I arrived home after a rather taxing day of study and work and there it was, sitting on top of my keyboard: a letter. I pounced on it (inwardly crying: "thank you!"). It was a long-expected letter; I had written her a very long letter, so it was also a long, expected letter. As I read it, I wept. Why is not important; it's not my story to tell. But her story made me realize that it's not just the one person: people's lives are breaking down all around me. Loved ones are sick, tempers are being lost, whole families are cracking at their foundation, relationships are beginning to fray and wear - and I wonder how this Christmas is going to look for me, for them...

So I'm trying to pound this out, and the more I think about it the more agitated/excited I become, and the more agitated/excited I am... the more words I use. I apologize if the following is somewhat convoluted, but here goes.

This is the Christmas season. Sure, we all love peace, love, joy, and harmony in celebration of the coming of Christ. We love family get-togethers that go smoothly and are enjoyable for all concerned. But what pulled Christ from glory and caused him to take on a human nature? What prompted him to come as a baby? I don't mean a cherubic thing in sweet repose on a cleanly bed of straw, like our favourite Nativity scenes. Christ was born (born!). And if it wasn't enough to endure a bloody, nasty process like a human birth, it happened in a dirty stable, and he found himself on the other side living with an unremarkable face and sinful parents, and a world waging war against him with their sin and hatred and temptations and traps. What made the Son of God endure all this, for thirty years, always with his face set toward the cross and separation from his Father? Wasn't it the brokenness - the little hurts and annoyances that cause us to lose our tempers and shake our fists at God and each other? Wasn't it the brokenness - the blackness that fills our souls and causes us to spit in the face of Holiness and Love? Wasn't it the brokenness - the sickness, the ache, the toil, the fruitlessness, not just in ourselves but rife throughout the groaning world around us? Wasn't it the brokenness - all of us, crawling through the ache and toil and strain of life, only to be met with the bitter sting of death at the end?

These are not things we like to experience in the holiday season. Holidays, we are told, are for nice things and safe feelings - materially luxurious presents and comfortable feelings and warm beds and tasty food and familial bliss. But this holiday, we celebrate God Incarnate coming to earth as a Man. Think about it. He forsook perfect, glorious bliss - communion with the Father and Spirit, all the praise and glory of heaven (wonder and joy and perfection beyond the best holiday I can ever remember or imagine!). That Eternal, Almighty God should do that much is enough to stagger the mind, so get this. He did it all for the sake of sinful, wretched, crawling, spitting, shouting, hating, whoring, depraved humanity. These included his own people, who would take him and shake him and surround him with filth and hatred and deceit, till, finding they could not bend him into sinfulness and rebellion against God, they put him to death.

This Christmas, I hurt. I hurt for myself, for my own frailty and sinfulness, for things done badly and things not done well. I ache for the hurts of those I love, the consequences of sickness and betrayal and personal sin. But I pray this holiday season is not just a spiritual narcotic - a strong dose of Fun'n'Stuff to dull and distract me from the pain and suffering within and around me. This is one holiday, at least, where it should be both fitting and profitable to embrace our strugglings and the bitterness of this life, and remember that the King of Glory came to endure all that and more for our behalf. By God's strength, I will take hold of that thread of pain instead, and follow it straight to the arms of Jesus. He came to suffer and conquer; praise God, he suffered and conquered. The King of Glory left heaven for me, and he is there now, having put all things in heaven and earth under his feet. To know this is to weep, and to wonder; to mourn my own sinfulness and defeat, and yet to rejoice in Christ's holiness and victory.

No, I don't think Happy Holidays even begins to cover it.

The reception area [at the college] turned out to be very small indeed. It was really only a conference room furnished with one long table. A few dubious looking refreshments resided on one end and Cousin Bartholomew lounged at the other.

“University food’s rubbish,” he said, glowering at the tray across from him and chewing the end of a pencil with a vengeance, as if to proclaim it more edible than said ‘rubbish.’ “Hallo, Dad. Barney.”

“I’ll just go find Messr. Clyde, shall I?” Uncle Baxter patted Barney briskly on the back. “Do catch up in the meantime, boys; I know it’s been a while.”

The door closed behind his tousled silvery pate, and the two young men were left staring at one another.

“I take it you didn’t mention our meeting yesterday,” Bartholomew said at last. “What! Afraid he’d find out about your tantrum?”

“Barty, I’m really—”

“—wasting my time? Yes. I’d offer you a sandwich, but that would be wasting both your time and appetite. Tea?” He sprang out of the chair suddenly and strolled around the table to the tea tray.

“Bartholomew.”

“Water’s tepid, if that,” his cousin sniffed, fiddling with the creamer jug.

“Bartholomew.”

“Good heavens. Cream bordering on sour.”

“Bartholomew…”

“Hum. Best check the sugar, too. Um.” He crunched a sugar lump ponderously. “Yes. Still good. Then again, better try another one. I mean, sugar can’t go bad, allegedly, but a college setting’s enough to sour anything—”

“BARTHOLOMEW BARTEMIUS BAXTER BLUNT THE THIRD!”

The man in question choked on his third lump of sugar. His red-crested brow furrowed above a pair of violently watering eyes. “Lower your voice, cousin!” he wheezed furiously. “’Bartholomew’ on its own is bad enough to threaten the healthy state of one’s social life. But the full name? Try feeding a pig arsenic—it has that sort of effect on friendships. You can’t just tell people your old man hung “Bartholomew Bartemius Baxter Blunt” about your neck and expect them to continue in company with you, even if it happened before you were old enough to argue the matter. Tacking on ‘the third’ only convinces them that some long-standing multi-generational lunacy resides in the family. And I don’t care if there’s nobody else right here—this place is cheaply built. Walls like parchment-paper. Someone who knows me might be walking by and hear you.” He peered curiously into the sugar bowl again. “I say, I didn’t think sugar would taste so good on its own. Have you tried it?”

“Did you say ‘social life’? The last time I saw you, you were hobnobbing rather closely with some dusty old volumes—but even if one of them does happen to be lying about these hallowed hallways, I think you’re safe. Books don’t commonly have ears.”

Bartholomew chose to ignore this jab. He was better occupied with a fourth piece of sugar.

Here's a bit of what I wrote yesterday:

The door jangled sleepily in his wake. He could almost smell the dust on the air—dust mixed with mildew and the smell of old paper and leather. There was nobody behind the counter—if that flat surface surrounded by a heap of books was the counter, that is. There didn’t seem to be a bell, sign, or register—nothing besides books and fragments of broken books filling the sagging frames of bookshelves and most of the floor space.

“Hullo?” he called tentatively, staggering a little over a pile of paper and broken bindings that had seemingly jumped unannounced into his path. He brushed against a bookshelf trying to avoid colliding with another pile and stirred up a cloud of dust. “I say, hull…oootish!” He sneezed.

“Over here,” came a muffled response at last. “Behind the shelf.”

“There are at least fifty shelves,” Barney replied exasperatedly. “To say nothing of the piles of books that one can't tell whether they are shelves or not.” No further information was volunteered, so he sighed and continued. “What do you mean, 'behind the shelf'? Which shelf, exactly?”

“Find the window, you dolt. The shelf in front of the window. Or at least I presume that's why you came in here—because you saw me in the window.”

Barney located the window with more difficulty than one would think and began to wade towards it. “This is worse than when Uncle Baxter took us on that excursion to the swamp,” he complained. He stubbed his toe on a shelf and bashed his head against the wall. “Ouch!”

“See, you only found that experience painful because you fell in. Some of us are coordinated, and swamps are quite enjoyable things.”

“You? Find the swamp enjoyable? Ha! If I remember rightly, the swamp found you quite enjoyable, a fact you did not exactly appreciate. You were scratching mosquito bites for days—and complaining.”

“Well, there are those who are just sweeter by nature, and the skeeters know it. But enough about me. Are you going to get here before tomorrow? We close at dark—no money for lamp oil, you know.”

Barney rounded a bookshelf, squeezing himself between it and a corner of the window seat, and nearly fell at the feet of the lad reading in the window, a ginger-haired youth with his face shoved behind an enormous tome. He had a quill clenched between his teeth which steadily dripped ink all over the grey smock he wore (presumably for the same reason). He did not bother to look up.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Barney said at last.

“I’d think you’d be used to it by now,” pontificated the shock of red hair—all that was visible behind the book. The quill dropped unheeded into his lap, where it dribbled gleefully all over a scrap of torn paper. “I am becoming too predictably unpredictable. I must remember to do something completely predictable sometime, so as to completely catch you off guard.”

For Elevyn, alias OSLF. This is an excerpt from a silly bit of something I've been plotting for the better part of a year now. Fondly known as "the tea story" and more formally dubbed 'The Brew' by Abigail H., this is basically a collection of (hopefully) humorous anecdotes revolving around the interactions of characters (mostly animals) all named after brands and varieties of tea. This excerpt allows you to meet the first character I've properly put down on paper: Assam. I say 'properly' because he's the only one I've really met so far, and so the only one I really know, to some degree. Um - yes.

It was lonely and hot at the bottom of the ravine.

Not that you or I would have minded the heat so very much, but Assam was a Very Small sort of serpent, and heat of any kind bothered him excessively. (Cold did, too, but heat was the present affliction on his mind.) Although it was rather chilly up above for one of his blood, he thought he infinitely preferred huddling between and beneath blades of grass for shelter Up There to the nigh-scorching heat of Down Here.

To Assam, it was like a desert Down Here: brown-grey, stretching out as far as the eye could see, rough and coarse and dry against his bare belly. The ravine wall was not that deep, but it was steep enough to prevent his slithering back up the whole way. Being a Very Small serpent, he lacked the ordinary strength and size that allowed most of his kind to slither about with ease. In fact, he tended to stay inside on most days, and that was where he was trying to go.

He could see it now—if he stretched himself up and back and squinted—the little white cottage covered in roses which was ‘home’ to Assam. He was quite sure he had had a good reason for leaving it, but he could not remember just now. All he knew was that his top was chilly and his underside scorching and he wanted to go home…

But first he had to make it up the ravine, and that seemed an insurmountable task. He sat, feeling very much out of breath and out of sorts. At last he turned his back on the wall and looked out across the desert to the other side of the ravine. ‘I know I'm rather small for slithering,' he said to himself, 'and therefore probably much too small for thinking—but the slithering hasn't worked, so I shall just have to try to think. How can I get back to Lady Jane?’

(Lady Jane was the name of the girl who lived in the white cottage covered in roses, which was (as I hope you’ll remember) home to Assam.)

It dawned slowly on him (as things tended to dawn on Assam) that he could not get back up right here, but that did not mean he could not get back up by some other way.

‘And perhaps,’ said he to himself, ‘that Other Way would be—um—across the Desert. There is grass over there, and I think—um—that dark spot is a crack in the wall, which might be slither-um-able even for such a poor slitherer as I. And then—um—then I would have to go the long way around back to the house, but—um—at least it would be grassy and warm, and my belly wouldn’t feel so burnt.’

He slithered away to attempt this, and here I shall attempt to describe exactly how Assam slithered. It was not a fearsome, hypnotic winding, as was the way with most snakes (for even the other smallish ones seemed better slitherers than he). This was not for want of trying on Assam’s part. The whole slithering thing just … failed to work. He pulled with his nose and pushed with his tail and wriggled about all in between, but the in-between parts flopped about and often got tangled up in themselves. Perhaps this was why Lady Jane had adopted him, although she was not very fond of snakes as a general rule.

Of course, as you probably suspect, he was not really in a Great Desert Ravine at all; he had merely fallen out of the grass over what you and I would call a “curb.” It was not a very long fall, but he was a very bad slitherer, and he really was unable to get back up. Perhaps, too, he had not so very far to go to get across the road, but it was longer for a small snake who was (as I’ve told you at least a dozen times) not a spectacular slitherer. At last, when he had flopped and tangled and flopped and untangled and flopped and feebly slithered his way all the long way across the Great Desert, he arrived and found the wall split in that place just as he had thought, and he could get up rather easily.

‘Aaaahhmmm,’ he thought to himself, as his belly left the hot pavement and found the moist, cool earth, ‘This is—um—better.’

There is nothing quite like the feeling a snake feels making his way through the grass. Assam liked it because he could move along without the feeling that Somebody Might Be Watching his silly way of slithering. He always felt a bit ridiculous on the open dirt. The Great Desert would not have been so excruciating if his belly had not been so hot and his mind frantic with the notion that a blackbird or—heaven forbid—one of his distant cousins was watching him and laughing the whole way.

But the grass—ah, the grass was another matter altogether! He pretended he was sleek and powerful and made of Epic Proportions, and there was nobody to spoil his delusions. Massive blades of grass bent in his wake (he really darted meekly around them) and there was neither scorching concrete nor chilly wind to torment him, top or bottom.

We went for a walk together yesterday evening.

I started out on my own, of course. Andrew sang me on up the Morningside road, my earbuds tucked precariously in ears too small for them. Somewhere on the top of the hill beneath the hibiscus trees with their dusty, crumbling blossoms - that's where you met me.

We talked, of course. I can't remember if I turned my music off or not. I don't think I did; it never seemed to stop, but it never seemed to contradict the sound of your voice either. We spoke of terrible canyon-fires and the holy blaze of Divine Love and the glory of God in the face of Jesus, sharing the ache and longing - the pressing, breaking joy - of waiting for Him to return. We crested the last hill and stopped, just before the road dipped down into the highway. There we stared the dying sun full in the face, our eyes able to take its fading glory and hearts longing for a glimpse of glory beyond the measure of even the sun at its brightest...

At last, we turned back, shunning the lure of the train cars winding their way through the trees across the highway. Behind us, a shadow of Glory clung to the rim of the western horizon, defiantly pouring its last drops of bloodfire onto the path before us. For just a few moments, we walked a road of living, dying gold. My hair blazed red. Then - golden glory fell to the grey of dusk, though not without the pressing promise of silver starlight.

The hibiscus trees came too soon. I left you and turned down the hill, working my way between the parked cars and patient garbage cans. Already I missed you, half our conversation forgotten and tugging at my brain, eager to be spoken again.

We went for a walk together yesterday evening. I thought you'd like to know.

"I never knew a night so dark until I knew the darkness in myself."

He spoke, face turned from me and hidden away in the front yard among the shadows of the maples. He had left the hilarious group inside abruptly, stalking out the front door with a set expression. I alone had seen him go - or at least alone noted it with enough concern to follow him. I expected to find him smoking, perhaps (though he said he'd stopped), or ready to leave. I had considered whether something had offended him - some joke had nudged at a rib too sensitive for tickling.

This complaint about the darkness of the night did not align with any of the possibilities I had juggled in my mind as I slipped out the front door in his wake. I stood in silence, quite certain there was a question in all that statement, and unable to discern what it was. Perhaps I did not discern the question because I did not want to, because I knew I could not answer it.

Our combined silences hung over us like a thick fog. At last, he turned his face toward me, but I could not see his features. He was pale in the dark, I knew - too pale to be seen, like a grey ghost's face set against the grey road.

"If it is so dark, you should come back inside," I said at last. It was a stupid suggestion. I knew it, and he knew I knew that. The sound of laughter burst from behind us. I had left the front door open in my haste. "See?" I gestured feebly at the door. "They're... they're having lots of fun."

A wave of laughter again, louder this time, but it seemed thin and faltering, like a frail wave straining to reach a child's castle on the beach and falling short. It could not cover us. We were left out.

I wished I was back inside.

"What are we, Anna?" he asked.

So that was the question. I knew not what to say. For a moment, I groped about for something - a word, an idea, a smooth change of topic - but then he drew a breath, and I knew he meant to answer his own question. I left off my own search and braced myself for whatever he was cooking up next.

"We are people," he said. I snorted, a little at the obviousness of his answer and a little at myself for not getting it, but he pressed on with his soliloquy. "But what are people? We are darkness. We are blackness and hatred and filth. We are anger and murder and lust. Surely it is a proud thing, to be called people - who need only think a crime before its stain is on our hands! Such a glorious thing, to be people, for it is to be stained--not in theory or metaphor, but with real, indelible blood-filth. Oh! I am glad we are people..."

His anger burned out into the night, scorching the thin thread of the people's laughter from inside the house and withering it away into a singed and crumbling line of vanity, like the thread of smoke streaming from the cigarette I now saw in his right hand. I saw the end of it flare as he flung it away with one jerky motion. I did not follow it to stomp it out, nor did he. The ground was wet; it would die soon.

There was another painfully stupid pause before I realized he was waiting for me to say something. I desperately fumbled with my memory, trying to sort through the thoughts about the cigarette (he said he stopped!) and the laughter from inside (what have I missed?) and the disjointed ravings about darkness from the man beside me. The smell of smoke still flailed about in my nostrils, making them twitch. I struggled and writhed, finally coming up with -

"I wish you'd come inside. It's warmer there."

He scowled. His face was still ghost-thin, but I could feel the expression. He always had a way of making his scowl known. "I'd rather be cold, thank you."

"Idiot." I tried to put a little lighthearted frustration into my voice, to dispel the confusion. Better to sound annoyed than clueless. "Come on. It's light inside, anyway."

I should have just left it at the idiot part, for my words seemed to act as a catalyst for... some depth of feeling in my strange companion. He abruptly stomped three steps away before turning and facing me fully. Deeper as he was within the shadow of the trees, no longer was his face ghostly; it was a tomb, a black hole against the road's grey.

"Light! Would you call that light?" He flung a hand toward the open doorway behind me. "It makes a pretty sight, sure, but it is a thin sort of pretty - not thick enough to be beautiful, much less penetrate the darkness that surrounds you and I. See how it barely reaches past the front step! Soon enough the bulb will burn itself out, and someone will have to change it. Electricity and wires and Thomas Alva Edison, but not light! Or that?" he jabbed accusingly at the pale moon above us. "I suppose you would call that 'light'? Borrowed light, I call it! A poor reflection of the sun's glory, it waxes and wanes at another's bidding. I would sooner call the tide a living man's heartbeat than call these things light."

Understand, if you haven't already, that by now I was very tired of this. There was a jolly little gathering inside which I was missing, and for what? To have my head talked in circles by some black-nosed brooding melancholic. I wished he would write it all down and let me look at it later - or, better still, forget the whole thing and go inside to relax a little. So! He liked the cold, did he? Then I would give him cold!

"If I knew you made it your business to go around depressing people, I would not have invited you." My tone was snide. I could hear it - snideness dripping throughout. This bothered me not. "Or do you mean to give up college and practice to be a professional bard?"

Silence followed. It was not the stupid sort that his remarks prompted from me. No, it was a strong and yet easy silence. Perhaps my words had pleased him. Perhaps really did enjoy more cold than temperature. The thought annoyed me not a little.

"Perhaps," he mused, and I heard satisfaction carving its way up his face as he spoke. He took a few tentative steps forward and his face became pale again, but now I could detect the hint of a smile.

In the words of the immortal Mrs. Bennet, it was all very vexing.

He seemed to hesitate, but there was no lack of certainty in his voice when he spoke again. "Anna, what if I told you ... I know a way to do it?"

(I wanted to say, 'to do what? To get you to shut up?' Unfortunately, I did not realize I wanted to say this until much later, and it went unsaid.)

"What if I know a way to turn a lifeless tide's ebb and flow into the pulse of a living heart? To make the palest, frailest of lights burn with all the intensity and everlastingness of the sun - no, and more besides? To burn with enough light to eradicate all that indelible staining that we own as people? What would you think?"

"I would think you needed little practice with bardship, still less need to practice on me." I tried to quip, but it came off as more of a snap. "Although, if I interpret the riddles rightly, you might do better as a Mayan priest, for all your talk of lights and frail moons. Soon you will have me worshiping the sun."

There was a pause. And then -

"It all depends on how you spell it," he said.

The question of relationships (I mean, relationship-relationships) threw itself at me this weekend in two ways: an experience at work today, and last night's chick-flick. The latter happened first, but today's experience tied it together so we'll start there.

It wasn't anything serious. I gave some nice old guy a smile as I was cashiering for him, and he responded by saying something to effect of, "Well, you're happy - I guess your boyfriend must've kissed you goodbye last night." (Yes, some people have not nearly enough shame.) I tend to think of myself as a naturally happy person and I'd rather people think I'm just chipper about life in general (which is true) than pondering last night's alleged (and totally nonexistent) 'rendezvous.' Naturally, I shrugged it off and smiled and remained Serene and Aloof from the egging. Um, no, duh. In my typically blah-blah-mouthed fashion, I offered the protest: "...I don't have a boyfriend!"

Yeah, Anna, that'll get the job done. Change the subject nicely. Not. It spiraled into a bit of good-natured ribbing about how I was just in denial, and ooh, look, I was blushing, so there was a guy et cetera... I didn't mind all that, because he wasn't being mean or inappropriate, but when it began to dawn on him that no, I seriously did not have a boyfriend, the next question was (albeit jokingly): "Well, what's wrong with you?"

DETOUR: This is something I just don't get about our culture. Although the guy meant it in fun, most people just assume that, for a young, college-aged woman, having a boyfriend makes you normal and healthy and something. I don't have a guy at this stage in my life, so something must be wrong with me. Oh, but let's be very clear on something else, too: my life is ruined and backwards because I don't have a boyfriend. But if I were to meet someone and marry him and start a family, then - oh, what a waste! All that potential down the drain.

But I'm not interested in a casual relationship, not ultimately, and a more serious relationship wouldn't ruin things, but it's just not happening. I don't want a guy to wear around like a bracelet and throw into my conversations to assure people that I'm a normal, well-rounded person. If I need to accessorize, I'll go look for something at Claire's. I won't play into the idea that a casual relationship would fulfill me any more than I will the notion that commitment to the creation and growth of a new family somehow reduces me to an unfulfilled nobody. END DETOUR. (I did manage to refrain from throwing all that in the man's face... so maybe my blah-blah-dom is not quite so fixed and hopeless. Right...)

But there was something beyond the fact of "I smile like this every day" that made that poor guy's question ridiculous. This brings us to last night's chick-flick. Sweet Home Alabama: funnier than it should be, and all about a guy and a girl (No. Seriously.) and somehow the girl winds up with the right guy and booyah, it's all heart-heart-in-the-rain and they get to dance to Sweet Home Alabama at the end. Wow. I really didn't see that last one coming.

And I'll admit: as ready as I am to point out the cheesiness and silliness and generally unrealistic qualities of such a flick, it (like many others) left me feeling a bit down. As ready as I am to say all that about commitment and not wanting a casual relationship, underneath all that goofiness there's something that I want and don't have. Those feelings of let-down tend to spiral into sessions of self-loathing and beration and general discontent.

But by God's infinite mercy, I picked up my little copy of Spurgeon's Morning and Evening and read the evening portion for the day. I was on the brink of dissolving into a puddle of discontented goo and I don't even remember what it was on now. I rather sulked through that one, I confess, and my mind was not fixed. Since I can't resist spoilers, I peeked (out of habit more than interest) at the next morning's reading. It was a verse from Song of Solomon: I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love. Before many of my readers flee in haste ('I thought it was bad enough when she started out on the topic of relationships, but Song of Solomon is the LIMIT!'), Spurgeon's opening words caught my eye:

Such is the language of the believer panting after present fellowship with Jesus, he is sick for his Lord. Gracious souls are never perfectly at ease except they are in a state of nearness to Christ; for when they are away from Him they lose their peace.

How quickly I forget who I am and what that means! I am not a girl, or a college girl, or an American girl: I am first and foremost Christ's. Whatever true hurt there is in me for fulfillment through relationship, to say that that means I ultimately just want a boyfriend is absolutely wrong. It is not only contrary to my heart and will, it is the opposite to who I am and what I am made of - my very nature. And yet that is what I, in my discontented reaction to the girl-movie, try to tell myself - that I am lonely for something else. Isn't that all sin? "Give me anything but Jesus! Let me need and love and cherish anything - anything but Jesus!" But I am Christ's. I am a new creature. If I hurt from loneliness, it is not because I don't have a man. No, I am Christ's, and I am lonely and hurting because Jesus hasn't come back yet, and I long for his presence.

I read on, riveted: 'Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness'; and therefore, supremely blessed are they who thirst after the Righteous One. Blessed is that hunger, since it comes from God: if I may not have the full-blown blessedness of being filled, I would seek the same blessedness in its sweet bud-pining in emptiness and eagerness till I am filled with Christ.

That's when I remembered: the next day (today) was communion Sunday. And that's when the glorious weight of it all came spilling down on top of me. Yes, I was horribly, terribly lonely for full fellowship with my Lord and Savior; yes, I was sinful and deceitful and foolish, trying to misappropriate that longing for Christ to a longing for a relationship with a human being; yes, I was hungry - more than that, starving - for the companionship and guidance and presence of Jesus Christ - but God fills the hungry up with good things, and the very next day I would feast at His table! Surely I could endure the blessed, wretched state of being hungry for a few short hours - and count it blessed! - knowing that there was a banquet on the other side. And if I could endure hours waiting for that small taste of heaven, how much more should I not be able to endure years looking ahead to the Real Thing?

All this context rolled about my mind as I grinned back at that (nice?) old guy and gave him his change and bade him have a nice day. He left convinced that I was smiling because some boy had made me happy, even informing the next customers of this fact. I don't think he realized how wrong he was - or how right. Because Some Guy had shown me quite recently how much he loved me, and it did make my smile that much brighter. He isn't just Some Guy, and he didn't hug me or kiss me, but he gave himself that I might be satisfied, and then - "this do in remembrance of Me." The picture of the Son of Man through the dark glass becomes a little brighter. How can I eat at that Table and not be content? Jesus is enough. This isn't a lame excuse of an ugly girl who can't get a guy to like her. Jesus is enough. Yes, I want to get married some day. But - Jesus is enough. This is life, whether some guy comes along or not - and if he does, my prayer and hope is that I love him first and always for what I see of Christ in him. The way to practice this is not to start scoping out guys and finding the godliest, but to love my Jesus more and more and more and to realize that to taste of Him in this life is to know how much I hunger for him still more. But - blessed are they who hunger and thirst!

So - no, Mr. Pesky Old Man, there's nothing wrong with me. Jesus hasn't come back yet - that's the world's problem and the world's grace. I'm not waiting for the right man to happen along; there's only one Right man, and he has already sought me out and found me. May I live my life in the blessed state of hungering after his return, as a teeny-tiny member of his glorious Bride, and one day may I find that, as Spurgeon says:

If Christ thus causes us to long after Himself, He will certainly satisfy those longings; and when He does come to us, as come He will, oh, how sweet it will be!

Or, as Psalm 34 puts it:

O, taste and see: the Lord is good!

Going through old things, I found a picture of myself--roughly age seven or eight--with hands held proudly aloft, each clutching a bright green walnut. I remembered how much my sisters and I loved those things. They were our all-purpose toys: balls, rations for runaway orphans, generic collectibles, gopher-hole-stoppers, you name it. We even used the green rind for a charming addition to various perfumes (mingled with grass and dirt, the results were stunning). An excess of playing with these led to another use: a striking, if unwanted, fashion statement. Those who played with walnuts were made like them--or at least made to wear the juice all over their hands and clothing, for once it sank into the latter it rarely came back out.

Going through old things, I've found so much stuff that, like the walnuts in Newman, I left behind. Many of them were sweet and full of promise in my hands, laden with rich meat. But like the walnuts in Newman, I held onto them a while and then set them aside - and all that sticks with me now are indelible blots on my hands and clothes. I've thrown away the satisfying part, and all I've got are the bitter-smelling stains to show for it.

Jesus, I know you washed the blood of my angry, shameful nature from these hands. Could it be that your mercy extends even to the mundanities of my foolish, girlish vanity? Could it be that you came not only to wash away the blood, but to cleanse me of the walnut stains as well?

Forgive me this post. I'm afraid it's rather bittersweet...like the walnuts in Newman.

[This has been Life's Soundtrack - Ep. 04: Whatever You're Doing (Something Heavenly) by Sanctus Real]

From the album sleeve of Love & Thunder:

All over the quiet plains, beneath the snow on the high mountains, rustling through the cattails that congregate along the water, you can sometimes feel the presence of a promise. On cold nights when you look at the sky, sometimes your breath catches in your throat at how bright the night can be. The dark spaces between the stars aren’t as dark as you thought they were; not nearly as dark as the tree line on the horizon, and as you stand there shivering with your hands bunched in your pockets suddenly you remember that you’re standing on a rock in the middle of space. Suddenly the notion that there’s a Someone who made it all and knows us all no longer seems quite so far-fetched; indeed, it seems too good to be false.

But here we toil and we till the hard earth, where even the warm times with friend and kin are lonely because we know they won’t last long enough to quiet the ache. Our sadness points to Home the way hunger points to the feast, the way the light of the cratered moon is always facing the sun, always pointing to where the dawn will come like a pillar of fire when this rock we walk on turns again to burning day. All over the quiet plains and the cold stone cities full of dying and shame the promise is not drowned out by the weeping; it is declared by it.

God died as a man and rose again, and the sound of the fiery blast of Death exploding shook the firmament. Throughout the wail and shudder, over the shriek and moan of man the thunder has sounded and sung, and it is both the answer and the promise. It sings still, and you can hear what it says if you listen: love never dies.

~Andrew Peterson