I am an old shoe. I am a vegetable.

So I've been getting really down on myself lately for struggling so much with carrying on in life. And then I just have to remind myself to sit down and describe things plainly.

I've just started two new jobs. It is my last semester of college, and a full one. I have the responsibility of being independently disciplined for one of my three studio classes, the most studio classes I've ever taken at once. I am now in the process of applying to and deciding on where to go to midwifery school, which is a huge decision. I've just taken on the responsibility of a new ministry. My entire immediate family has moved relatively recently. I've just quit smoking.

I am also grieving a tossed salad of various other assorted upsetting things which feels like a toxic soup sloshing around in my stomach as I run as fast as I can trying to keep up with and cope with all of the above.

Virtually everything in my life has turned over and nothing seems familiar. I have a new phone number. I have a different car. I have different clothes, my hair is a different color. I'm trying new foods, new music, new media in my artwork.

It's like waiting tables, when you've been in a groove for about an hour of serving people you recognize. You might even know their names. Then, all of a sudden they all cash out and then there are these new people and they're ordering new food and you're all stirred up and flustered again.

I had just gotten used to Jim and Nancy and their Teriyaki and the Katsu Don and now here comes this new group ordering up all this sushi and now they want salad and refills and they have names like Jeff and Mary Kathryn......I just don't know how they expect me to go on with names like that!

I have to remember that I need to be merciful with myself here, considering the description of my situation. Otherwise, I'll just hide in my room and not let anyone help me or even know I'm struggling and then I'll just go numb like a vegetable or a worn out shoe, all crumpled and foot shaped and frayed and hollow...and smelly.

I'm trying to let people in. I need people. I need you. Help me. Care about me.

I'm an old shoe. I'm a vegetable. I need love and mercy from the body of Christ.

Freedom

Father of all, we pray to you for those we love, but see no longer: Grant them your peace; let light perpetual shine upon them; and, in your loving wisdom and almighty power, work in them the good purpose of your perfect will; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Grant, O Lord, to all who are bereaved the spirit of faith and courage, that they may have strength to meet the days to come with steadfastness and patience; not sorrowing as those without hope, but in thankful remembrance of your great goodness, and in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those they love. And this we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Savior, Amen.



O God, who on the holy mount didst reveal to chosen witnesses thy well-beloved Son, wonderfully transfigured, in raiment white and glistening; Mercifully grant that we, being delivered from the disquietude of this world, may by faith behold the King in his beauty; who with thee, O Father, and thee, O Holy Ghost, liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.

because there are things happening in this world that we can't see, and if we get hung up on the startling sights here below, we miss the things happening above.

Because God is Spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is FREEDOM.

and freedom feels like freedom..it doesn't feel like righteousness or vindication or shame or grief. it feels like freedom.

It's Advent. Put the Cheez-its down.

Since Advent is the season of waiting, I'm doing a lot of learning about my needs. And since I've been learning about my needs, I've also been learning about waiting. What are my needs? Why am I ashamed of them?

I think part of the reason that many people (okay me) find themselves feeling ashamed of their legitimate needs is that people (the conventional need-satisfier) do not do a very good job of meeting each other's needs for many reasons. We're selfish, impatient little creatures with short fuses, so when someone has a need, it is often second nature to deny it. We meet our own needs first or in leiu of meeting another's. We invalidate other's valid needs because it is simply more convenient to convince someone that they don't need something than it is to meet their need.
Naturally, in order to survive, many of us (okay me) come to ignore our needs. I tend to continue on for a very long time in a situation where my needs have been invalidated and not met, with the false hope that the person with the power to meet that need will notice my suffering and have a change of heart.
The Big Surprise: They don't.
Many of us have simply turned off the need feeling switch, hoping the need will get the picture and move somewhere far, far away. You can guess how this works out.

Let's just say that my own personal relationship to my needs is a bit tricky. But now that I've gotten to the point where my needs have held me hostage, forcing me to admit they exist, I've made some progress. I've been playing the waiting game with God, asking Him for things I need like a good nights sleep, the ability to feed myself all month long, the skills to relearn how to cook for myself in a balanced, healthy way, enough money to pay my utility bill, the desire to forgive, the gift of compassion, hope, love. As I've been doing this, thinking about what it is I need, and asking God for those things, I've been shocked by His response. He's giving me things I wasn't even sure were needs, things I thought I was just responsible for mustering up.

The moment I mention maybe wanting some ideas or some options for healthy, balanced, non-emotional eating, Jesus is right there in the form of my friend Lisa on the telephone rattling off 101 healthy cook-at-home options for under $5. God uses people. God LOVES using people. Especially to meet people's needs. Because just like God, we love meeting needs too. When we aren't busy being selfish or convincing others they don't have needs, you must admit it feels really awesome to really help someone. It does not feel awesome to be selfish. God LOVES serving us and He LOVES it when we serve each other because everyone wins.

I think this concept can be really clearly illustrated by Walt Disney. In Beauty and the Beast, there's this scene where Belle says she's a "little hungry." The entire castle party then goes into this very enthusiastic and showy parade of options for her dining pleasure expressing their immense joy to serve her.
"Life is so unnerving for a servant who's not serving!" they say, sadly.
They used to be flabby fat and lazy...but she walked in and...well you know the rest.
If you haven't seen this, you need to.

Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h3Cvs1caeA

An excerpt from John Piper's book "Desiring God" really got me thinking on this (as did my insistent needs)

"God aims to exalt Himself by working for those who wait for Him. Prayer is the essential activity of waiting for God--acknowledging our helplessness and His power, calling upon Him for help, seeking His counsel. Since His purpose in the world is to be exalted for His mercy, it is evident why prayer is so often commanded by God. Prayer is the antidote for the disease of self-confidence, which opposes God's goal of getting glory by working for those who wait for Him.
"The eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to give strong support to those whose heart is blameless toward him" (2 Chronicles 16:9). God is not looking for people to work for Him, so much as He is looking for people who will let Him work for them. The gospel is not a help-wanted ad. Neither is the call to Christian service. On the contrary, the gospel commands us to give up and hang out a help-wanted sign (this is the basic meaning of prayer). Then the gospel promises that God will work for us if we do. He will not surrender the glory of being the Giver."

Well it turns out God is interested in whether or not I get a good night's sleep. It turns out that He's interested in how busy I am this week. He doesn't look down from up there and say..."Welp, you wouldn't be so busy if you just slowed down." Nope. He's not like that. He says, "Here. This will help you slow down. Just don't worry about this thing here. Let it go." God cares about what I cook for dinner and how much it costs. This is amazing. No one has ever cared about my life this much. This stuff doesn't matter to anyone but me.

Well, that's because "anyone" has never been JESUS.

God wants to meet our needs so badly if we'll ask Him. He wants to be the giver of good things in our lives. REALLY good things. Sometimes really good things take a while, so we have to wait to receive them if we want to receive them at all.

So it's no wonder if we're sitting on the couch scarfing cheez-its that Jesus is saying--"Hey! Quit that!"--if He's making filet mignon and lobster tail in the next room. But we don't believe He is because it's in the "next room," so we we're scarfing the cheez-its, yelling with our mouths full on the couch, "PROVE IT!"

What's Jesus supposed to do? By the time the lobster tail and the filet mignon are ready, you'll be in bed and full of cheez-its, Jesus will be eating dinner by Himself, and you won't trust Him any more than you did before you were full of cheez-its. All because it takes five seconds to open a box of cheez-its and hours to cook filet mignon and lobster tail.

So put the cheez-its down.
And wait for the lobster tail.

The Whole Story

http://www.vimeo.com/7786740

for everyone who has wondered what the whole story has been, and for everyone who was a part of it....and still wondered what the whole story had been.

well, here's the whole story.

Flannery Oconnor: unapologetic, faithful

Barry Moser, Valley of Dry Bones


In an essay titled, "The Fiction Writer and His Country", Flannery Oconnor addresses the concern of literary critics that American novelists do not accurately represent the "joy of life" in a country which is "enjoying an unparalleled prosperity", which is "the strongest nation in the world", and which "has almost produced a classless society."

She responds in such a way that encourages me not only as a Christian, but as a Christian artist, especially in a cultural climate hostile to Christianity, at Florida State and in the United States at large.

Christian artists have the inconvenient responsibility of conveying a need for redemption to an audience convinced of a reality where such redemption is not only an insult, but an unnecessary fairy tale. The belief in the depravity of man and his desperate need for redemption is a make-believe cop-out of living life in the here and now, a crutch for the weak, instead of hope for every soul with the curse and blessing of being confronted with the reality of his soul: needy.

Flannery says:

"Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.
The novelists with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, they you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

Christian artists are often accused of having a view of the world so dark that it is dishonest. Each artist faces this accusation singularly, with no other conscience but his own.

"It may well be asked, however, why so much of our literature is apparently lacking in a sense of spiritual purpose and in the joy of life, and if stories lacking such are actually credible. The only conscience I have to examine in this matter is my own, and when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little--or at best a distorted--sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life.
Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these time to make transparent in fiction."

She is right about that. This is not a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy.

The Burning and The Blessing

While I was in Uganda, I wrote about the tattoo of the tarot card that I have on my shoulder. If you haven't read that, you should go back and read that first, because this is part II of that story.

* * *

A couple of weeks ago, I got a wild hair and decided to obsessively clean.

This began, innocently enough, with the trunk of art supplies in my closet. But then it started spreading. First to the shelves in my closet, then to my desk, then to my bookshelf and before I knew it, half my stuff was in the hallway and I was rearranging the furniture. The bed was turned this way, the chair was on the bed, dust was flying and I thought......

Hey, this feels pretty good.

The closet was, by far the biggest challenge because that is the place I throw things when I try to forget about them. I unearthed all sorts of memories, crawling out from under things. It was very emotional.

And then I really found a chunk of something.

There were my tarot cards, hiding in a little bread pan, in the corner of the bottom of the trunk, curled up in a ball whispering to each other, "If you don't move, she can't see you."

Well I saw them, and I picked them up and I just looked at them for a minute. The thoughts began to dawn on me. Why do I still have these? Why haven't I destroyed them by now? I destroyed the eight of swords, why haven't I destroyed the rest of them?
Well, I didn't really know so I just set them down on my bedside table and kept cleaning, but now that they were out in the open, their presence was really bothering me. My eye kept being drawn back to the place where they sat, staring at me. I heard God whispering.

"You know, we still haven't talked about this."

The last year and a half has been a stormy affair between God and I. We've fought and we've struggled and fought some more and cried and there have been a few times when I've tried to kill him. It's been hard.

But God is faithful. He's more faithful than I am and he's kept his promises to me, even when I turned my back on him.

Somehow, in all of this Storm, the fact that I had engaged in the consulting of spirits and divination had slipped to the bottom of the closet, unaddressed. I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but as I continued to be drawn back to the cards, sitting on my bedside table, I knew there was a reckoning about to happen. I had been struggling with whether or not the tarot was actually evil, since I thought I had seen a lot of good come from tarot, but as I thought about this, the conversation between God and I surpassed the tarot and became much more serious.

We started talking about baptism.

When a person is baptized, they renounce evil and all of the spiritual forces that rebel against God and corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. They turn to Jesus Christ and promise to put their whole trust in his grace and love. They promise to obey him.

I made those promises eight years ago when I was baptized in the Methodist church, but a lot has happened since then.

I turned my back on God and not my face, and I went my own way. I counted the commandments of God hopeless, impossible, unrealistic and foolish, instead of counting them as pathways to blessing and peace. I began walking the hard road of rebellion and it led me to a place where I was alone and isolated. I thought that following my desires and my ideals would lead me to an open place of freedom and a renewed, true sense of intimacy with others, but my desires and my ideals betrayed me and left me alone, hollow, cut off from everyone and wondering what had happened.

I was lying in the ruins of my apostasy, tormented and undone.

I had clearly not kept my end of the bargain. Over the years, I had broken my promise to trust, my promise to rely on his grace, to renounce things that would corrupt and destroy me, to turn and accept Christ, to follow and obey Him. But as I look back now I see the ways that God was faithful to his promises, faithful to His grace.

"When Israel was a child, I loved him,
And out of Egypt I called my son.
As I called him, so he went from me;
They sacrificed to Baals,
And burned incense to carved images.

I taught Ephraim to walk,
Taking them by their arms;
But they did not know that I healed them.
I drew them with gentle cords,
With bands of love,
And I was to them as those
Who take the yoke from their neck.
I stooped and fed them…

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?...

My heart churns within me;
My sympathy is stirred.

I will not execute the fierceness of my anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim.
For I am God and not man,
The holy One in your midst;
And I will not come with terror."

Hosea 11:1-4, 8ac-9

God was faithful. He led people into my life to shine their light in my darkness, he spoke to me as I sat alone, searching desperately for something in a deck of cards. He spoke to me in whispers as I sat crying on my back porch because I didn't like the person I was becoming. Even though I had forgotten my promise, he hadn't forgotten his and he wasn't giving up on me.

In all those times when I showed my unfaithfulness to my promise, Jesus was falling to his knees in the front yard, head in his hands, begging that the cup of suffering would pass me by.

But it didn't pass me by. I drank the bitter cup to its dregs and threw up in the street.

"Your ways and your doings have
Procured these things for you.
This is your wickedness,
Because it is bitter,
Because it reaches to your heart."
Jeremiah 4:18

I always thought the tarot was pretty innocent. I always made it clear that I wasn't practicing divination, that I wasn't a fortune teller, that what I was doing wasn't evil---but no matter what I said, or what I told myself to make myself feel better, that didn't change the fact that the tarot was evil, and what I was doing was consulting evil.

I didn't just decide one day that the occult sounded better than Jesus. It was a slow rot. It started with my own apostasy, and somewhere along the way, I found something that celebrated that, and that thing led me deeper into darkness.

So when God began to drop hints a couple of weeks ago that we had some things to talk about, it had less to do with tarot cards and more to do with apostasy.

I had rejected the God I had promised to trust and it had grieved us both, only I hadn't felt that until now.

So when it came time to repent, I wasn't just admitting I was maybe wrong about a few things. I wasn't groveling before an angry God. I was grieving before a gracious one.

"O Lord, are not your eyes on the truth?
You have stricken them,
But they have not grieved;
You have consumed them,
But they have refused to receive correction.
They have made their faces harder than rock;
They have refused to return."
Jeremiah 5:3

My face softened by the tears of my mourning, I turn around to face the Lord, only to find that he has been in hot pursuit since the chase first began.

"If you will return, O Israel,
Says the Lord,
'Return to me;
And if you will put your detestable objects out of my sight,
Then you shall not be moved.'
And if you shall swear,
'The Lord lives,' in truth, in judgement
And in righteousness;
The nations shall bless themselves in him,
And in him they shall glory."
Jeremiah 4:1-2

In my grief over the separation I had caused, and in the joy of God's grace and forgiveness and mercy, I knew that I had to put the cards away. I had to put the rebellion and the broken promises and the cards away once and for all and I had to renew my vow to the Lord.

Father John and Ashley and their littlest Wallace, all together with Sonya Cronin witnessed the burning of my tarot cards and the renewal of my baptismal vows on October 26, 2009 at St Peter's Anglican Church.

We celebrated God's grace and piled the cards in a little flower pot that the Wallaces had brought. We doused them with lighter fluid and as they burned, Ashley and Sonya presented me for the renewal of my baptismal vows. They promised to help me grow into the full stature of Christ by their prayers and witness, with God's help. I renounced again the spiritual forces of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. I renounced all sinful desires that draw me from the love of God. I turned to Jesus Christ to accept and put my whole trust in His grace and love. I promised to follow and obey Him.

It all happened at once, the burning and the blessing. As Father John stood in front of me, he anointed me with oil used at ordinations and baptisms. He made the sign of the cross with his hand on my forehead and reminded me again of God's faithfulness when he said,

"You were sealed at your baptism as Christ's own forever."

He anointed my hands and my mouth and my ears with oil and showed me how God was setting me apart to do His work with my hands, a new work to lead me into blessing, and not into bitter darkness.

I felt Ashley's hand on the tattoo on my left shoulder and Sonya's on my right shoulder. They surrounded me in a triangle, and I felt so surrounded by God's love and devotion to me, thankful for his grace in putting people like Ashley and Sonya and John in my life to show me His love. I could hear the baby talking a little bit and the fire popping behind Father John. Sometimes if he shifted, I could watch the cards burning and it all just felt so good in the autumn air, I could feel some things were dying. Just like the leaves falling away, there were parts of me that fell away then, and the promise of new life was more real than it ever had been.

As it was all happening there, out in the open, in the garden at the church, I saw what small and flimsy things, made of only paper, the cards really were and I was sobered by that reality. I thought,

Hey, this whole time, they were only paper.

But it wasn't just paper that led me into bitter darkness. And it's not just the paper in my Bible that leads me into the presence of the God of the universe. A Bible will burn just as easily as a pack of cards will, but there are things going on in the world other than just what we can see with our eyes.

"Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.

Then He who sat on the throne said,
"Behold, I make all things new."

Revelation 21:3-5

yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.

This came to me in a dream.

Righteousness, the cake I'm baking alongside all Christians over time and space. As I follow the recipe of scripture, mixing four parts purity, one part weeping, ten parts mercy, one part repentance, I get the feeling that others have measured this combination before.

And as I begin to watch the batter swirling into a sweet conclusion in the buttered pan, I think.....

yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.

As I slide my pan into the hot oven, and the wave of heat fogs my glasses I think---maybe I'll survive this after all.

Maybe the warmth and the fire will set me free and when Jesus peeks over the oven door twenty five minutes from now he'll celebrate and say:

"And I will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.....Behold. I make all things new."
Revelation 21:4-5

Being a Christian is like making a cake----except halfway through, you hand the spoon to Jesus and finally admit that you are the cake. Surprised by this fact, you totally lose all composure and then you're both standing in the kitchen and the spoon is on the floor, your head is on Jesus' shoulder and you're crying and he says....

yeah. this is all gonna turn out alright.

"Assemble yourselves and come, Gather together from all sides to my sacrificial meal which I am sacrificing for you, A great sacrificial meal on the mountains of Israel, That you may eat flesh and drink blood."
Ezekiel 39:17