Tag Archives: faith

  • girlreadingweb

    Is Reading Scriptures Literally, Literally Wrong?*

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    I came across a blog post by Father Stephen, an Orthodox priest about the problems with taking scriptures literally. On this blog, I have tended to focus on how insisting on taking scriptures literally leaves us vulnerable to being unable or unwilling to deal with reality or to losing our faith altogether when our literal understanding comes into conflict with reality. Father Stephen points out another, probably more important problem with a literal approach to scriptures: it engenders a shallow reading of scripture. From his post:

    The Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, are frequently misread (from a classical Christian point of view) in a literal manner, on the simple evidence that the New Testament does not read the Old Testament in such a manner. Rather, as is clearly taught by Christ Himself, the Old Testament is “re-read” from a Christological point-of-view. Thus Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale is read by the Church as Christ in Hades. The first Adam in the Garden is but a shadow and antitype of the Second Adam – the One who truly fulfills existence in the “image and likeness” of God. The Passover and the deliverance from Egypt are read as icons of the true Passover, Christ’s Pascha and the deliverance of all creation from its bondage to death and decay. Such a list could be lengthened until the whole of the Old Testament is retold in meanings that reveal Christ, or rather are revealed by Christ in His coming. . .

    A “literal” reading of the Old Testament would never yield such a treasure. Instead, it becomes flattened, and rewoven into an historical rendering of Christ’s story in which creative inventions such as “Dispensationalism” are required in order to make all the pieces fit into a single, literal narrative. Such a rendering has created as well a cardboard target for modern historical-critical studies, which delights itself only in poking holes in absurdities created by such a flattened reading.”

    Now, I do know that it is possible to see the deeper Christological meaning of the scripture stories while also maintaining a belief that these things are literally historical events, recorded in scriptures. And certainly there are certain things which we need to be literally true. For example, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”

    However, I think that Father Stephen is right that by seeing much of scripture as a record of events which can be shaped into a literal narrative, there is a strong tendency to “flatten” scriptures into nothing more than an account of historical events. A person who takes a very literal view of scriptures, will often also find themselves spending a fair amount of time either defending their perspective or avoiding what can threaten their perspective. To the extent that they are willing to deal with ideas contrary to a historical view of scriptures, they do so through the reporting of those who agree with them.

    I believe that scriptures themselves make it abundantly clear that in many places, the historical accuracy or lack thereof, is largely besides the point. We often miss it because we are reading translations, but a great deal of scriptures are written in poetic form. The use of imagery is widely used. There are places where we find hyperbole. Some stories are repeated and contradictory. Jesus himself taught using parables rather than finding “true” stories to illustrate his point. To insist that scriptures must be understood as historical accounts, even well written historical accounts, seems to me to be a violation of the very fabric of scriptures. Which again, is not to say that nothing in scriptures is literally true, and there are events such as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus which are supported by a variety of sources. But when we hang our faith on the idea that scriptures must be literally true, we are putting ourselves in grave danger of being left with a shallow, incurious faith which doesn’t reflect the full glory of an unlimited God.

    *Originally posted May 2008.

  • hope1

    Wrestling Hope

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    “Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: ‘Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.’” Jurgen Moltmann

    I’ve wrestled a lot with hope in the last few years. Mostly to try and send it away. “Hope deferred makes a heart sick.” I’ve had enough of being sick. But allowing oneself to venture into hell is a dangerous thing as well. I know – I’ve wandered into hell more than once as of late and couldn’t muster the strength to find my way back out.

    I’ve taken to resisting comfort. I’ve fallen for it too many times before. I’ve read the words of scripture and their promises that God will not abandon me or let me fall. My heart has leapt at them only to find that holding onto comfort is like holding onto water as it slips out between your fingers. And God is no where to be seen but my failure is all around me. Better not to let myself try to grab hold any more.

    I’ve gazed at the cross with its promise of redemption after suffering. But Jesus’ suffering lasted for a weekend and mine is lasting for years. Jesus’ suffering was probably greater than mine, but it’s not a competition. My neighbor’s broken leg doesn’t make my broken heart hurt any less. I’d say I just want my suffering to end, but the damage has already been done. What difference does it make now?

    And then I realize that it is an evil thing I’m fighting with which bids me to remain in hell and refuse comfort as too little too late and far too quickly gone. I’m tired of keeping up the fight. But behind this evil that I’m wresting with are a whole hoard of demons just waiting to rush forward and devour the ones I love. There are generational curses straining mightily to break through. And demons of rejection and abandonment waiting to sink their teeth into young children’s hearts. There’s resentment and confusion that will lead a teen down misshapen paths to no where. There’s weariness and betrayal and anger that never rests looking for unguarded cracks to set up infection in a barely healing soul.

    I resent it – being pinned down by all this evil. Having to keep up this fight rather than allow myself to walk away or be swept up by some worldly comfort until it takes my life with it. Even Jesus got to die in the end.

    And along comes a three year old who drapes herself into my arms, looks up at me and says in her baby way, “you love me mom.”

    Yes I do baby.

    “I love you. I love Noah. Noah loves me. Everyone loves me.”

    Yes they do, baby.

    And then an 8 year old comes in.

    “I just want to be with you for a minute.”

    How come?

    “I dunno. I just feel good when I’m by you.”

    A six year old brings a picture she’s painted.

    “It’s for you. It says ‘joy’! Do you like it?”

    She’s made her J backwards so it really says “Loy”.

    It’s wonderful, pretty girl.

    “Joy” it is.

    I start to find my feet again for the first time in days. The evil’s still there, but I’m not pinned down under the force of it now.

    Later I’m stumbling again and a 17 year year old boy stops to put on a song for me before putting his arms around me. When he was younger he made his own sound effects every where he went. Today, he keeps a sound track going.

    “What you need to remember is that you’ve done good, mom. Even if the rest of the world is to stubborn to admit it to you, you’ve done good.”

    I wanted life to be better for you. I didn’t mean for it to be this hard.

    The thirteen year old chimes in.

    “We’d both be ruined if it weren’t for you. Life is hard. But at least we know that we can handle it. That’s more than most people can say.”

    And finally, finally, the ones I keep up the battle for have gotten me steady enough on my feet to walk away out of hell and away from the evil. I don’t know that I’m ready to hope exactly. But I think it will be a while before I wander back into hell again. And that’s no small thing.

  • spain path

    Defiance is a Christian Virtue

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    I just came across this post from late last year and felt so strongly lead to share it. Perhaps it’s something one of y’all needed to hear tonight. Honestly, this might be my favorite post I’ve ever written. I hope you enjoy it (and ignore all the typos, please – I’m to busy cookin’ and cleanin’ to do any proof-reading at the moment!. You’re all smart people. You can figure it out!)

    The moments in my life that have been most sure and which have left me with the most peace and joy have been moments of defiance.  The times when, even though no one else would get it, I knew the path I needed to take forward and I took it.  These are my reckless moments.  Those things that caused offense, consternation, even concern for my sanity among those watching.

    I am often a very cautious person.  I don’t go shopping without knowing what I’m going to buy and how much I’ll pay for it.  I skip the “trust” part of “trust, but verify” and go straight to verify.  I can explain the things I do and the choices I make down to a level of detail that could put a hyper-active 7 year old to sleep.  I think of what I’m going to say before dialing the phone.  I think of questions I can ask people and topics to discuss before I get into conversations.  I bite my tongue often.  I handle my relationships with kid gloves lest I damage them or hurt someone unintentionally.

    So these moments of defiance must seem out of character to anyone who doesn’t understand what’s going on beneath the surface.  But these moments of defiance are my most true moments.  They are the moments when what is beneath rushes to the surface and propels me forwards, regardless of all the consequences.  Because I already know all the consequences.  And not one of them – not disapproval, the loss of relationships, poverty, pain or anything else – is nearly enough to stop me from doing what I know I need to do.  I can be reckless because I know that I’m doing something I have been specifically called by God to do or because I know that the damage done to myself if I do not do them is far greater than any of those consequences could be.  I can be defiant because I have examined the matter through and through and I know that it’s coming from a pure place in my spirit.  You have to be willing to be defiant if you are going to follow God and allow him to restore your heart.

    This defiance is something I love about Christianity.  The bible is filled with people recklessly defying expectations, norms, social pressures, sometimes reality itself.  When Peter or Paul sat in a prison cell, often beaten, and sang songs of praise to God, that is defiance.  When Hosea married a faithless woman and wooed her back to himself over and over, that’s defiance.  When the woman with her jar of perfume washed Jesus feet with her hair, that was defiance.

    Some of the strangest stories in the bible are one where God appears to approve of or reward those breaking the rules.  The prophets who bargained for a better deal from God to protect their people from the full blast of God’s wrath.  Jacob who deceived his own father and wrestled with God.  The parable of the crooked steward who bargained with his master’s debtors to gain favor with them when he realized he was going to be fired or even imprisoned.  These are all stories of people who said, “not good enough” and bargained, schemed and acted to forge a different path in defiance of all expectations.

    Jesus’ entire life and ministry were defiant.  He wasn’t the warrior the Jews were looking for.  He talked to people he wasn’t supposed to talk to.  Made outcasts, the inconsequential and the unclean the heroes of his stories.  When faced with an attempt to force him into a damned if you do – damned if you don’t choice (should we pay taxes?  stone the adulteress?), he found a third answer no one else had seen before.  He broke rules that were misinterpreted and misapplied and made those who tried to shame him for it look the fool.  When he did not even say a word to stop his own execution, it wasn’t the enemy gaining the upper hand as it appeared, but a defiant willingness to walk a path no one could have predicted.  And in the end, he defied death itself.

    All these millenia later God is still calling us to be faithfully defiant.  So we sing through our tears.  Forgive the unforgivable.  Confront those who spread pain, fear and suffering about them.  Love the filthy and mean and undeserving.  When we serve small children and drug addicts and those left behind.  When we fall down and get back up and fall down and get back up and repeat as many times as it take until we succeed or we die, we are faithfully defiant.

    This sort of defiance is freedom and peace and goodness in action.  It washes away doubt, discards baggage, untangles unhealthy entanglements.  When we follow in the footsteps of the defiant faithful who have gone before, we truly are taking the road less traveled. It’s not paved or smooth or even particularly safe.  It’s the narrow winding road that few find and fewer stay on.  Often to those watching, it looks like we’re wandering in the wilderness with no direction and no sense.  And yet, as long as we continue to use our spiritual eyes, nothing can convince the faithfully defiant to abandon it for the more sensible, well traveled path.  Because a journey begun in faithful defiance is guaranteed to lead us closer and closer to God – no matter how dire our circumstances.  If we end up alone, despised, poor, crushed and even dead, we do so gladly, in defiance of all expectations and external pressures.  And I would rather be crawling on my belly in filth and misery along the narrow way than walking in comfort on the wide path that my God has told me leads to no where I want to be.

    140 years ago, a man and his family were living a blessed life.  The father was a successful lawyer, with healthy children and a wife who was admired and respected in the community.  They lived in Chicago where the family fortune was largely invested in a thriving real estate market.  They moved in prominent circles and were good friends of DL Moody, the famed evangelist.  139 years ago, their only son died at age 4.  138 years ago the family’s wealth was wiped out in the great Chicago fire.  137 years ago, the man placed his beloved wife and four daughters on a ship to England to start a new life in England working with Moody.  He stayed behind to attend to loose ends before following them across the sea.  But the ship his family was on collided with another ship on the open sea.  His precious daughters were ripped from their mother’s arms by the force of water that sank their ship in only 12 minutes and drowned.  On the voyage across the ocean to join his wife in her grief, one of the great, defiant songs of Christianity was written.  Because defiance is a Christian virtue:

  • fine-timepiece-repair

    “You’re so sensitive!”

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    “You’re being too sensitive.”

    Oh are those ever familiar words.  All through my childhood they trailed after me like a tin can tied to the end of my shoelaces, with each step in danger of sending it bouncing across the floor.  The sound of those words clanging along behind me made me wince until I could hardly bear to move from my spot any more.  One day, when the strain of being planted in one spot got to be too much for me, I got wise, cut the string and walked away.  For a long time though, the memory of that ugly sound haunted my steps.   But many, many years of freedom from the constant accusation “you’re too sensitive” faded even that away until I was able to move about my world with an ease I had not dreamed was possible back when I was trying to be quiet and still enough not to send that tin can clattering across the floor.

    I am sensitive.  I am very sensitive.  As I explained in the section of my book devoted to part of my spiritual memoir:

    I was the sort of kid who felt bad for the fake Santa’s at the mall when little kids would cry in their laps.  An old woman struggling to pull change out of her coin purse in front of my at the grocery store made me tear up.  If the other kids were teasing the girl from special ed classes who smelled funny and dressed badly, I felt compelled to step in to help her even though that was a great way to find out that I also smelled funny and dressed badly.  If you were someone I actually cared about, an angry word or harsh action could wound me down to the depths of my being.

    Too sensitive – right?  Only being so sensitive isn’t a design flaw in my personality some would make it out to be.  It’s a main feature of my personality, gifted to me by my maker with great love and care.  It’s the source of all my other giftings.  It’s the reason that I, a white, upper-middle class college girl from the suburbs could go into a juvenile prison and have conversations about God and love and pain and healing with young, minority criminals from the violent projects of Chicago.  Because feelings are the same no matter who you are or what you have been through.  If we have nothing else in common, we are all connected by the experiences of pain and joy and betrayal and fear.  Being sensitive is the reason I knew how to parent a baby so challenging that even my own dear mother dreaded having to watch him for more than a very short time.  He was just doing on the outside what I had often felt on the inside.  So I taught him the lessons I had learned from being such a sensitive person and he will never need to know what it’s like to feel badly simply for being the emotional, sensitive person God made him to be.

    It is a gift to be so sensitive.  Because emotions work like curtains pulled open and closed by a cord; as far as they are pulled in one direction, they are be pulled in the other direction as well. The same sensitivity that makes me so vulnerable to hurt also allows me to be open to the joy, peace and wonder that flow with abundance through the simplest parts of everyday life.  In the middle of some misery, I can know that as deep as my suffering is in that moment, that’s how high the joy waiting for me later will be.  Even in my deepest despair, I can hardly avoid experiencing the pull of a child’s love, or the beauty of nature or the pleasure of singing leading me out again.

    I remember years ago a dear friend telling me, “you don’t have to be afraid of your feelings.  They can’t physically hurt you, you know.”  In my head I knew she was right, of course.  But my heart was horrified.  “Oh you foolish woman.  If you understood the strength of my feelings you would know that they could kill me.”  Which simply shows that a sensitive heart must also be a well-trained heart if it is to survive.  But people who say, “you’re too sensitive” don’t know how to help a child learn to tame and train their wild hearts.  So, I sought out every scrap of wisdom, knowledge and understanding I could find to teach myself to live in peace.  The things I write on this blog are often my attempts to share some of the fruits of that quest with anyone who wants them.

    Call me too sensitive if you wish.  But I know that I am sensitive like the finest aviator watch that uses the motions of the adventurer wearing it in unlikely places to keep its own tiny, perfect gears moving in sync.  I am sensitive like a flower that responds to sunlight and opens or a bird that senses danger and flies away long before it arrives.  It is not easy being so sensitive, but even that simply drives me deeper into the arms of divine Love.  Because I am exquisitely sensitive.  Just like God made me to be.

    hardlifecovercover*I have an appointment to jam Christmas music and do some baking with 3 lovely girls today, so I’m being lazy and recycling this post from Nov. 2011 for y’all. My sister Shannon told me it was her favorite when I first posted it, so it must be good. I hope you enjoy it as well. And btw, today is the last day to get free super saver shipping for Christmas delivery on The Upside Down World’s Guide to Enjoying the Hard Life and The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress (the one which contains my spiritual memoir as well as poetry, stories and other material – most of it not available here on the blog).

  • pharisee

    Do you read scripture like a Pharisee or like Jesus?

    October 30, 2012

    32 Comments

    Way back in college, I took a class on the history of religion in America. One day during a discussion about some Christian evangelist, one of the other students offered this criticism of the man’s work: “it’s like he’s actually trying to be like Jesus.” I sat there a bit bug-eyed. Can you imagine – a Christian who was actually trying to be like Jesus? Whatever could that evangelist have been thinking? (Clearly, not everyone I who attended my college was the best or the brightest.) But the reality is that a lot of people – including a good number of Christians – are as unclear on the concept as this young man back in my college days was. How else to explain the fact that many people read the bible the exact same way that the Pharisees did rather than trying to read it like Jesus did? (For anyone who is really unclear on the concept – the Pharisees were Jesus’ main opponents in the gospel stories. We’re supposed to try to be like Jesus, not like the Pharisees. Just so we’re all on the same page here.)

    At the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were experts on the bible. In fact, they had managed to find all the laws in the bible – 613 of them. They had further figured out that there were 365 negative laws – thou shall nots. And 248 positive laws – thou shalls. So they knew all about important rules like thou shalt wash your hands before eating, thou shalt not perform miracle healings on the Sabbath and how long to keep the fringe on their garments. Somehow they had managed to miss those very important rules about card playing, drinking alcohol and dancing. No one’s perfect, I guess. But they had mastered the very important biblical teaching to avoid the appearance of evil. Like they wouldn’t eat with unclean people because if they did, the other biblical rule followers might call them evil. And evil is bad, donchano? (I once attended a church which demanded that members not drink alcohol on the grounds that other church members might be scandalized if they saw you coming out of a liquor store.)

    So long before the teaching of sola scripture, the Pharisees were experts in biblical living. If you needed to know the biblical way to weave your cloth was, they could tell you. (Using only one type of fiber is biblical. The Pharisees would not have stood for our unbiblical polyester/cotton blends!) The Pharisees were also very good about setting a good example for other people – praying in public or announcing their contributions to the synagogue loudly. Because it was important to “witness” to those around them so that people would be inspired to honor God the right way, of course. Continue reading »

  • 4116541-mountain-climbing

    Mountain Climbing

    September 17, 2012

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    Once there was a climber who set out to climb a mountain.  The word from those who had gone before was that the guru at the top of the mountain was God himself and that the closer you got to the summit, the more spectacular the views and the more satisfied your soul became.  At the bottom of the mountain, there were many paths to start from.  Different paths had different challenges and enjoyments.  The mountainside was dotted with cafes, inns and gathering places and many people enjoyed exploring the trail they had started from.  But as the elevation got higher and the air a little bit thinner, the trails all converged together into one narrow, difficult path.  This was the way to the summit.  This was the path our climber was determined to take.

    The road to the summit was not as well traveled as the other trails lower down.  Everyone on the mountain claimed to be trying to reach the top, but few actually ventured onto the daunting path towards the summit.  The accommodations along the higher path were functional, but sparse and the travelers even sparser.  It was not uncommon to meet someone nursing a strong drink at a gathering spot along one of the lower trails who had been defeated by this arduous journey to the summit.  The few who made it to the top tended to be harder to locate, but when asked they all said the same things:  “Stay on the path even when it looks foolish and dangerous.  If you think you are lost, stop and wait until the path becomes clear again. Gather any food and supplies you find even if they are a burden to carry – you will depend on them later.  And don’t quit.  It’s worth it.”

    Our intrepid climber knew it was a foolhardy journey to undertake.  But she had never found a comfortable spot on one of the trails lower down that satisfied her heart.  The amusements found there seemed unworthy of her full devotion and the people were often kind but they were not God.  They could not satisfy her heart.  So, she determined to climb the summit to meet God and satisfy the longing in her soul which would not allow her to make peace with lesser things.  Continue reading »

  • potters-hands

    God’s Discipline

    June 27, 2012

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    Have I ever told you about the time I had a homeless Cameroonian living in my house? No? Well, allow me to share. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll call our homeless Cameroonian friend Ben. A few years back my family was involved with a church where I had volunteered to call people who filled out visitor cards asking for more information about getting involved in small groups. Ben had visited and asked to be contacted. I reached him on the phone a few days later. He was at the airport in D.C. getting ready to return from a conference of Christian aid workers working on water issues in Africa. In the course of talking with him, I discovered that Ben was heading to a homeless shelter that night to sleep. It didn’t feel right to allow that to happen so I called my husband. I asked him to talk with Ben and extend an offer to stay at our place while we worked to find a better solution to the situation. (My husband is preternaturally good at reading people and suspicious to boot, so I wanted him to make sure we weren’t inviting an ax-murderer into our home.) When my husband called back to let me know that he had arranged to pick Ben up from the airport, I said to him, “he’s under God’s discipline isn’t he?” I could just sense it in my spirit. There’s a certain way that things go wrong in a Christian’s life when a person is under God’s discipline. The bits of Ben’s story I had gotten from our phone conversation all pointed in that direction. My husband affirmed my own impression and said, “this should be interesting.” Continue reading »

  • feature-faith-crisis_520

    Why Do I Keep Faith?

    June 22, 2012

    Why do I keep faith? Believe it or not, that’s not a question I have much of an answer for right now. I know I should say, “because God is good and his promises are sure and He’s always been faithful to me.” But that’s just not where I’m at right now. Instead I have been asking myself quite seriously on a fairly regular basis – why do I keep faith? What is it? Why can’t I let go? It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve kept my faith, I’ve kept on the narrow path, I’ve been obedient in things big and small, I’ve relied on God’s grace and forgiveness to cover me. And for what? Misery and humiliation and rejection and poverty? A husband with more issues than Reader’s Digest Magazine? Kids who I love but who just take and take and take and need more than I have left in me to give?  Boys who I put my all into and adore, but who can’t even pull together a decent report card or a crappy certificate of achievement? A God who won’t show himself to me? A bird’s eye view of my every ugly imperfection with the full realization that I’ve done my best and I’m still a hopeless wreck? A million whiny, complaining, woe-is-me blog posts to break things up around here? Continue reading »

  • cheerleader

    Sometimes You Just Have To Be Your Own Cheerleader!

    May 20, 2012

    4 Comments

    Dearest Rebecca,

    Hi! I’ve heard that you’ve been having a hard time lately so I thought you could use some encouragement. I know that between being sick and hating housework and wishing you could have just one full child free day and night every couple of years, you feel like you’re drowning and can’t hold things together. Heck, I hear that you even lost your purse last week after leaving it on the top of the car. What a bummer! But, you know, shit happens. Shake it off. No use crying over spilt milk and all that. I mean look at all the things you’re juggling. You’ve got 5 kids. Everyday you make sure people are wearing clean clothes and sleeping on clean sheets and some days your own clothes are even clean. You check backpacks and harass errant students and sometimes even remember girl scout meetings before they start. Continue reading »

  • What "not fun" looks like

    Shall I Become the Anti-Evangelist?

    May 8, 2012

    4 Comments

    You know what extreme sport I would never want to engage in? Spelunking. Throw me from an airplane. Tie a rubber band around my waist and push me off a bridge. Put me in a cage in shark-infested waters or leave me in the wilderness with a paper clip and a coffee filter and tell me good luck. But please don’t send me to explore an underground cave system. It’s not the dark or being underground that would get to me; it’s the narrow tunnels between caverns that I could never tolerate. To have the earth closed in around me such that I can’t flex my joints, twist my back, turn my shoulders – being able to do nothing but breathe and creep forward is the stuff of my nightmares. Just thinking about it makes me feel like I’m suffocating. I cannot for the life of me understand why people do it. Unfortunately for me, this seems to be exactly the position I’m in spiritually. And it turns out that being in such a constrained place in the spiritual realm is as uncomfortable as I imagine moving through a very narrow tunnel under the earth would be.

    You can look at your life as a large cone that becomes narrower the deeper you go. There are many doors in that cone that give you chances to leave the journey. But you have been closing these doors one after the other, making yourself go deeper and deeper into your center. You know that Jesus is waiting for you at the end, just as you know that he is guiding you as you move in that direction. Every time you close another door . . . you commit yourself to go deeper into your heart and thus deeper into the heart of God. ~ Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love

    I first came across this quote from Henri Nouwen years ago and have always thought that it was rather apt. There are so many ways that one can just walk away from the spiritual life. Or maybe not even walk away, but just find a door that you can’t bring yourself to close to hang out by. You could hang onto guilt or unforgiveness.  You could make choices based on what’s safe and comfortable.  You could decide that instead of an identity in Christ an identity as a parent or spouse or accountant or whatever is good enough. Or you could just decide that throwing yourself into the abyss is kind of a dumb way to live your life and go to seek your fortunes out in the world beyond that ever narrowing cone. But I didn’t. And now I’m in the deep dark part of the cone with no escape hatches in sight.

    Early this year I said that I thought this year would be one of letting go. Which was kind of silly. I’m already really good at letting go. I’ve practiced it to near perfection over years and even decades. I deal with a problem, learn from it and then let it go. I let go like a champ. No, this is not the year of letting go. This is the year of limits. And that I am not so practiced at or comfortable with.

    “Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it”. ~ Matthew 7:14

    Up until now I’ve recognized limits and chosen to abide by them. I’ve failed at things and chosen to accept that it wasn’t the right thing at the right time. But the presumption was always that I could choose not to accept that limit. I could have chosen to break through failure, paid the price and pursued my goals to the point of success. Limits meant saying “I won’t”, “I don’t”, “I haven’t . . . yet.” But in the last 12 months I’ve had to add another phrase to my repertoire: “I can’t”. And now the “I can’t”s have piled up until I can hardly move. As I’m discovering, it’s one thing to practice being still. But it’s another thing entirely to not be able to move.

    My van died. My dog bit the baby. We can’t afford the $45 surrender fee the shelter requires to take him back. My 12 year old flunked his online course because the computer crashed and ate his (not turned in) homework during the system restore. Now the school district is threatening not to pay for any more classes because it looks like he did nothing. I had to quit my DJ job because I can’t carry the equipment since I’ve been sick. I’ve been working on making a series of vlog posts for weeks. But each time something goes wrong; YouTube ate the file, I get interrupted, the microphone was off, I get interrupted, the video camera stopped recording part way through, I get interrupted, the picture is all jerky, I get interrupted, I can’t get new video capture software to install properly. (I swear, I’m just giving highlights from the last month. There’s much, much more of this joyousness.) On and on it goes. Day after day. Nothing completely catastrophic, but one thing after another blocking any way out.  I feel like I’m just being pinned down and there’s nothing I can do about it. Like a person stuck in a narrow passage while spelunking, all I can do is breathe and keep creeping forward.

    He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light . . .He has walled me in so I cannot escape . . . Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my path crooked . . I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. ~Lamentations 3:2,7,8-9,17

    I’m not sure if it’s the stress or being sick almost continuously for 2 months (did you know that under certain circumstances you can pee out blood clots? I had previously been unaware of this fascinating possibility.) , but I honestly think I have brain damage. It’s taken 4 days to write this post so far.* My body doesn’t work. I can’t hear God at all. I can’t pray. I can tell that better things are coming, but frankly it just doesn’t make much difference at the moment.

    All the old saints and mystics say that the greater the darkness, the closer to the heart of God you are. Even if that’s true and I haven’t spent my life on a fool’s errand or been cast into the outer darkness for swearing too much, I can’t imagine why I or anyone else was ever be foolish enough to try to come this way. As St. Teresa of Avila is purported to have said to God, “if this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder that you have so few.”  I suppose it’s like labor; everyone knows it’s awful and yet we manage to convince ourselves that it’s worth going through.

    More than once in the last month I’ve started a blog post in my head that included some version of the words: “If you are thinking of following God, don’t. It’s not worth it. He will lead you into misery and humiliation and abandon you there. Even if He finally brings you out of the awful places he takes you into, you’ll be too destroyed to give a crap.” I’ll become the anti-evangelist. Not that it would any good. There’s just something about being caught up by God. It’s like Munchausen’s Syndrome or something. Only God won’t have me rob a bank – that would mean giving me access to cash.

    My soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning . . . I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him. To the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. ~ Lamentations 3:20-23,24-26

    *OK, it took 5 days. Plus an extra day waiting for the neighbor whose internet we’re stealing to fix their modem. It was down for a while. They really need to take care of that. heehee