Stones of Remembering

A week ago when Amber invited us to join her on "Journey of Faith Friday"s, to set out memorial stones from the rivers of our lives for others to see and, hopefully, be encouraged and conclude that "God is great, God is good, God is faithful", I began sifting through my memories to see if I came across anything in my life that still, in my estimation, qualified as a "memorial stone to God's faithfulness and power" and which I was willing to, with much effort, lug out of the river and put out on the bank for anyone who happened by to see, walk around, kick, or stub their toe on.  


I'd started piling up memorial stones in earnest in my twenties.  I married at 20, immersed myself in theological, historical, and christian education studies at Asbury College and in practice of those studies within the Wilmore Free Methodist Church for two years.  I gave birth to our first son when I was 23, and our second when I was 25.  I thought a lot about setting up memorial stones in my life, which my sons would see or bump against and ask about, and which might remind me of God's faithfulness if ever I lost my way in the dark.  I started gratitude lists in my journals while in college, and they spilled over to the walls of our small home when Kyle and Sam were small.  For decades I kept recording my struggles with life as well as my pleas for help and the answers and guidance and help I felt God offered.  

Perhaps after I have submitted to Amber's proposed discipline of writing testimonies of God's power, love and faithfulness for a few months, the stones from my river will come up easily, anxious to display their witness.  But in this season of my life, they are not easily removed from their bed of gravel and rock, so it is probably good for me that Amber is assigning topics, this first being what we see as the beginning of our friendship with God.   


Years ago I would have begun my "salvation story" at the point when I was eight years old, sitting in a Salvation Army "vacation bible school" story time one summer, paying close attention to a woman describing the construction that God was offering to do in my heart.  If I remember correctly she held up a large heart-shaped black cut-out when she described the hearts of children who lied, or disobeyed their parents, or behaved meanly towards others.  She showed us a large red heart cut-out to symbolize God's love for us which had been demonstrated in Jesus' physical death on the cross; and she held up a white heart as a picture of the heart of a person who invited Jesus to live within him and change him.  The person who consented to that act and that process would have a changed heart, a clean heart, a white heart.


I wanted a white heart, a clean heart, a good heart.  I knew I wasn't good through and through.  I knew I had done some of those bad things she talked about, and I wanted a clean heart, a white heart.  I wanted a good heart.  


Thinking of my story now, within the puzzling context of Paul's words to the Athenians that God "determined the times set for them  and the exact places where they should live.  God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us"  (Acts 17), I would probably begin my story of God's provision sooner.


My parents had love and energy to share with a wider family of foster children when my sister and I were young.  As foster parents, they opened their home and arms and hearts to hurting children in the community whose families were fractured or breaking, and offered each child a safe place and space of his or her own, nourishing meals and honest, consistent discipline.  


I learned early on that some parents did not keep their children.  Our parents likely gave us simple answers meant to protect us from harsh realities as to why these children came to live with us.  But what my 5-6 year old brain concluded was that some parents gave their children away to others.  And if I wasn't good enough, might my parents give me away?  That anguished question tumbled over my lips one day after my mother caught me in a lie.  She assured me that she and my father would NEVER give me away.  But still, I wondered at times. 


It would be many years before I would realize and understand a greater factor in my compelling need to do right and be right, to be good.  But when I was 8, listening to that VBS story of God's invitation to change dirty hearts to clean, my mind did not know what my deep heart knew.  I knew only that I wanted a clean heart - I wanted to be GOOD.     


So I invited Jesus to "come into my heart" and live with me.  I believed he did.  And for me it truly was the beginning of many choices that set me on a path of cultivating a vibrant inner relationship with "I AM"  and making an earnest outward effort to follow God.  It was the beginning of learning to look for God's handiwork, provision and power in my life, the beginning of gathering stones of remembering.

Photo #1 of the large boulders and walking stick and photo #2 of the rocks on the shore were both taken on the Homer Spit, Homer, Alaska.


Photo #3 was taken by Michelle at Indian Rocks Beach, Florida (the Gulf Coast) one evening this summer, while the oil was still gushing, capping attempts had failed, and we were grabbing memories of "our beach" before it was gone.

I LOVE our house!

My daughter-in-law, Michelle, was sharing some humorous videos posted on the "Spirit fm 90.5" web site a few nights ago and one that stayed with me was a short video of a 4-5 year old curly blonde haired girl standing on her bathroom counter, so she could watch herself enthusiastically declare all the things she loved about her life.  I assumed she had watched a parent doing daily affirmations in front of the mirror since "Jessica's daily affirmations" was the title of the youtube clip, but it could very well have been her compliance with a parental prescription meant to replace grumbling with gratitude.

Where David and I live now is less than a 5 minute walk from where our old house stood.  Years ago, I had been looking for a house close by where we could live while our old home went through extensive (as in the architect and contractor telling us "you need to tear it down") remodeling.  I happened upon this one at the end of a cul-de-sac one afternoon when I walked the dog.  I asked to see it and within a few days David and I had made an offer to the owners, and within a couple years we had abandoned all serious thought about moving back to our former property.   We were simply too content with this house.

There were several other factors in our decision, but the ones I've thought about so often are how much I LOVE is the way it nestles among vine-covered oak trees and palmettos, and the number and placement of windows in the home.  Every single room in the house has a view to the outside, and in most places the view is largely comprised of plants and trees.

Watching from our bed as the sunlight  pushes back the early morning darkness in our back yard is pure joy.

I do most of my "paper work" at the dining room table, because I only have to lift my eyes for a moment of rest and a reminder that the current project, though keeping me inside, is not keeping me from beauty.

For someone who worked in a windowless office for many years, being able to drink in my oak glade and palmetto "jungle" is a marvelous gift.

When I am cleaning the floors or setting the table or reading to my grandchildren I have only to move my head to let the beauty feed me.

Whenever I clean or share our guest room with another, I give thanks that we are able to share such beauty with those who stay with us.  Because beauty is meant for sharing.

These photos were all taken at our home in Largo, Florida.

Kneeling

I read "The Search for God at Harvard" by Ari L. Goldman at least 10 years ago.  Goldman, a "third generation American-born Orthodox Jew, then religion correspondent for The New York Times who wrote this engaging spiritual memoir of his year at Harvard Divinity School in 1985, grabbed me when he wrote:

"The most elusive experience for me in my early days at the Div School was, to my great surprise, the Christian experience.  Everybody, it seemed, was trying so hard not to offend the wide diversity of people that were gathered there that Christian spirituality did not emerge.


If, for example, there was a mention in class of the divinity of Jesus, the lecturer would offer an apology to the non-Christians in the room.  If there was a Christian prayer offered at a convocation, you could be sure that some Buddhist meditation would follow for balance.  Religious truth did not seem to exist at the Div School, only religious relativism....


The Noon Worship, organized and led by students, would include some tepid hymns, an inoffensive reading from Scriture and a short sermon usually on the liberal political topic of the day.  The sermons that I grew up with in syagogue exhorted the gathered faithful to change themselves; here in the Div School chapel the plea for change was directed outside, well beyond the church walls....


I often passed the chapel when I was on my way to and from classes.   Occasionally, I would see someone sitting there meditating, but in my entire year at Harvard, I never saw anyone on his or her knees.


To my mind, kneeling is the ultimate expression of Christian supplication.  It is something so Christian that, as a boy, I was taught never to fall down on both knees, even while playing in the park or retrieving some toy from under the sofa.  'Always keep one knee up,' my counselor said at Camp Kol-Re-Na, an Orthodox all-boys summer sleep-away camp in the Catskills, 'Jews don't kneel.'"

Goldman's words astounded me.  At the point in my life when I encountered his memoir, I could not imagine my life lived without frequent kneeling before God.  I prayed a lot, about 2-4 hours a day.  I  knelt in my private worship to express submission of my life to God, I knelt when I pleaded with God to intervene in my life or that of another, and sometimes I knelt in adoration or in simple waiting, quietly "present" with God.  I knelt in corporate or solitary prayer for others in churches of various denominations, all over my local area, and in other areas of the country when I traveled.  

Although my home church during most of my adult life was generally a sitting or standing church - not a kneeling church,  people sitting in the pews were almost always invited to kneel at the altar at the front of the sanctuary at the end of a worship service to demonstrate their desire to trust God, and my last few years there we were regularly invited to kneel at the altar for our corporate prayer time.  Kneeling didn't have a prominent place in our corporate worship,  but it did have a place.

I often knelt in corporate worship whether anyone  around me knelt or not, and whether or not the worship leader invited us to kneel.  I knelt to bow my heart and tune my ear to the still small voice.  I knelt to be a living symbol to onlookers of God's invitation to man to "come, let us reason together".

So it astounded me to read that "Jews don't kneel."  If I'd ever thought about it, I would have assumed they did...for the same reasons I did....to demonstrate personal acknowledgement of God's might and authority.

Apparently so many years of frequent kneeling during prayer had embedded itself so thoroughly in my conversation and relationship with God that kneeling was almost the only traditional expression of Christian worship that remained during my long long season of questioning and doubt.   I still tried to live my life in ways that modeled integrity, compassion, and service to others and I still made time for quiet reading and thinking, but my days no longer began and ended with praise and thanksgiving.

After I returned home from Kolkata, I tried to read my Bible but found it had become an ordinary book, subject to my many questions, doubt and skepticism which had begun brewing before my trip to India.    The words I read no longer called or sang to me with  vibrant love and life.  Church worship services also, largely lost their ability to touch me with encouragement or teaching or conviction.  I stopped dancing, stopped singing and stopped listening to contemporary Christian music to avoid the critical, cynical thoughts that filled my mind.

The journaling that had been such a strong part of my daily "walk with God" stopped being a daily record of my thriving inner life and conversation with God and instead became reading journals into which I copied meaningful sections of books I read.  After several years of my questioning even that fell by the wayside.  The ability to form coherent sentences and paragraphs had abandoned me, and each time of trying to write my thoughts ended in complete frustration.  I had become a spiritual deaf-mute.

I still tried to choose integrity, compassion, and service to others day by day, and I still followed the wisdom of a weekly day of rest.  Thanksgiving broke through on occasion in those first years of my doubt, but generally I was so overcome by the suffering in the world and so skeptical of the beliefs that had shaped me most of my life, that for a season, forgiveness, gratitude and thanksgiving - once key plantings in a thriving, abundantly nourishing garden in my life - became a neglected, patch of dormant plants.

But amazingly, in the midst of all the anger and agnosticism and despair, I still knelt.

At times, when I could not utter a single sentence of prayer, I knelt.  Some early mornings I rolled out of my bed where I liked to read and I knelt on the hard tile floor.  No words beyond "God.......you know" would escape my lips.  Sometimes I slipped out of my rocker or chair onto my knees, letting my posture say what my tongue found so difficult to utter:  "I am here, God.  Come, reason with me."

The top photo of the surf pounding against the rock was taken on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, photo #2 is a portion of a holocaust memorial at a Jewish synagogue in Clearwater, Florida, photo #3 is Walsingham Park, and the rainbow photo was taken on our cul-de-sac in Largo, FL - it actually was a full double rainbow!  My thanks to Amy for diverting her run in the park to run home and tell us, gasping!, that we MUST go out and look.

Note to Self 2: Cups in the Car

One of the things I love about my newest daughter-in-law is how much she enjoys laughter.  Since Amber reminded me afresh about the immense value of laughter in her recent blog post, I thought I'd share a quick EEUUGH! from yesterday.

The day before David and I had shared lunch at Sonny's, our favorite BBQ establishment and carried away large "to-go" cups of drink for later.  I drank one Sunday afternoon, then worked on the second cup yesterday, refilling the big foam cup with my own iced tea as I worked at my dining room "desk".  I dashed out late in the afternoon, hoping to make a stop at Home Depot for soil and shovels quickly enough to afford me an early arrival time and vacant swim lane when I got to the pool.

I put the car in park, turned and pulled the keys, and grabbed the to-go cup in the holder for a swig.  Suck on the straw, feel lemon seed-sized object in mouth followed immediately by YOWWW....that's a STING!
Turn and spit out the open door and see a light gray SPIDER shooting out and scrambling for cover - NOT a lemon seed.

Note to self:  Do NOT, under any circumstances, drink from cup left in car overnight, without visually checking the contents first.

As I lay in bed this morning, slowly becoming aware that "yes, it really is 5:25, that was the alarm going off, and I do have begin my day", one body-awareness thought dominated all the "sore muscles? joints?" assessments:  Dang, my tongue hurts!

Crossing the Causeway

I might get tired of the long commute if I had to do it five days a week, but I rarely ever mind driving to Tampa via the Howard Frankland Causeway across the bay between Pinellas County and Tampa. It is one of the gifts of renewable delight of living in this place.

The water and sky display a fresh mood every day: sometimes morning sunshine bounces off the water in rapid-fire-bursts dazzling the eyes, sometimes the hazy clouds and utterly still water whisper an impressionist painting, and sometimes the wind buffets your vehicle and storm clouds dump torrents of rain backlit by earth splitting lightning so fierce you wonder if you'll make it to the other shore alive.

 On one trip across I was agog over the dazzling sunlight on the water and the clouds just beginning to stack.  So as I drove I groped for paper and pen to blindly scribble and capture the moment:

Crossing the causeway

soldier clouds

line up in formations

many rows deep,

awaiting orders to march across

the sparkling granite bay,

and crunch the waves beneath their boots.

Now, I'm under no delusion that this poem qualifies as "good", but it was the first poem I'd written in many years, I had fun rolling it around on my tongue in the car, and I wanted to capture it.  Joanna has been dazzling me with her poetry of late...stirring up great emotion and wonder in me.  I realize that poetry which stands alone without melody does absolutely nothing for many people, but reading and chewing on good poetry makes me give thanks to God for the wonder of language and emotion and creativity in the same way that standing before a magnificent painting or sculpture does.  "In the image of God, made He them..."

Note 1:  Recently, in a conversation about navigational directions I'd given someone, my husband informed me that the Howard Frankland referred to the bridge and that the term "causeway" was reserved for one of the other highways crossing the bay.  Give up the alliteration in the first poem I've written in....probably decades... and labor to re-write? Nope.

Note 2:  This photo taken 18 months after that drive is a poor substitute for the "granite bay" of that day, but it is at least the same bay. :-)

What think ye?

I spotted this on one of my recent walks, and just had to capture it.  What does it look like to you?

Acquainted With Grief

It has been six years since I prayed "the dangerous prayer" and hurled my deepest desire for my family to know God fully, into the lap of God. I wanted them to know his complete character and personality  experientially through relationship, intuition and intellect. 

The lap of God became the threshhold of an open door and we stepped through. Our older son, Kyle and his wife, Michelle, carried a seemingly bottomless bag of suffering and sorrow from the streets of Kolkata, India upon which to build their family.  Sixteen months later they brought home from those streets their newly adopted daughter, who has displayed so many consequences of early childhood trauma and neglect in her brain, body, and emotions, and whose nurturance has cost so much energy, money, and sacrifice and has given pain, loss, and wisdom in return.

Our younger son, Sam, walked through waves of physical and relational pain, and David and I drank at our own well of sorrow and grief.  We watched as our fathers' strength left them and our mothers exchanged freedom of movement and activity for a new loneliness as they nursed their husbands' bodies and felt their lifelong partnership slip through their fingers.  We struggled with the smallness of our service and support for them.  

During a two year span in the midst of these sorrows, I experienced the abrupt death or removal of five of the closest friendships, ministry partnerships and mentoring relationships of my life, apart from my family.  During this same time David had to adjust to the sudden death of two of his closest friends, who died on an airstrip far from home.

David and I  faced "new and improved" versions of old marital conflicts, wounds, and disappointments as we tried to navigate working together on a full-time basis once again.  That had always been challenging for the two of us, with our poor communication skills and our opposite approaches to seeing, prioritizing, and tackling challenges.  But when we threw in my chaotic hormonal changes with its toll on my sleep and psyche,  and the physical and emotional consequences of David's many years of deferred stress into the mix, living and working together with mutual respect and joy in our relationship seemed an impossible dream.

In addition to the sorrow my family experienced first hand, after we returned from Kolkata, I felt strongly compelled to immerse myself in and "borrow" the suffering of the world, through books, documentaries, and movies narrating and portraying biographical accounts of incredible loss and suffering. For months I swam in the river of other's sorrow, read biblical passages of lament,  and inwardly disdained an American evangelical narcissistic consumer culture of which I had been an enthusiastic member.

This culture seemed to prefer that the suffering of others stay hidden from view, shut away in institutions or faraway lands, displayed only in brief snatches of print, video and song.  Many of us viewed outbreaks of suffering as a condition to be avoided at all costs.

I didn't like suffering.  I knew Bible passages that referred to suffering as a normal human condition and spoke of benefits that came from suffering, but I didn't have an ascetic's glorified view.   Secretly, I hoped that suffering was not inevitable.  For most of my adult life I hoped to avoid "unnecessary" suffering by obedience to principles of living I saw in the Bible and by appealing to God for protection.  I didn't want to get too close to people who suffered in ways that seemed so far behond my coping ability.   I wanted no part of it.  Until I wanted an intimacy with God that couldn't be had without unlocking that door.

So my family's increased experience of suffering after my "heart's desire prayer" didn't take me by surprise, but my increasing inability to trust in and frame it within the Christian story on which I'd built my life did.  Thoroughly.  Within 18 months of completing the in-depth Bible study which caused me to fling my deepest desire onto God's lap, I was unable to finish a Bible study about believing God because I realized I no longer did.

I could no longer trust that God cared about the details of our lives to intervene and come to our rescue when we cried out in pain, because He had, by my thinking, abandoned millions of children around the globe to exactly that perspective.  And if he abandoned those children to conclusions one would come to naturally, how could I come to a supernatural conclusion and think that my vastly different life circumstances came because I and my parents before me trusted in God's goodness; and not because I was born in a country that had abundant natural resources and oceans surrounding it to insulate and protect its members;  and not because I had been born to parents who spent their lives providing for, protecting, loving and nurturing their children?

With that trust in God's great willingness to intervene gone, suffering that might serve a redemptive purpose lost its place at my table.   Myriad examples of suffering caused by man's pride, selfishness, covetousness, anger, and injury to one another seemed simply senseless to me.

I fell back into the ancient conundrum of trying to reconcile a God who is all good AND all powerful yet allows suffering on the massive scale we see and experience in our world.  That our suffering is caused by sin was no longer enough explanation for me.  That God was patient, waiting, while many suffered, so that some could come to new life in him, was no longer enough for me.   I wondered if my four decades of certainty about the joy and fruitfulness of an intimate relationship with the God of the Bible had been simply self delusion.

I kept up the process of internal questioning, reading outside the traditional Christian world view and trying to see where reason and logical thinking would take me in my quest even though I felt little hope I would arrive at an answer to the riddle that would satisfy me and other wounded skeptics.  After all, centuries of far better thinkers than I had been denied.  I strongly suspected that sooner or later I would simply have to choose what I would build my life on, because I didn't read anyone who hadn't at some point in their reasoning, based deductions on some assumption that had to be believed rather than proven.


Eventually I grew tired of fighting, tired of living with more fear and less hope, tired of the nihilism that moves in when faith in a God of love walks out. 

Gradually, over a period of several years I've worked my way back to some foundation of belief.    I reduced my stress load by exchanging most of my responsibilities in our family business for increased childcare and cooking responsibilities.  I started walking, running and biking regularly again and I began to lift weights for the first time in my life.  As a result, my sleeping and my sense of emotional well-being greatly improved.  Together, these actions gave me more time, energy and ability to reason effectively, and I began to heal from the outside, in. 

Slowly I began to choose to believe, (some days, then many days, then most days) that "GOD IS", then that "GOD IS GOOD", then "GOD IS LOVE" and finally that "JESUS SHOWS ME WHAT GOD IS LIKE", what love would look like if love were a man.

The character of Jesus, as displayed in the gospel accounts, was very compelling to me,  but also compelling was the commonly acknowledged prophetic picture of Jesus as the "man of sorrows, acquainted with grief", the one "from whom we hide our faces" described by Isaiah hundred of years before Jesus' birth in Isaiah 53 which I had memorized years before.

During the season in which I had charged God with being unjust, heartless or simply uninvolved, I had been saying things like this: "How can all powerful LOVE continue to allow the harm we people do to one another to continue?  How can LOVE continue to allow children to be raped and mutilated and forced to murder their family members?  How can LOVE continue to allow mothers to watch multiple babies die in their arms from malnutrition and disease?  How can LOVE watch gentle boys who find sanctuary and love in their mother's embrace to grow up and become misogynists who beat their wives into submission or set them aflame generation after generation?"

"GOD, How can you make it so exceedingly difficult for people who suffer greatly from abuse, extreme poverty, oppression and hatred passed from generation to generation to find a way out of fate and into freedom?  I cannot bear to think about this suffering for more than a few months.   How can you bear this hate and destruction continuing year after year and generation after generation?  How can LOVE not move to end it?"

All these agonized questions slowly settled on the picture of Jesus, the suffering servant, the  son of God, bearing our sorrows, our sins, our sicknesses, our suffering on the cross.

The crosses generally worn and displayed by Protestants in the U.S. are "empty" crosses, with the body of Jesus removed and the focus of the resurrection:  "Christ has won!  Christ has power over death!  Christ has new life for me!"  But the crosses displayed and worn by Catholics often are a crucifix, depicting Jesus' body nailed to the cross, with a focus on the suffering Jesus, the Jesus who bears in his body the sin and sorrow of the world, the sin and suffering of every man, every woman, every child.

"Jesus Christ...the same yesterday, today and forever... bore our sins in his body on the tree....He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering...Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows...Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer...After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities...he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors."

This Jesus, the one one who was despised and rejected, this Jesus who shows me the heart of the eternally present-tense "I AM", this Jesus who suffers when others suffer...who feels our pain and weeps with us over death and destruction has been sitting shiva with me during these years, sitting beside me, waiting for the quiet space that comes after a paroxysm of mourning, waiting to lift my chin so I might look into his eyes - a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief.

Now, six years after the prayer,  I know this man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, in a way I did not know him before the prayer, before these years....I know him from inside his overwhelming, love-driven sorrow... the sorrow his eyes reflect because he experiences our pain with us.


Note:  Pictured above is a wonderful holocaust memorial statue at Temple B'Nai Israel in Clearwater, FL.