*****************************

And they’re all the same, dimly-lit rooms, carpets with strange floral patterns.  Peaceful landscape paintings on the wall, surrounded by gaudy wallpaper that was popular twenty or more years ago.  Discreet men in black suits.  People, looking uncomfortable, milling about, making awkward small talk, starting to say something funny and then stopping, some trying not to laugh, some trying not to cry.  Flowers, flowers everywhere, with tags sticking out, stiff condolences boldly typed.  The person you knew, you loved, the person whose very genes match your own, cold and gone, looking like a stranger, dressed in clothes you found in a back closet, clothes they never wore in life because in life they were busy, productive, working, never had time for fancy clothes.

You don’t want to look, but you can’t stop looking.  How can *that* be your loved one?  And there’s always an aunt going on about how nice it is that she just looks like she’s asleep, as though that is supposed to somehow be comforting.  And people keep coming in, uncomfortable but wanting to help somehow and they don’t know what to do and they don’t really know how you feel, but the love is there, and they give awkward hugs and stand around, wondering why dress shoes are always so stiff and how did Cary Grant wear a suit every day, anyway?  And they try to say something nice but not cliche, and fail, but you look in their eyes and you see the sympathy and know that they are doing their best.

And afterwards, at the cemetery, children running around, dirtying their nice clothes, clusters of people about, and how can the sun be shining today?  Autumn air, cool, brisk, and you look out, past the edges of the cemetery to corn almost ready to be harvested, heads heavy with grain, their season almost finished.

These seasons are so relentless, always moving forward, time draining away steadily, the sun always setting but always rising, spring’s arrival just as insistent as winter’s, and you remember how she sang hymns with such conviction and how she lived and breathed God’s love and you know that there is a purpose and a reason to the changing seasons and that every death brings life to something else.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

So yes.  I may be back here.  But for now, if you’re interested to know what’s been making me happy, check out my other blog…

http://manycurrentssmallpuddle.tumblr.com

Owning a cafe where people can hang out and enjoy life and drink good coffee?  Love the idea!  The reality of bills and schedules and loans and cranky customers and stress?  Sometimes not so much.

Having fresh, home-grown vegetables?  Love the idea!  The reality of digging and preparing soil and planting and weeding and fertilizing and pruning and watering?  Sometimes not so much.

Losing some weight?  Love the idea!  The reality of not eating cookies or ice cream and actually getting some intense exercise every day?  Sometimes not so much.

The truth of the matter is that I actually love results but not the work necessary to accomplish those results.  I want the cafe without the bills, the vegetables without the weeds, and the ideal weight without the sacrifice.

And this love of ideas sometimes gets me into trouble (I mean, I own a cafe, I’m trying to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and I’m still clinging to that pesky extra ten pounds) because I get so caught up in the idea that I don’t even see the reality necessary to get there, and before you know it, I’m already committed to something that I don’t even really understand.

And really, that’s just kind of life, and that’s what makes me grow as a person, and (as Seth always says) things pretty much always come crashing into place eventually.  I think that my biggest problem, actually, is that I frequently love ideas instead of people.

I love the idea  of a sister: secrets, giggling, road trips, adventures.  But do I actually love my sisters?

I love the idea  of a dad: advice, learning, long hikes, a rock of wisdom.  But do I actually love my dad?

I love the idea  of a husband: a partner and co-conspirator of adventures, a comforting embrace, an appreciative supper-eater, a constant companion who understands the inner-workings of my soul.  But do I actually love my husband?

The truth is, loving people is a lot of work.  Not because my sisters or dad or husband are difficult people, but because they’re simply people, and people are complicated and I can’t just assume that because I love an idea that I really know and love the reality.  My love of ideas, in fact, frequently prevents me from loving the reality.  My lazy mind automatically files people into their “idea” category and quietly rejects anything about them that doesn’t fit my preconceived categories.  I don’t want to know them as individuals; that would require work.

And then comes the big question…  if I do this with people, do I also do it with God?  Is it possible that I love the idea of a God who is on my team better than I love the reality of God?  Do I even want to know the reality of who God is?

I don’t think that I do.  I have, in my mind, the ideal God.  He’s sort of grandfatherly and a bit gruff but warm and hearty with lots of good stories that always have a bit of a moral and He’s good to go fishing with and fun to go through antique stores with because He always can connect random objects with real life.  He loves all His children but isn’t always good at showing affection so you don’t always know for sure (even though you know know) that He really does love you.  And even when you mess up, it’s okay, because He’ll shake His finger at you and scold you but you know that He isn’t really angry.

And so when I’m reading Scripture, or praying, or talking with other people about God, or reading books or listening to sermons or whatever, my mind just screens things, and only accepts information that supports my preconceived theory about who God is, thus constantly confirming in my mind that my mind is correct.  Because actually trying to get to know God is hard work.

 No real amazing conclusion here, just some rambling thoughts today, and an encouragement to let go of some of those ideas and start looking hard at realities.  And maybe learning to love those realities for what or who they are, because the truth of the matter is that while the realities may be harder, that very hardness is what makes them greater, bigger, and more beautiful than our ideas can imagine.

Sometime life is confusing, difficult, strange.  And yet not.  Maybe the confusing part is just myself, purposefully muddling so I can avoid acknowledging the Truth, avoiding knowing what I already know but wish I didn’t, even though the knowledge of this Truth is Life itself.

God seems pretty straightforward to me.  I have people tell me that they’re confused by Christianity, but upon further questioning I discover that they’re actually confused by the Church.  This makes sense to me, because the Church is comprised of people who, like myself, know what they ought to be doing but don’t really want to, so they spend their spare time coming up with ways to complicate the simple Word that God has given.

But the Church, and myself, don’t really seem to care that we’re throwing up roadblocks in front of people who might otherwise be seeking our God.  Instead, we convince ourselves that we’re just “getting our theology in order” so that we can “better share the Gospel” when the truth of the matter is that the Gospel isn’t in any way complicated and it takes about 30 seconds to get the theology in order.

We are endlessly selfish.  We avoid Scripture passages about anything remotely challenging, and convince ourselves that Love is a warm and fuzzy emotion, completely disconnected from work, when the truth of the matter is that, on many levels, Love and work are synonymous.

And even when that little glimpse of Truth manages to creep into our conscious mind, we stifle it by picking and choosing the easiest and laziest of methods to put our “Love” to work.  Never mind scores of Scriptures about self-sacrifice.  We’re all about giving what we didn’t want anyway.

The truth of the matter is that we’re called to circumcise our hearts.  And circumcision is no laughing matter.  It’s not some light-hearted la-de-da that you do on a whim.  It’s serious business.  It’s painful business.  It’s sacrificial.

But instead we give out of our spare change, spare emotion, spare time, and devote ourselves to pointless wrangling, while allowing the heresy of laziness, gluttony, and gossip to run rampant, too busy determining whether or not the Plagues of Egypt can be scientifically proven or asking ourselves whether Christmas is a valid holiday or deciding whether or not God still wants us to tithe specifically 10%.

We wander to church, mindlessly going through the motions of prayer and worship, and wander out again.  We flip through our Bibles.  We toss up heedless prayers asking blessings on our food and half-heartedly hoping for miracles we assume will never happen.

And we lose, not God.  That’s the irony of the whole thing.  We spend so much time avoiding Him, avoiding work, avoiding growth, avoiding sacrifice, when our entire faith is built upon the idea of a world completely opposite of what is natural.

The poorer you get, the richer you are.

Those who are first now will be last later.

The meek will inherit the earth.

I think that we so often forget that God is outside of time.  He is always, completely, totally just.  But sometimes that justice seems, from our tiny human perspective, to be lacking.  When that is so, it is simply that that justice is outside of the time that we can see.  It will come.

God’s promises hold both great joy and great terror.  He is, even now, purifying His children with fire.  And instead of being grateful for the opportunity to melt away our impurities, we try to keep us much of ourselves away from the flame as possible.  Don’t fear His fire.  It is the only way for the gold hidden deep inside to emerge.

Anyway, the basic premise of the show is that there is this guy, who is actually an alien called a Time Lord (although completely human in appearance) and he has a time machine and he ricochets his way through time and space having various adventures, along with a human friend of his (whom he picked up in England), Amy.  Usually these adventures involve aliens being where they shouldn’t, and the Time Lord, known simply as the Doctor, fixing everything up the way it should.

One of the things that I really enjoy about this show is how not-God the Doctor is.  There is a huge opportunity to make the Doctor be the sort of “force behind it all” but instead, he is simply this guy who happens to have the intelligence and means to help people out wherever he happens to be.  He has a great sense of humor and a huge empathy for people–and creatures–who are alone, as he himself is the last of his race.

So ANYWAY usually the show is just happy and adventurous, but not particularly deep.  Not so with last night’s episode.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpkCFfU256M is the link to a great review of this particular episode, in which the Doctor and Amy visit Vincent van Gogh.  And in some weird way, the whole alien situation ends up being secondary to the actual story, which is that van Gogh, whose paintings will be revered by generations to come, is viewed by his neighbors as a crazy, demon-possessed, talentless man, which is kind of depressing.  In turn, van Gogh himself believes that he has no talent and has nothing to give to the world.  He continues to paint because he can do nothing else, because the scenes he sees beg to painted, because he sees things around him as no one else does and must capture it.  (This is illustrated by the fact that only he can see the alien.)  But he treats his own paintings as trash throughout because no one else values them.

But if you watch nothing else from that clip, skip ahead to about 4:48.  At this point in the story, the alien has been vanquished, and, theoretically, the Doctor and Amy should be on their way.  But they are both reluctant to leave van Gogh, so alone, especially knowing that he will commit suicide in just a few short months.  So the Doctor takes van Gogh on a field trip through time, to the same museum where he and Amy began the episode.

Did you watch it?  I can’t describe this scene well enough to do it justice at all, so watch it!  Now!!!

I’m not going to even try to lie to you:  this mean made me cry.  The key here is where the curator guy says that the reason that van Gogh’s paintings are so powerful is because he took his pain and turned it into beauty.  Van Gogh returns home with a renewed purpose.  It reminds me of the verse in the psalms…  ”Let the bones which You have broken rejoice.”  Pain can so very easily be the catalyst for worship, praise, and purpose.

And I’ve just been thinking about this ever since.  How often do we only value our lives for what others tell us?  How frequently do we judge others as useless because *we* don’t have a use for what they do?

So I don’t know…   I guess I don’t really have a big grand finale to this post.  Words are important.  People are important.  Every life has value, and we have no right to determine (even in our own minds) who is or isn’t contributing to the greater good.  And we have no way of looking ahead to see what greater good we could be passing on to those who come after us.

But seriously, winter comes, and people complain about it. “There’s nothing you can do,” the old guys sigh when they come in to get their coffee. “Can’t stop winter from coming.”

And we weary through winter, cold and dreary and dark, and wonder if the sun will ever shine again. Do we even remember what grass looks like? Was there every a time when we didn’t have to pile one 17 layers of clothes before trudging out to scrape frost off the windshield? It seems as though, in the distant past, the sun was still up when we ate supper.

Then, slowly, so slowly, the snow recedes. One day, a robin appears in the front yard. A crocus is found blooming in a forgotten corner of the yard. There are still frosty nights to come, but spring is determined. The sun comes up earlier and sets later. The trees begin to bud. Spring is every bit as relentless in its appearance as winter. We’re just glad to see it and don’t complain as much. But there’s nothing we can do to stop its arrival. Spring blooms, the world is green and glad, and the seasons continue as unstoppably as ever.

My sister and I had a long and deep conversation today, and we wondered, together, how salvation really works for those of us who have grown up in the Church. I mean, you get saved when you’re five. And you love Sunday school and you love Vacation Bible School and memorizing verses about God’s love and singing “Deep & Wide” is a joy. But did you really know what you were doing? You were just a kid!

So you get saved when you’re twelve. You suddenly realize that all this church stuff–well, there’s something there! God is really real! Jesus is really real! You can DO SOMETHING with your life. Being “saved” is more than just going to Sunday school. That’s when you get baptized. It’s serious this time. But then you start high school and life gets complicated and you wonder if God really is all that.

So you get saved when you’re sixteen. For serious, you get a new Bible for Easter and read it every day. And you’re amazed at how real it all is! It’s like you’ve never really read the Bible before. It’s new, it’s different, it’s awesome, really. But then you start driving and get your first boyfriend and all that Bible stuff seems kind of restrictive and you wander off a bit.

Then you graduate and think about how serious life is, and you get saved when you’re eighteen. You head off to college full of beautiful ideals and ideas of saving the world because the power of Jesus is amazing and crazy and life-changing. Nothing can dissuade you this time. But professors are firmly discouraging of any faith, all faith, and you don’t really want to be weird so you start reading your Bible just when no one is around and then you were out late last night and have an exam and before you know it months have gone by and what happened?

And suddenly you graduate and realize you’re starting this whole new life and you can’t do it alone, and you get saved at 22. And you realize the Holy Spirit is real and He can change you and He does change you and you know your life will never be the same. But time goes by and life seems empty somehow and it isn’t going the way you want it to and you begin to wonder, just a bit, if God really is everything He claims to be.

Does the cycle ever end? Are you ever really saved? Which time was the REAL time, the time that Christ truly rescued you from hell? The very familiarness of the Gospel almost deadens us to its power.

And today it struck me how very seasonal my faith is. Each time I come to Christ, humbled by my sin and His awesomeness, newly aware of my desperate need for Him, it’s like spring. It’s joy unbounded, new life and growth poured out all over, indescribable beauty poured out over a grey and dreary land.

And summer follows. Each day is a new discovery, a new delight. So restful, yet challenging. It’s a season of work and focus, new lessons learned and taught. It is so incredibly glorious that it is impossible to think of it ever ending.

Then there’s a frost. A light one… just a shimmer of doubt. Somehow the world is not as bright and beautiful as it seemed before. Just a whisper here and a whisper there. A nagging voice that wonders, quietly, about the rightness of all this, and suddenly the whole world seems colder, darker.

Somehow, sinking into winter just seems natural. Hole up at home. Huddle up under a blanket and hope for the best. If you have to venture out, keep your head down, trudge, keep your ears covered. Somehow, it’s easy to almost revel in the dark. Doesn’t it just prove that you were right in the fall? The joys of summer and spring seem so distant now that you can almost believe that they never existed. You must have imagined the whole thing. The world as always been as it is now. Cold. Dark. Isolated.

And I think–and I could be wrong here, because this is a new thought, just springing from today’s conversation–but I think that here is the difference between those who have been truly saved, and those who only went through the motions of church-going and Bible-reading: Spring comes to those who have been saved. And it’s relentless. No matter how much easier it seems it would be to burrow under the blankets and sleep forever, spring comes and it calls and the sun comes out and the child of God can no longer deny the desperate need to be out, reveling in the greenness of a renewed life, delighting in the work laid out ahead. God’s children hear His voice calling them outside, calling them to plant the garden and run barefoot and to rest gladly in His care, enjoying the fruit of His trees and soaking up His sunshine, and they cannot resist Him.

The child of God comes before Him, humbled by this glorious example of His mercy, the very arrival of this season of life as a miracle, and confesses all the doubt of weariness of winter. And God forgives just as freely as though He has never forgiven these same mistakes before and gladly turns His children out to pasture for the summer, a summer that will last as long and delightfully as they will trust Him in it. For in God’s world, fall is never the inevitable, winter does not have to come. But if it does, the reappearance of spring is always undeniable.

As we would drive along, we would go below the fog for a bit and be able to see the road and trees and such. But then we would climb back up into the fog again, and again be forced to a crawl, basically finding our way along by following the road lines as they appeared out of the mist. Considering we were surrounded by huge drop-offs and unprotected by guardrails, it was a bit exciting.

Later that day, Mary Rose & I were talking about something completely unrelated to fog. And I was telling her, in my ancient wisdom from 27 years of experience, versus her mere 18, how so often in life we think that if we can make it through just this next decision, everything else will be easy. If I can just decide where to college… what to major in… where to live… where to work… who to marry… then everything else will fall into place, easy peasy.

But, in fact, that is false. I think that the enemy loves to keep us busy thinking that, so that we will always be worrying about the next ‘big’ decision instead of focusing on the present.

And it struck me that life is kind of like driving through the fog. The whole time we were driving through the fog, Dad kept saying, “I’m sure we’ll get through this soon, and then we’ll be fine.” And we would get through that patch and everyone would breathe a sigh of a relief… and then we’d hit the next patch and Dad would say, “Gosh, I really thought we were done with that fog!”

But the truth of the matter is that lots of life is driving through fog. We “can’t see what’s ahead and we cannot get free from what we’ve left behind.” The only way we can get through is to keep moving, and to stay focused on the road. And even when we do make it through a particularly bad patch, the fog is still lurking, ready to surround us again at any moment.

Scripture is kind of like those white lines on the road, you know? It helps keep you where you’re supposed to be so that you can make it through the fog safely.

I don’t mean to make life sound like a downer. Because actually, I think the fog can be quite freeing if we surrender ourselves to the fact that we cannot see, and we never will see, where we’re headed. If we’re willing to trust the lines and just follow the road, suddenly life becomes so much simpler.

‘Big’ decisions are important… but so are lots of ‘little’ ones. The truth of the matter is that God is in control, and if He is our constant pursuit, everything will fall beautifully into place. All of the things that we love to fuss and fidget over are but a breath on the scale of life. So surrender to the tranquility of the fog and the confidence of knowing that God is the one painting the lines on the road. He will never lead us wrong.