Lessons Exquisitely Crafted

We're a little more than a year away from graduation, two girls -- women, although it's hard to feel like I fit into that word -- riding in a car on a day when the sky above is startlingly blue, with no cloud anywhere to be seen. And we talk.

There are a lot of things, we both say, that we wish someone had told us before we came to college. We're discussing what our plans are for the summer, what we'll do after we graduate. The conversation wanders all over the place as we drive back to campus from church.

But we wouldn't have known how to listen to it before college, we say. We're trying to make sense of the world we'll be graduating into, and our options. More school? Finding a job? The weight that we should put on what our parents want? What is with the whole idea of "calling"? Willingness to take jobs that are more humble than what we've trained for?

At some point, the choices we make really do have consequences and affect the rest of our lives. I knew that, I guess. It's becoming more apparent. You choose one major and that makes it maybe not impossible, but certainly more difficult to get into other fields that are completely different. You become friends with a group of people, and it opens some doors and closes others. It's not a bad thing, but I'm finding it a kind of bittersweet one.

The ideas bounce around in my mind and I get Vienna Teng's Eric's Song stuck in my head. Not all of it is very applicable to friendships, but some of it is, some of it connects with life. She doesn't quite get it, but she has some pieces of it.

So we just hold on fast

Acknowledge the past

As lessons exquisitely crafted

Painstakingly drafted

To carve us as instruments

That play the music of life

It's sometimes very difficult for me to look back at the past and say, Yeah, that was good; God is good. So I loved the reminder in her words that God has had His hands in all of my history, carefully putting pieces of everything together for my good, for His glory.

Knowing that gives me hope for the future.

Spring Break Report

I rub at my wrist, water washing away the words that have been inked there for the last week.

Overcome

evil

with

good.

Words from Romans 12:21, from the Newsboys' song Elle G.

Good words for a missions trip that is all concrete vision, working to see the kingdom of God come and invade a ghost-steel-town, a drug capital.

So we spend days filling wheelbarrows from a heap of rubble and then filling Gabion baskets with that rubble. That way, when the river floods, it won't cut through the homes of the people who live in the trailer park. We get to know some of those people too -- Chuck, Kelly, Tim, Ed, Brenda, Dick. I spent one day there last year, but there were no faces for me then; I hadn't knocked on their doors, played with their dogs, had picnics of sandwiches and cookies, been offered dry shoes.

We spend other days and evenings working in the cafe, the small colorful space that offers safety on the main street of a town that people used to fear. And in the evening, the tables are packed full of people talking and playing games, looking at paintings done by local artists, listening to those who display their talent in singing. It's a coffee shop snapshot of everyone blended; races, ages, backgrounds.

We worship with a Benedictine Episcopal community, and then with a black Pentecostal church. Know what? They love each other. And I love both of them, and they both spill God's love all over the team.

Oh yeah, the team. We're six students and one faculty, all from different majors and backgrounds, all giving our spring break to be here instead. Because we wanted to. We knew each other to varying degrees before the break, but this week ties us together into something that couldn't have been predicted from the meetings, as we grow into a family. We sing a lot. We tease each other a lot. And people are surprised that we are so happy, that we enjoy each other's company.

Good stuff happens like that. It should mark the kingdom coming.

Mark 5

I didn't just fall before him.

I flung myself at his feet, landed awkwardly, face uncomfortably close to all the dirt.

And we talk about it now, me sitting on a very squishy couch, listening to John's Australian accent, wrapped in the warm smell of coffee.

Isn't that how it works -- you don't really choose to fall, you have no option but to throw yourself at His feet and trust Him?

I hadn't thought about it that way before.

And I say, I wouldn't have done this two years ago; I had to learn to trust you. He nods. I had to learn that this was a safe space, that all the talk of listening is much more than just talk. We acted out the story of Mark 5, of Jairus coming to Jesus about his daughter and of the other daughter who came to Jesus for healing, throwing herself in desperation at His feet. This was my third time to do it, and this was the year that I said, I want to be the woman. I'm learning my need to throw myself at the feet of Jesus.

In our debrief right after the story this year, John was asking us about why Jesus called the woman back and didn't just let her sneak off with her healing as she wanted to. Someone said, Because He was renaming her, making her a daughter rather than an outcast.

Sure, said John. But He could have just yelled after her: Hey Daughter! You were healed on account of your great faith! Go in peace! Why didn't He?

Someone else ventures an answer. Maybe she wouldn't have listened. Unless He made her stop.

Those words cut deep into my heart, because that is me. I don't listen nearly well enough to Him calling me Daughter until He makes me stop.

The falling at His feet, misjudging distance and tripping ungracefully into a heap on the floor, vulnerable and exposed, is not what I would choose left to myself. But He knows what I need, and calls me back to listen to Him, to receive more healing and gracious goodness than I would have gotten from Him on my own.

Spring Break -- for the third time!

I'm getting ready to go on an adventure again. It's the beginning of spring break.

And I'm going back to the same city where I've spent my last two spring breaks, and my heart is gasping with anticipation and excitement, and also feeling very vulnerable. Both other years were astonishingly raw and shattered me into a million pieces, dissolving pieces of facades that I or someone else had built up. So I am a little bit tentative going into this year.

Yet mostly I'm excited. Waiting to see what He has planned for this year.

And there is, it seems, no limit to all the things I remember and look forward to. It's my third time, and this will be the fourth year of the trip. Which means that after this trip, I'll be tied for seniority with those who have gone the most times, and that's fun for some reason.

It's a different trip every year, as we work on different things and the group changes. My first year there were three who had gone before, last year there were two, and this year is two again. I love going and watching other people learn to love the city, the people there.

Now I wait, knowing the week ahead will stretched into endless ages, will cut through the rest of my life, and will also fly past in moments that I cannot hang onto. I'm packed. In a while, I'm going to a friend's apartment to spend the night there. And listening to music, of course. For some reason, it's been 100 Years by Five for Fighting.

That song seems ironic on the verge of a missions trip.

15 there's still time for you
Time to buy and time to lose yourself
Within a morning star
15 I'm all right with you
15, there's never a wish better than this
When you only got 100 years to live

I'm older than 15, with no idea of if I'll have 100 years to live or not.

But I am confident that there is never a wish better than this: to seek His face. That all the days of my life I may live with Him, in the company of His people.

So I keep going back.

Lesson of the Week

I’m getting the impression that God is reminding me of something.

1) In the Screwtape Letters, read for CS Lewis class this week:

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him – the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say “Thy will be done,” and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross but only the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practice fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier and is usually helped by this direct action. [Screwtape Letters, VI]

“Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practice fortitude and patience to them all in advance.”

Sometimes I feel like Lewis knew me too well.

That goes along with another snippet of advice Screwtape gives to Wormwood.

"But don't try this too long, for fear you will awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed." [XIV]

I'm pretty sure I underestimate the power of laughing at the devil, forgetting that he's been soundly beaten and has no authority to be giving Christ's people grief at all. Good night, Satan. You failed.

David*Crowder puts it this way:

We’re gonna
shout loud,
loud until the walls come down
shout loud,
loud until the walls come down
loud until the walls come down

Yeah yeah yeah

Because we’ve already won
And you don’t have a chance
Yeah we’ve already won
No you don’t have a chance
It’s already done
And you don’t have a chance
Because we’ve already won!
We have already won!

2) Recently, I reread my journal from the past summer, too, especially the week I was on the Edge. It caught my attention where I wrote about how I couldn’t plan for the week ahead or worry about it, because I didn’t know what was coming. Also, I had too much to do at any given moment that week. It kept me in the moment, and seriously reduced stress. It was a good thing.

3) Last night I was listening to JJ Heller’s song Save Me, and this line gets me every time: “You are stronger/ Than any terrible possible scenario today”. Too often, it seems, I am willing to admit that God is greater than whatever is going on at the moment. Sure. Of course He is. But I forget, whether unintentionally or purposefully, that He is also greater than the worst things I can imagine.

I don’t appreciate grace enough.

I get some other good reminders too, such as yesterday being insane with scrambling to do an assignment. But it works out; things always do… and my worry about them accomplishes nothing.

All I need to do is trust that He is and is good. And do the next thing, following Him.

Darkness is light to You

And all You ask me to do

Is trust what You say is true

[Save Me, JJ Heller]