors. Let them give thanks to the LORD for His mercy and the wonders He does for His children.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness; let the whole earth tremble before Him.

Tucson is in its greatest glory after a rain. And creosote embraces me as I step out the door into the bright, bright night sky. And up overhead is Orion and his belt, my favorite constellation, because it’s the one easiest to find.

Next week my ninth graders are going to start the Odyssey and I am laying awake at night trying to think of how to sweep them into the grand journey there and back again of a hero, of all those men and women who looked up into the sky at those three bright stars in a tidy row and felt place. And the heavens stretch up into eternity and holy beauty.

But there is another kind of beauty, d’un beau affreux, ugly-beautiful. Because God is always good and I am always loved. Everything is eucharisteo.  The hard discipline to number the griefs as grace because as the surgeon would cut open to heal, so God chooses to cut into my ungrateful heart to make me whole again. -Voskamp

And this is the true hero. The disinterested one who can see grace, give thanks, find joy in this sin-stinking place.

Because this one can see Jesus in the pain in the angry faces in the broken world because his or her eyes are fixed on Him. No matter the circumstances under the starlit sky.

What compels me to name these moments upheavals and annoyances instead of grace and gift? Why deprive myself of joy’s oxygen? The swiftness and starkness of the answer startle. Because you believe in the power of the pit.

Really?

Do I really smother my own joy because I believe that anger achieves more than love? That Satan’s way is more powerful, more practical, more fulfilling in my daily walk than Jesus’ way? Isn’t it because I think complaining, exasperation, resentment will pound me up into the full life I really want? Then I choose–and it is a choice–to crush joy with bitterness, am I purposefully choosing to take the way of the Price of Darkness? Choosing the angry way of Lucifer because I think it is more effective–more expedient–than giving thanks?

Blasphemer.

I am Hagar lost and afraid, and I want to step back, flee. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. Hagar and her son were dying of thirst with a well less than a bowshot away.

Why do I lunge for control instead of joy? Is it somehow more perversely satisfying to flex control’s muscle. Ah–power–like Satan. Do I think Jesus-grace too impotent to give me the full life? If I am rejecting the joy that is hidden somewhere deep in this moment–am I not ultimately rejecting God. Whenever I am blind to joy’s well, isn’t it because I don’t believe in God’s care? –Voskamp

Do you trust Me?

So I didn’t sleep so well last night on my hard little bed, mulling over how I can walk my students through this truth. How to listen to God’s whisper as we journey, to hear His voice, to see His face, and to see His face in each face not only around us, in the sweaty dingy-walled classroom, but out there as well, let the whole earth tremble before Him.

Well, that and trying to figure out my tangled Spanish class as well. Stumbling forward somehow.

To see His face in each one of these faces with darting, restless eyes, young bodies rocking back and forth in their chairs, furtively eyeing their iPhone flipped over in the center of the table, wondering what’s next, well, actually wondering when they will be able to make a dash to the vending machine for another bag of hot Cheetos.

My heart says to You, “Your face, LORD, do I seek.”

Be Thou my vision.

And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night. Exodus 13:21

I am a wandering Israelite who sees the flame in the sky above, the pillar, the smoke from the mountain, the earth open up and give way, and still I forget. I am beset by chronic soul amnesia. –Voskamp

And last night as I was leaving Heather and Dustin’s, having tucked little Everette into bed, well, she fell asleep after I read Spot Goes to the Park fourteen times in a row and we pointed out the cat and the ball on every page and she liked the Quack sound that the duck made too, and having finished grading every single last one of the papers in my manila file folders, I stepped into a man. A big man who had been a sergeant in the army. And he was walking out of an argument with his sister who was comforting her tears with a bottle of vodka, and maybe he had some too because he was a little wobbly but maybe he had just been drinking tears. And we both comforted one another there under the streetlight in the October chill. And we hugged each other, and he yelled back down the sidewalk–Do you feel better? I feel better. I was in the army and we never give up.

And it is a long, long road. With many a winding turn.

Bowed at the edge of the world, Jesus ask me spun in circles, me coming to, only to hope and to forget again, He asks soft of me who is yet again lost what He asked to the man born blind: “What do you want me to do for you?

Has He called me because He wants me to do my own plumbing of the soul? What do you want?

A summer of pain. Always the running. A summer of grace. Always the revelation. Pain is everywhere, and wherever the pain there can be everywhere grace.

Even under the streetlight on Sixth Avenue.

The kingdom laden with glory, this, the pearl of great price, the field I’d sell everything to possess.  And I know all about The Pearl, since I just graded forty-four not-so-good literary essays about The Pearl of Great Price and the hold it has on our being.

The only place we have to come before we die is the place of seeing God.

I whisper with the blind beggar, “Lord, I want to see.”

Out of the dark, tender life unfurls

My God whose ways and thoughts are higher than my ways and thoughts.

Why do you call me Lord, Lord and do not do what I say? Luke 6:46

What I desire: To live before God with true freedom.

Ignatius understands “indifference” to be the condition of balance, equilibrium, equipoise, unbiased, unprejudiced, and without partiality. He doesn’t us to simply leave something behind, but find something–the person of Jesus Christ. Indifference means we are so consumed by love of Christ (which is actually Christ’s love for us) that we are free of all else.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face.

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.

One of the biggest things, or perhaps The Thing of the past two months, has been this peeling off of the Eustace dragon-hide layers. With the hope that it will leave me very tender to those still stirrings in my heart that I have come to recognize as His voice.

And in this time of deafening silence, my very ears are ringing with the quiet, may I be deaf to The Other Voices and mute to my desires and only looking full in His wonderful face.

Yes, and emptiness itself can birth the fullness of grace because in the emptiness we have the opportunity to turn to God, the only begetter of grace, and there find all the fullness of joy.

Yes, Father, You long to transfigure all,n o matter how long it takes. You long to transfigure all.

Because eucharisteo is how Jesus, at the Last Supper, showed us how to transfigure all things–take the pain that is given, give thanks for it, and transform it into a joy that fulfills all emptiness.  -Voskamp

Watching the baggage of life spin around and around

Rejoice always, I say it again rejoice…in everything, by prayers and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. If you do this you will experience God’s peace, which is far more wonderful than the human mind can understand. Philippians 4

Meditate: God, who is the Giver of all good gifts to me and the world…

Ungratefulness– all humanity’s dissatisfaction with the good gifts of God–this is the fall.

What I desire: To live joyfully and faithfully, receiving and using all of God’s good gifts so that I may attain the goal God desires me to reach: to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

Charis. Grace.

Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving.

Chara. Joy.

A triplet of stars, a constellation in the black. A threefold cord that might hold a life?  One Thousand Gifts, Voskamp

I fretted as I waited for through yet one more delay from American Airlines, standing in front of the frozen luggage carousal in Tucson International Airport. What did it matter? Why did I fret?

Hurry always empties a soul.

For all our frenzied running seemingly toward something, could it be that we are in fact fleeing–desperate to escape pain that pursues?

Whatever the pace, time will keep it and there’s no outrunning it, only speeding it up and pounding the fee harder; the minutes pound faster too. Race for more and you’ll snag on time and leak empty. The longer I keep running, the longer the gash, and I drain, bleed away.

Hurry always empties a soul.

Time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy.

Wherever you are, be all there is only possible in the posture of eucharisteo. I want to slow down and taste life, give thanks, and see God.

And I am back. There and back again. And what did faithful Sam Gamgee learn on his great adventure to the Crack of Doom and back again?

I have left the land of seething volcanoes and fog settled down low and gladiola-scented paths and black beans and fried plantains and papaya juice, back to the land of big skies and empty spaces and the heat trickling down my neck.

And even in the pain, the shredding pain present, the remembered pain past, the pain distant wars and rumors of wars broadcast through the mounted television overhead, and the pain so close standing next to me in the somber-eyes hidden under the NRA cap clamping down thick fuzzy hair, I can receive joy.

When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows.

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

God is not in need of magnifying by us so small, but the reverse. It’s our lives that are little and we have falsely inflated self, and in thanks we decrease and the world returns right. I say thanks and I swell with Him, and I swell the world and He sirs me, joy all about.

To name His gifts is to move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable.

And there is a reason why just before I bustled off to my gift of Europe, and I had to change all of my internet passwords in one flurried moment because of some new vicious bug created by Russian mafiosos or Chinese technocrats that was out to steal everything of value, I chose variations of a theme: Philippians 4. So that I would meditate and be reminded of Paul’s words, written from a prison cell.

Because really, really, all that I have of value comes from His hand.

Rejoice, I say it again rejoice.

Um, well, this morning my classroom was filled with hundreds of balloons

Honor the Lord with your wealth
    and with the firstfruits of all your produce;
then your barns will be filled with plenty,
    and your vats will be bursting with wine. Proverbs 3:9-10

I do sort of feel that my vats are bursting with wine. With good wine, better than that perfectly decent Green Fin table red from Trader Joe’s, beyond good enough.  Indeed the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a beautiful inheritance.

It has been a while since I have added to my Eucharisteo 1000 gifts lists. But today’s verse sent me back to Ann Voskamp and her admonishment about what is true:

The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning “grace.” Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks. He took the bread and knew it to be gift and gave thanks. Eucharisteo, thanksgiving, envelopes the Greek word for grace, charis. But it also holds its derivative, the Greek word chara, meaning “joy.” Charis. Grace. Eucharisteo. Thanksgiving. Chara. Joy.

Deep chara joy is found only at the table of the euCHARisteo; the table of thanksgiving. The holy grail of joy, God set it in the very center of Christianity. The Eucharist is the central symbol of Christianity. Doesn’t the continual repetition of beginning our week at the table of the Eucharist clearly place the whole of our lives into the context of thanksgiving?

One of Christ’s very last directives He offers to His disciples is to take the bread, the wine, and to remember. Do this in remembrance of Me. Remember and give thanks.

This is the crux of Christianity: to remember and give thanks, eucharisteo.

Why? Why is remembering and giving thanks the core of the Christ-faith? Because remembering with thanks is what causes us to trust; to really believe. Re-membering, giving thanks, is what makes us a member again of the body of Christ. Re-membering, giving thanks is what puts us back together again in this hurried, broken, fragmented world.

So easily I forget.

Yesterday I was getting unhappy texts about plans falling apart, so unhappy that every time the bell dinged, I shuddered and I prayed about it and glued in a few verses about Trust in the LORD and He will make your paths straight, and life suddenly pieced together for this person far beyond what the human hopes could imagine. I was sitting here in this very couch last night remembering with Alan how for two straight years I prayed for PROVISION in capital letters for someone, and then, well, God provided far beyond what the human hopes could imagine. Out of the blue. Out of His blue. And it has made all the difference in the heart of someone I love so much. And um, really, I am staring at an itinerary Istanbul•Bologna•San Sebastian•Assisi•Denver of which my early dusk staring into the sunset daydreams were only a faintest shadow.

Really? I will be in Istanbul in two weeks? Really?

Hurried, broken, fragmented world so clearly describes my thinking. And so does not describe what God has prepared for those who love Him.

And yesterday, even though I was on my second night of eight-hours of sleep Sabbath offering to put into action my faith that it is God who at work and not my ceaseless efforts, I felt so tired and discouraged that I crept into my classroom at lunch to eat my quesadilla and celery sticks in quiet darkness. And maybe I was a little weepy there in my quiet darkness. And bam, bam, bam, there was a whack at the door, and I wiped my face dry and opened it up, and was greeted by a bunch of kiddos wanting to record their song on my dented and cracked Mac garageband, so I left them to their devices, well my devices, and went over to check my mail and sign up the library for another day of research, and when I had come back those little guys had filled my whiteboard with lots of names and words like “favorite” and “love” and “thank you.”

And don’t even get me started on the adorableness of little Everette and the squinchy eyes because Alan is teaching her how to wink sort of. And sitting in the hammock just as the western light is bouncing off of the very golden whatever-its-name-is building in the back and the bicycle-parts arch covered in white jasmine blossoms, and even little Pippen curled up on my toes right now.

My vats are bursting.

 Eucharisteo.