a warm bed is the best medicine
This morning I indulged.
I woke up late, drank coffee, went for a run, came back and took a long shower ... then I pulled on some snuggly, warm, big, baggy sweats and crawled back into bed. Sipping the last of my coffee, I finally finished
this book. I didn't want it to end. The book is a modern-day version of the story of Hosea and his wife Gomer. I can't explain the feelings that stirred inside of me as I read about Angel (the main character) returning home after having been gone from her husband for four years. As she approached him, she was so fearful that he wouldn't take her back ... and she didn't know what to do, what to give him, as a token of her love or of her regret ... so she gave him herself. It was beautiful and poignant and touching and powerful. And I cried and prayed and cried some more.
As I reflected on the story, I realized that I am dangerously similar to the main character who forsook her true love again and again. She left the one who truly loved her because she didn't know how to accept his love ... and yet he continued to love her, even when it seemed she did everything possible to convince him to do otherwise. She left him because she thought she could be happier somewhere else, or that she couldn't give him what he needed.
In the end, Angel realized that ultimately -- beyond the fading happiness -- she needed to find true and lasting JOY, which she was only able to find in Someone so much bigger than herself or her husband. That joy had nothing to do with the love of a person and everything to do with faith and the relentless and unshakeable love of a Father whose love would never change or fade or weaken.
It was a rough weekend, marked by too many things to do and not enough sleep ... but this morning more than made up for it. This morning, in the pages of a thick book and in the comfort of a bed warmed by sunshine and an electric blanket, I found joy. My happiness will ebb and flow with circumstances and situations -- I know this to be true. But nothing or no one is able to pry this joy from my grasp. This is a lasting, unflickering flame of peace and comfort and consolation ...
simple things that make me smile
Last night I started a "Thankfulness" journal. The basic idea is that I write down things for which I am thankful. I am finding that it's difficult for me to STOP writing in the thing.
Here is one thing that I listed today:
Christmas trees. I think the idea of cutting down a pretty tree and bringing it into your house to decorate is silly. But oh, I love the smell of having one in my house. And I like to see the twinkling lights. It brings a warm, cozy feeling to my heart, and makes my house feel a little bit more like a home.
when things don't line up
It has been a day full of thoughts and ponderings ...
So funny how I can do all kinds of different things and go to different places and not really think twice, but then something happens or a thought enters my mind and all of a sudden I see things in a different light.
I look back on my day, and I can't seem to make things line up. I woke up this morning in my comfortable bed and walked around my warm house ... then enjoyed a warm shower. After taking my dogs outside and watching them romp around freely in the backyard, I was welcomed back into my house by the wonderful smell of bread baking in the oven. I had made the bread from a selection of ingredients in my cupboards and fridge, some of which I had bought at the grocery store just last night. I brewed a pot of coffee and readied myself for the second weekly prayer meeting that is held at my house. At that meeting, we spoke about God and prayed and read our Bibles freely, even speaking about the incredible freedom and liberty that we have to do so.
Soon the meeting ended and I walked up the street to work. A morning full of computer work and phone calls. Then I went to Wal-mart to buy Christmas presents for the kids in my program, and ended up spending $246 on hats, gloves, socks, and body wash. I drove back to work (in the county-owned car) and popped my lunch in the microwave. After a couple minutes, the aroma of homemade chili warmed the frigid air in my office. I enjoyed a full hour for lunch, safe in my office with my warm food and a new book.
At the end of the day, I walked to my house, where I played with my dogs and changed my clothes ... then proceeded to job # 2. The restaurant was bustling tonight with women whose scarves matched their socks and men whose wallets looked tired from all the Christmas shopping in which they had participated. I served food to people who didn't say thank you or please, and picked at their food and complained if it was too hot or too cold or too sweet or too salty. Without asking any questions, people dished out $30 or $40 for a meal that they could have prepared at home for less than $8. I emptied out plate after plate into the trash, because there "wasn't enough" to take home or someone didn't really "like" the food enough to finish it.
After work, I stopped at the grocery store and grabbed some food for my dogs. The one human-operated register had a long line, so I opted for a "self serve" register where I could check out, pay, and exit the store without speaking to a single, living soul. And I managed to do just that -- I smiled as I looked in the eyes of employees as I was walking out, and was met with blank stares and expressionless faces.
My dogs were happy to see me as I filled up their bowls with food and gave them clean water to drink. We went for a short run outside, and I felt safe in my (fairly) well-lit neighborhood, strong with my healthy body, and capable in my new running shoes.
I enjoyed a warm shower and changed into yet another set of clothes (this time warm flannel pajamas), and sat down to read as I sipped a cup of warm tea that took me just moments to prepare on my electric stove.
I have been revisiting my bookshelves in search of books that I purchased a while back but never read, and just last night I dusted off a book entitled "The aWAKE Project". The subtitle is "United Against the African Aids Crisis". Basically, the work is a collection of pieces written by many well-known figures such as Bono, Philip Yancey, George W. Bush, and Danny Glover.
Here is an excerpt from the first piece (written by journalist Johanna McGeary) that I read tonight. I had to take several breaks to get through the rest of this article, because the tears made it difficult to read:
Imagine your life this way.
You get up in the morning and breakfast with your three kids. One is already doomed to die in infancy. Your husband works 200 miles away, comes home twice a year and sleeps around in between. You risk your life in every act of sexual intercourse. You go to work past a house where a teenager lives alone tending young siblings without any source of income. At another house, the wife was branded a whore when she asked her husband to use a condom, beaten silly and thrown into the streets. Over there lies a man desperately sick without access to a doctor or clinic or medicine or food or blankets or even a kind word. At work you eat with colleagues, and every third one is fatally ill. You whisper about a friend who admitted that she had the plague and whose neighbors stoned her to death. Your leisure time is occupied by the funerals you attend every Saturday. You go to bed fearing adults your age will not live into their 40s. You and your neighbors and your political and popular leaders act as if nothing is happening.
Kinda makes a "not sweet enough" sweet tea and a cold cup of coffee not seem
all that important.
the many faces of love
There are few things I enjoy more than a really good, hearty, full-of-wisdom-and-learning kind of conversation ... and tonight I seemed to have several of those.
It seems that I
was most affected by the sharing of words and ideas I had with a recently married friend of mine. It had been a while since I spoke with him, so it was good to catch up and realize that he is the same
ol' goofy Mat I always knew (oops, guess there's no anonymity with Krista) -- even if he is now a husband and is living thousands of miles away.
We talked about music and traveling and books and ideas, and it was good and safe ... and then somehow (and I'm still not sure how) we got on the subject of love. It was a little weird at first, because in some ways he is so incredibly different from my old single friend. He suddenly seems older than me (even though he's actually 5 months younger) and tremendously wiser.
While reflecting on our pasts, experiences, and relationships, we realized that there has been a bit of a change -- maybe even an evolution -- in our ideas about love and what it looks like. I still remember similar conversations that he and I had in college, where we questioned if love was really simpler than we made it or maybe more complex than we would ever understand. Because we were friends and somehow skipped past the whole "what if we were more than friends?" deal, we were able to delve into some issues that are sometimes a bit sensitive for men and women to talk about. Tonight we laughed as we recalled how we used to say that we would absolutely know for sure if someone was the "one", because the butterflies would never fly away, and the fireworks would never stop bursting. Our idealistic and romantic college student notions of an effortless kind of love undoubtedly came to us from the poetry we read in our literature courses and the badly written love songs we heard sung at the Friday night coffeehouse by artsy guitar-playing fellow students. There was no substance or reality to our ideas -- they weren't challenged by real life issues of hectic work schedules or mood swings or just the little eccentricities and unpredictable things that life sometimes throws your way.
I caught myself with tears in my eyes tonight as I listened to my newly wise friend talk to me about his discoveries regarding love. He is learning that love is not so much something that you feel or say, but something that you do and live. At first I pelted him with questions: "how do you know you really love your wife?"; "how do you know that she loves you?"; "what do you do when it doesn't feel like that love is there?"; "how do you get that love back?"; "what if that love doesn't come back?"
But soon I found myself shutting up and remaining silent as he poured forth words that were like gold to me. He reminded me that when he first met his wife, he had stronger feelings for her than he ever had for anyone. I remember teasing him at the time, because just a few weeks into their relationship they had both professed their love for each other, and I even heard the "M" word thrown around a bit. I remember being with him a couple times when he was on the phone with her, and hearing the breathless "I love you" at the end of each of those conversations, and hearing him sigh as he hung up the phone. At the time, I wondered how long it would last, or if maybe perhaps it really WAS love -- the kind that would last for as long as they would both live ...
Tonight, as I teased him again about those early days in their relationship, Mat admitted to me that it was so much easier to say "I love you" then because there wasn't as much involved. He could tell Jen he loved her but still hold onto the idea that he would eventually either act on that love or not act on it. It was still just words, really. A few more months into their relationship, things got rocky and soon it grew more difficult to say the words because they meant more. He had said "I love you" to other girls in the past and never really ended up doing much more than saying words and stealing kisses. With Jen, however, the words took on more and more meaning, and for some reason became more and more difficult to say.
Love, Mat told me, is not a thing that he and Jen feel the need to
say to each other as much these days ... because their life together gives the opportunity to
live it all the time. Jen loves him by washing his clothes and getting up early to turn on the coffeepot so that the coffee will be ready by the time he stumbles out of bed. He loves Jen by leaving her the last bit of the mint chocolate chip ice cream, even though he really, really wants to eat it. Each of them has a different way of loving the other, and those ways are constantly changing as their lives change. Neither way is better or worse -- it's just different.
We got a little deeper and compared love for another person to the act of worship toward God. I remember hearing a sermon once about how we worship God in every thing we do, even in the way we clean our car or brush our hair. It's not necessarily about WHAT we do, but it's about HOW we do it. Mat told me tonight that he has learned (and is still learning) that real love, at its core, is not about whether or not he tells Jen he loves her, or even necessarily what he does to show her that love ... but it's about his intentions and motivations behind whatever words he says (even if he says, "I like your socks") and whatever things he does (even if he just puts her dirty plate from supper into the dishwasher).
He doesn't wonder if he loves her, because he is too busy living out that love. He doesn't wonder if she loves him, because he is wrapped up in living with the way she's living out her love. There are moments when he feels her love more strongly, like when he reads a note that she hid in his pants pocket ... And there are also moments when he feels like he is loving her more, like when he is talking to a friend about his wife and how much he admires her and then realizes how much he really DOES admire her. Or when she is late for dinner and he worries about where she is -- so much so that he calls her cell phone, again and again and again (and again!) ... It is in those moments when the love that he
lives is affirmed by his words and feelings, not the other way around ... he doesn't wait for the feelings to be there before he lives out his love for his wife -- he just knows that they will be there or not, at some times stronger than others.
I asked him when this "living out" thing started, and he told me it was when the speaking "love" grew difficult. This is amazing to me, and so beautiful. When they (or really, more specifically he) found it difficult to
tell Jen he loved her -- even while they were still only dating -- he just began to look for other ways to express that love that he knew was still there. It felt different, and it took a different face, but it was still love in some shape or form ... and so he held on and
lived it.
I still have so many questions, and so few of them got answered tonight. I'm not sure that any of this is new or profound to me. I just am so intrigued by this mystery of love, and how some express it by speaking it ... some express it by worrying about someone who is late for dinner ... some write a note or sing a song or bake cookies ... none of these is right or wrong -- they are all just many different reflections of one powerful ideal.
I spent my lunch today reading, and I came across a couple of articles that inspired me. They were of the type that I read and then wish that I had been the one to write them -- the authors captured feelings and thoughts in such a way that I was almost envious of the way they did it ...
Nothing all that new or profound, really ... but it is always encouraging to learn of someone exploring new ways of thinking or looking at things. There is power in asking questions and trying to figure things out, or in challenging traditions or practices that have no foundation but are simply held onto just because "that's the way it's always been done." I want to eventually touch on more from these articles, but right now I just want to share a couple quotes that especially struck me:
Most of us think of salvation as the answer to the question, “If you died tonight do you know you’d be in heaven tomorrow?” and perhaps the better question we should ask is, “If you knew you’d be alive tomorrow (and most of us will be), then whom will you follow and how would you live your life?”
Christianity is a way of life. Jesus calls us to die to ourselves in order to walk in his path.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions? If so, we’re offering the wrong answers too. This would explain why the majority of people, both inside and outside the Church misunderstand what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
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Evangelism, like following Jesus, is all about going to where the broken and the lost and the forgotten are and loving them as Christ loved us. It’s not, I am convinced, about finding new ways to get them to come to us on our terms and to learn to believe the way we believe.
Jesus commanded us to “Go” and the command is still valid today. If we have any hope of accomplishing this command, it will only be as we go out in the power of the Holy Spirit and as we cooperate with Him in the process.
I encourage you to engage others in conversation. Tell your story, and listen to their story. Share your experiences with God in natural ways, not rehearsed speeches, but with a genuine voice of concern and compassion. Love others the way Jesus loved you. Invest in people. Trust that God loves them far more than you ever will, but ask God to teach you to love them more anyway.
