Clinging or Compromising

Being justified therefore by faith, let us have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ:

² By whom also we have access through faith into this grace, wherein we stand, and glory in the hope of the glory of the sons of God.

³ And not only so; but we glory also in tribulations, knowing that tribulation worketh patience;

⁴ And patience trial; and trial hope;

⁵ And hope confoundeth not: because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us.

Romans 5 DRA

I find myself here today when I should be at my school site, answering the question of how Native Americans and African Americans dealt with the issue of Christianity as it related to White society....because my own current question of the day is how as a woman separated from her husband, I am to deal with the issue of Christianity as it relates to American/Christian society.

I went to the bookstore yesterday because that's one of the things I do when I'm crying out to God for an answer or a response or a sign of some sort and I'm getting nothing.  I browse other's words, hoping for some insight or truth to get me through. And I walked out with: Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life  by Kathleen Norris; The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth by Gerald G. May;No Man Is an Island (Shambhala Library) by Thomas Merton and the one I went in for -Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren Winner.

I think there was a theme, here.  It's not so much that I'm questioning God's existence.  It's that I'm questioning His seeming silence, His apparent allowance of my enemies to prevail,    If He is truth, why do I keep hearing the lies of the enemy?  If light has more power than darkness, why is the atmosphere dim? If I am free, why do I feel condemned?

And in a way, I know the answer to these questions. And I know that much, I have brought upon myself. That I forsook my first love.  That I allowed strongholds to take root.  I ignored the warning signs.  I became unfocused and searched for healing where there was none. Wrote words for peccary and pittances. And  out of self-pity.  I turned out of fear of my own sin.  Because as Winner writes, "my sense of myself as a Christian had become so wrapped up with my sense of myself as a wife that to question one was to question the other." 

 I read those words and I realize the dilemma in that.  The pride.  That marriage had become my god.  And I had developed pre-meditated resentments toward God as I prayed for my own will rather than His.  And so faced with my own disappointment and failure, I listened to the world's words rather than the Word.  I soaked up false niceties, stunned when they proved lacking.  

I thought I was clinging but now see that I was compromising.  And so now I confess.  

"I think of the Hasidic rabbi petitioning God for the gift of prayer, asking until such time as I can pour out my heart like water before You, let me at least pour out my words" -Lauren Winner

So I'm pouring words as prayers now rather than defenses.  Rather than cases, I'm making pleas.  I'm choosing to believe that I:

 may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth:

¹⁹ To know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge,

-Ephesians 3

that Jesus loves me - as I am.  For how can I extend grace if I haven't accepted it? And the world needs grace.  It needs patience and love an prayer.  And if my pain and my new understandings have been purposed so that I might share with others, then who am I to question this?

I remember the lyrics to the Christmas song, "Away in a Manger" and I rest on the knowledge that when I sang this song year after year at Lutheran school, Christ heard me and answered.

Be near me, Lord Jesus,
I ask Thee to stay,
Close by me forever,
and love me, I pray!
Bless all the dear children
in Thy tender care
And take us to heaven,
to Live with Thee there.

And so today, as I find comfort in the words of others who have tread through that dark night and stood looking at the frightening face of a middle, I pray that God would show Himself in a real way to all those out there who are being tested now and who feel that awful silence, that they would know how deeply they are loved and that He does work all things together for good.

There are things that no one tells you, that go along with this whole mess.  They don't say, (or say,well) that there's this huge collaboration of mixed emotions, that depression sort of lurks around the corner and it requires extreme vigilance to keep her at bay, or, most importantly, that when a marriage suffers to this extent, motherhood also gets a little shaky.

Carving out the motherhood against the singleness is a whole new ball game.  Because before, something was established.  Even if only in ideal.  But what is this new ground?  How do we all fit in or around each other now?  How many days can I play the giving-myself-grace card and feed them fast food? With each tantrum,  I now wonder if it has happened because of what has happened.  What do these kids really think? What do I really think?

Carving out really, everything, against this new circumstance is tricky:  Should I write to heal or heal before I write? 

Well, I'm here.  So....

I guess I'm banking on the idea that maybe, there's just a few others out there who have tread this ground before me or someday will in the future.  And the bottom line is that it's my truth now.  It's a truth, like the need for me to write is a truth.  Another truth is that I keep coming here drafting a paragraph or so and saving, then adding later because I'm scared.  Scared to voice what's going on, to admit that I still believe God is beautifying me because I hear in my head the mockers, see their fingers pointing, screaming that women whose marriages don't work out don't have the right to talk about God.  Not in the Christian world.  But maybe I don't want part of the American/Christian world anymore.  Maybe I just want to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling, away from the voices of judgement.  And maybe, I want to just share that little sliver of truth because I know that I'd appreciate reading it from someone else.

"I know that help is waiting only for my acceptance, waiting for me to say, 'Not my will but Thine be done'"




Grateful for:


the fact that, though, "We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. ⁹ We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out."

messages only for me
purple flowers
reinvention
not parenting alone
childlike faith
the scales falling off
a building of confidence
believing and accepting the truth

It seems that everything is changing, now.  Life is never stagnant.  It's exciting and scary at the same time. There are choices and no clear answers, yet.  I want to know.  To understand.

  So I'm waiting. Trying to stay grounded, focused and in prayer.

"I once thought, "I would like to feel the contours of these times with my fingertips." I was sitting at my desk with no idea what to make of life...And then I was suddenly flung into one of many flashpoints of human suffering.  And there, in the faces of people, in a thousand gestures,small changes of expression, life stories, I was suddenly able to read our age....Surrounded by my writers and poets and the flowers on my desk I loved life...There was simply one great, meaningful whole. Will I be able to describe all that one day? So that others can feel too how lovely and worth living and just-yes, just-life really is?"

-From Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork 

Life is always beautiful, I'm learning.  It may not always be pleasant.  It may not always be entirely clear which direction it will go but when broken down into moments, moments of just cleaving, and when one knows that 'great, meaningful whole', there can be a peace and even a new view of tragedy, a sort of hushed acceptance.

My natural reaction, in times like these, is to isolate, go inward and shy from the unknown.  But I find I'm not doing that.  I'm open and waiting for what God has to bring.  I'm seeing that He sees me and that it's okay.

I was reading John 4 today, struck by the fact that Jesus, when He spoke to the Samaritan woman, immediately exposed her sin. Candidly, matter-of- factly but leaving out judgement.  It seems like judgement was not His purpose.  Rather, He wanted her to know that He knew her.

How often does this scene play out between Jesus and me?  How often does He ask something of me and I respond that I can not give, given who He is and who I am ( or am not).  And He says, "Well, ask of me then and I will give to you...so that you will know, then, how to give." And He shows me that He knows exactly who I really am here on earth.  What I have done, or what I have not done.  And contends that, still, He is offering Himself to me.

The Living Water flows and it is mine to take, to never thirst again.

Teresa of Avila, in Interior Castle, says that, "It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are. Would it not be a sign of great ignorance...if a person were asked who he was and could not say..."

She speaks of our souls and the lack of care we give to them, that our bodies are where we place most of our interest rather than on the inner man.  And how true this is. I know who I am because I know Who created me and Who lives within me.  I cannot know the future but I can know that God knows me intimately and loves me and blesses me and this means everything.  It means that in the midst, of all I never thought would happen, I can come here and share, still, because I am known.




-new beginnings
-being known, being seen
-opportunities
-time to write
-revelation
-flowers on a desk
-birds chirping
-snoring dog
-treasures every where
-courage given


With Ann because it's Monday

There is an opportunity here to grow.  Will I take it?  Can I take it - this pressure building?  I taste choices here, questions and know somehow that there are answers which are more right than others, though the question is not a trick.  I want sometimes, someone else to answer the question so I reword it and pose it, when it is within. I want to take it out, give the responsibility to someone else.  Because the consequences scare me on both sides.  I'm afraid to listen.  To be called upon.  To heed the call.  Sometimes there's no easy answer.  Sometimes waiting is hard.  So I kind of dance around the truth, not seeing the Truth dance over me.  And the opportunity is lofty, high and I don't know if I can reach.  But I guess it's just climbing.  One foot in front of the other. Day by day.

I'm not entirely sure what I can at this point in my life - this very immediate point - bring to the table or even what table I'm attempting to bring something to.

Really, what I'm doing is prayerfully coming here because my heart is wildly experiencing something so brand new and it seems that maybe if I work it out here, something will come of it.

I have said that, for me, the thirties have brought into my life an element that I had not expected and maybe this is all the more true at this very moment.  Because I am working out a new identity.  And at the same time, asking God to be the one to work that identity out.  And honestly, it's scary.

There was something very safe and comforting about the practice of contentment and quiet submission in my twenties.  And now suddenly I find myself single but with children. This is not a slight thing.  Because without the marriage part of mothering, a giant piece of what a woman has attempted to attain is now under question.  Of course, my job as a mother is the same.  But with the housewife role stripped, this woman within, flounders a bit for herself.  And this, may be one huge reason against divorce.  It is unnatural to the way of things in a family setting.  And yet it is what it is.  And here I am, mapping out this new course.  Somehow.  I'm barely touching the surface of it all because my mind has barely touched the surface of it all.

If the husband is to be the head of the household, the manifestation, in a way, of Christ's love for his wife (even if this was an unsuccessful endeavor) and he is then gone, then in many ways woman is now face to face with the real Christ and there is the Lord's face, asking the woman a question.

How can it be that I felt for so many years, that I was already walking alone with Christ and now that I truly am, feel that I must not have been, then before?  Marriage served as a protection.  Faulty, but there in its own sort of way.  And now I totter, here, ungrounded, the world beckoning in its beguiling way as never before, the Lord in His quiet manner offering peace which surpasses all understanding.  My flesh has risen to its occasion, if only with temptation and I feel compelled to say that Every Woman's Battle is not every woman's battle until it is.  And I am not merely talking about sexual temptation.  I am talking about the cry of the spirit to hide until these storms have passed and the skin prickling with whispers of freedom, forgetting that it is the truth which truly liberates.

I feel that as a Christian writer, my work will never be the same.  That there will be more than ever, many who must turn their face as I speak, the words unable to penetrate, the experiences I have to offer, unrelatable to many.  But still, I must write. Bring this struggle and its beauty to life on page and that requires a raw honesty that in actuality loses audience.

Brand new idols are showing their face,begging for worship and I have to choose, hourly now who I will serve.  I also have to be willing to confess that this is the case. That new territory is being trudged and that though I know where my help comes from, there are times my hand reaches toward a mirage or a mirror.

And maybe, if I can bring this fight in its authenticity to this small table, in a minor way and with few gritty details but at least the essence, then I, myself, will find sustenance and perhaps, just perhaps, if it is God's will, one woman might find some little thing here which brings her closer to her Maker.

The view from my backyard:  Beauty can always be found.

"We see more than we can say.  The trees stand like guards of the Everlasting."

!

"How could we have lived in the shadow of greatness and defied it?"

-From Man's Quest for God by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Wordless Wednesday

I have not wanted to come here.

But then I read this.  So, I try.

I have thought that this new life phase might mean the end of this one here.  Because in the midst of a marital separation which looks to be permanent, I'm catapulted right out of the Christian mommy blog world - I feel. At least,hurled away from any housewife claim or title. So, I am an average what? now?

And what am I to say?  Here?

But....

"The language of religion is the vehicle of collective experience and it is meaningful only when it speaks of experience and addresses itself to experience." - Dorothee Soelle

I've tried very hard to be real even if at times I insisted on vagueness. And so, now, though thoughts are plenty, there's not much I feel I can liberally express.  Except that, though one major piece of who I am has changed, the whole of who I am is still hid in Christ.  I am admitting, confessing even, that the piece that's been shorn feels like a very big deal in terms of writing as a Christian.  Not writing, in general, because elsewhere, I've been free to do that therapeutic, dark writing to work it out.  But here, I had established a sort of something that I wanted and was true to its time.  But it's all different now.

I want to speak as a Romanticist rather than a Realist but idealism gives way to how things are and so require a different language.  I'm learning it.  But I'm also steadfastly holding to my first love.  Trying not to anticipate His body as my final judge and just hold fast instead to unconditional love.

So there you have it.  A big confession.  And maybe I am still to come here.  At least, for today.

And I am still thankful:

- for knowing where to turn
- for knowing the author of my salvation
-for strength and honesty
-poetry, brilliant by True and Annika
-protection
-for children who still can somehow laugh because I can still somehow laugh
-the gift of teaching children
-friends who call because they care
-the babies learning Spanish from Dora - ha!
-the tools of recovery
-other's words which have helped me through
-the Word