Then the word of the Lord came to me: "Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I have sent away from this place to the land of the Chaldeans. I will set my eyes on them for good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up, and not tear them down; I will plant them, and not pluck them up. I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord, and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart. 

I think, after such an undeniably long absence from my own shabby art of blogging, that a bit of rambling and ranting on the miseries of the Dread Writer's Block'd'arts would be justifiable. But I'm not going to talk about that; instead, I'm going to talk about why I'm not talking about that, and thus probably spend more time talking about it than I would if I weren't not talking about it.

Their eyes met, and he found no sympathy in the other’s gaze, only a singular earnestness and clarity of understanding. The look was like the statement that followed: “A providential stalemate, I call that. Not that there is nothing to be done about it; rather, you have no excuse for sulking.” -The Brew

 Written because I did write that blessed blog entry, because I do habitually talk to myself (though not quite so much of the chess game in A Bug's Life), and because Audrey Assad is fabulous, and so is Jenny.  

I've been trying to look at people more when I talk to them.

Not in a stare-you-down or creep-you-out sort of way (I hope!), but I have noticed a lack of eye contact on my part with the people I'm talking to. It's not a hugely perpetual thing; I don't think it's because I lie to everyone, and I'm pretty sure it's not because I'm bashful. I suspect 'tis more a matter of self-absorption and habit. I've just gotten used to rambling into the distance, and I'm beginning to realize the value of ... actually interacting with people instead of vague horizons.

It really began to interest me, however, when I took that principle of staring at vague horizons instead of people and dragged it into my prayer life. Because if I do it some of the time with people, I'm pretty sure I do it most of the time with God. Again, it's not that I don't mean what I say. But what I say isn't worth saying, because most of the time it springs from an indefinite contemplation on the art of self-knowing.

I'm not asking for sympathy or a pat on the back. This is a horrible thing that I see in myself, and I'm repenting of it as such. There's no need to wallow in the agony of self-reproach; better to rejoice in the truth of redemption. But there - that's just the point. Ever tried staring at a mirror image of yourself and saying a prayer of praise and reverent awe to God? Ever tried being thankful to God whilst in a state of total self-absorption? Yeah. It doesn't work. (And I suspect it's stolen a great quantity of joy from my prayer life heretofore.)

I want to linger on that last one. Thankful. My prayers are often beseeching, often repentant, often wrestling - these are good and right parts of prayer. But I struggle to make them thankful. What keeps me from thankfulness? Is it not because I do not look at God when I am talking to him? Is it not because prayer for me is usually more about self-disclosure than basking in the presence of the living Christ in reverence and awe?

I say this knowing that tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. There's an element of non-coincidence there; at the same time, if a thankful heart isn't sustainable on the ordinary days then all the howling horrors of the holidays certainly won't foster one. Yet the howling horrors are not to blame. If I were to pray, and think, and walk, and live, and work, and sleep with the face of God ever before me - in all of my conversations, but especially time in the closet for prayer - that life, that conversation would be a wellspring of thanksgiving and praise, unstoppable and unending in its current.

I do not remember when I first began searching for the sunset. I was on the road before I realized it had begun. My sister painted it into a picture for me once, and I believe that was when I first began to realize. The painting itself was nothing grand: a simple daub of watercolours depicting the silhouette of a girl on a hill against a flaming sky. It was a spin-off of one of the hills in my parent's neighborhood. I had watched many a sunset just so, many times.

But I stopped to look at the painting on its place by my door one day on my way to work, and that was when I realized how distant the sunset was. Fifty-some miles would take me to that same hill; it would not take me to the sunset. The impression of a day gone by - or a day foretold - in an artist's mind; it was not mine to grab. It was too bold and surreal - or perhaps it was too real, the grass on those shadowed hills surely too sharp for my soft and shadowy feet.

I seemed to shake, for just a moment, with a curious longing to expel myself through the veil of the picture frame and stand beside that girl and stare into the face of glory. The voice of Chesterton seemed to ring in my ears: whether it was hell or the furious love of God, I did not know...! But it was early in the morning, and the dim lamp in my room seemed to turn things black and white by turns. Only the picture burned with a maddening brightness, as far removed from my little room and the day ahead of me as eternity is from finite things.

Hey, you.

I know you're tired. In fact, I know you're exhausted. And I know that life just feels like a battering of assignments and tests and hours put in here for school and hours put in there to pay for the hours you put in for school, and meeting this person and talking to that person and worrying about this other person... yeah, I'd say I know Anna's life pretty well.

And I know that sky looks threatening, and the boat is the last place you want to be. I also know why.

Yes, I know the secrets of the minefield, of the storm, and I know the secret of your heart: you're not terrified of craziness and explosions and being exhausted from an excess of work. The reason the minefields terrify you, the reason you and so many others stay away, is because you're afraid you won't feel anything, and you hate being bored.

Wake up. The peril is not in the obvious hazards, the literal bullets, the schedule that wings by in a blur. The danger is in the landscape that never changes, the ground that never seems to ascend or descend, the monotonous plodding that grows more maddening with every step.

Peril is everywhere, but especially in the mundane. The thing that makes the minefields dangerous isn't the mines; it's the fact that you can walk them and never know the mines are going off all around you. That you would dive headfirst into the teeth of death and experience salvation and still - still! - shut your eyes to the beauty of the reality of what God is doing because it is too small for your backwards, twisted mirror-vision to detect, too boring to tickle those itching ears, too even-keel and ordinary to rock the emotion-springs of your heart.

This generation is obsessed with feeling things, and you are no different. So easily entertained by news stories and television shows and musical numbers by popular bands that bellow angst and candied-happiness and troubledness, the never-ending lie that life is what you feel, and you have to feel something to know your life. Meanwhile, we scorn things like marriage or simply being a full-time daughter or being a blue-collar laborer for the next twenty-plus years because... well, to dress it up and put it in as close-to-the-truth and disgustingly false way as possible, a Christian is all about risk, and I don't feel like I'm risking anything in any of those boring commitments.

That's why you won't get into the boat when the storm looms overhead. It's not because you're afraid of sinking. It's because you don't want to risk finding out that the storm isn't be all that it's cracked up to be - or, rather, that you're not all you've convinced yourself you are. Dan Haseltine hit the nail on the head when he sang: I have no fear of drowning; it's the breathing that's taking all this work. The terror is in not in going down with a blaze of glory; the terror is in finding your first squall to be a few mere ripples, and that even those are enough to keep you hanging over the rail puking your guts out for a lifetime. The terror is in realizing that it doesn't take an epic gale to reduce you to the dust that you are.

Yes, there are minefields, but they aren't guts-and-glory. They're the stupid little things we have to do every day to be the people God has called us to be and love the people he has called us to love. They're the myriad of insignificant little conflicts where our life is on the line, and we have to surrender it. And that's the danger: the searing heat of the blast doesn't get any closer to us than when we are totally unaware of its presence. There is peril in the mundane, and it is that we do not know the fires are singing the hairs on our necks because we cannot feel them. We cannot feel because we are bored; we are bored because we would rather be secure than have our ordinary things threatened. Take my life, Lord; create a World War - just don't take my routine, don't take my schedule, don't take my secure little corner of the world, my idols of the thousands of insignificant places where I can feel self-sufficient... give me something grand to feel, something I don't care about so all these little things can still be mine to me, and never yours, never surrendered... 

Are you disgusted enough already? Then forsake this gluttony of experience. Feelings are all very well and good in their place, but it's faith that's meant to be your eyes now. To say that life is boring because you don't feel the battle is to fall asleep in the face of an epic gale, even as we shake in our rubbers at the tiny ripples. Yes, that's you. It's good to feel foolish and know ourselves to be dust. Throw yourself on the grace of God. That grace is the only reason you may have faith to see the goodness in being small, in being foolish, in being secure in the greatness and wisdom of Almighty. Are you going to puff up yourself in the face of such great grace and wisdom and strength, protesting that your eyes can do better without the faith he gives so freely?

Come on, soul; you know you were bought with a price, and there's nowhere for you to go but the path grace forges. Let's clamber aboard this vessel and leave the oars behind. We can weigh the anchors of pride and self-sufficiency and unfurl the sails. Let's leave the wheel unmanned; the rudder's broken anyway, and my compass always forgets which way to point. We don't need to use the stars to divine where sovereignty drives us: you know it means us to go further up and further in, and "sovereignty" isn't just a nice word. It works. No, it doesn't feel like a thundering charge up the waterfall into glory yet - this is a Far Country, and we are still plodding, but the beauty of the mundane is that there are always glimpses, and the tragedy is to miss them.

So come on, you. That sky looks doubtful enough for sailing; what are you waiting for?

N.B.: I wrote this waaay back in October - I know because I found it sandwiched amidst NaNo plannings - but it seemed fitting enough for the right now. I've been meaning to type it up for a while - particularly for FB. ^.^ And yes, it does come with two TAN songs. See, this moves the fixation along a little more quickly...

[Life's Soundtrack - Ep. 03: Let It Go and You Are by Tenth Avenue North]

There was no precipice.

I had not come, like so many so often describe it, to the edge of some cliff where dwelt the invitation to blindly jump into the abyss of the unknown. There was no opportunity for a leap of faith, only a mostly level ground which sloped a little upwards and allowed me to see a little ways ahead and a little ways behind. The road itself was fairly smooth--a few bumps or potholes here and there, but mostly just a flat, broad path.

I had never taken such a leap. There had been the occasional moment here and there when I had had a swift sensation of being swept up, up, into the clouds and then beyond, where I could see the wind that stirred my hair move the weather as well. I had been minded in those instances of the vastness of the sky, of the many other lives that had trod this way before, and the Way had in becoming so much bigger than myself become my own to me.

Those moments never lasted long enough. All too soon, I would return to being Anna again. Anna was so very small, each step covering little more than a foot, each day's scenery never changing. There was no cliff, no daring call to risk it all for the unknown. All there was was the known, the flat, the visible. Surrender in that seemed impossible.

But then I ceased my plodding stride and looked up to the grey clouds blowing about in a sky that was too big for me and too small for my God, and I knew.

I had to surrender.

Truthfully, I'd have taken the cliff. A couple thousand feet seemed a vastly preferable option to a fall of no more than a few feet. Nobody quite knows what will come at the bottom of the cliff, but it is the ultimate surrender, the surrendering to end all surrendering, and you know it will be amazing. There is no going back to ordinary after the cliff. But I knew exactly what would follow this fall. I should have to get back up and keep on plodding, keep on watching the muted grays and greens and browns passing in my periphery, and then sometime after that I should have to surrender again - and again - and again. What lay before me contained no trace of going out in a blaze of glory. It was a muddled blur of dull colour and surrender after surrender after surrender...

Yet it had to be done. I clenched my teeth, resisted a few more seconds, and then yielded to the plunge.

I dropped to my knees.

There was no instantaneous quieting. I knew there would not be. The questions still assaulted me from every side. But then, though I knew nothing else, though the tears and queries had no answer but an echoing silence of Unfathomable, I knew the rightness of the position. In bitterness I had thought of myself as a dog performing tricks for its master, kneeling when the authority said "kneel," and receiving a paltry treat for my paltry efforts. Yet somehow, in the doing I came to understand that I was loved. It was not because of the surrender that I was loved, but still - somehow - it seemed - through the surrender.

Here is an end to it, I thought to myself. Here it is. I must do what is right and required. I shall lay these questions at His feet and walk away not claiming them for myself anymore. They are not mine, for though they belong to me I do not belong to myself.

I opened my mouth, but something boiled up into my throat then, and the questions would not make it past my tongue. They were a tangle of too many threads, threads of loathing and doubt and despair and fear and sorrow, all snagged on the ragged edges of my treacherous heart. It was beyond my power even to state them, much less surrender them. I had nothing to lay at his feet. I came not as a petitioner, but as a beggar. I could not even give him questions. If I came for anything, I came to receive, for mine was hunger, and thirst, and smallness.

"You - you - " I managed to choke a few words out at last, wrestling to speak still more. "You are!" Those two words hung in the silver sky. I felt the overwhelming conviction of having said nothing and yet there being no more to say. The words said nothing and meant everything. The stranglehold on my voice released slightly, and I gulped in air. It smelled - I thought a bit foolishly - of truth.

"What can I - how can I - who can I be apart from you? Every need and fulfillment is from you!" The words rushed out at once and I let them spill out carelessly. My voice felt like sandpaper in my throat but I soldiered on. "Trying to love you is like hunger and sickness. Being loved by you is death - and yet it is food and health. Where - what meat have I found here to satisfy my soul-hunger? What fountain could quench this soul-thirst? Is there a physician I could find among men to cure this soul-sickness, or a lover to satisfy enough past the restlessness? Where am I to be, if not in you?"

I saw myself: grasping, always grasping after things to satisfy me, wondering why the questions never fade. Oh! Why had I never seen? Behind every long-term question there stood not a direct answer or explanation, which may fade in memory or dim in reason and surety, but an eternal promise. And I saw that, though my questions might last a lifetime, they would end with me. But YOU, Unfathomable, Eternal, Existing - You would go on and on, promises never altering or fading, even as it is not within You to alter or fade.

My face fell to my chest. The weight of it - the foolishness of my questions - bowed my head with irreverent guilt. For a moment, I wanted to run. But a breeze stirred somewhere - was it the air around me, or something deep inside - and I felt my face lifted as it were by the touch of Infinite Goodness.

I could not help myself. The tenderness of it was all that of a father's, a brother's, a husband's, and still more in strength and truth and love. I stretched my arms to heaven and murmured again the first two words, thinking perhaps I understood the everythingness of something that seemed to say nothing.

"You are," then, "Friend," then again, "Husband," and still once more: "Abba."

There was nothing momentous about this, in reflection - simply a girl holding her arms up like a fool and waiting for her father to pick her up. I knew it would not be the last time I found myself in that position, and the knowledge gave me great comfort instead of the anticipated weariness. At last I moved my arms back to my side and stood. For a moment, I remained still, surveying the quiet green of the surrounding fields and the rich brown of the earthen path.

Then I took a step, and a dingy campus street reared to life about me. As I continued on my small ant-path to the next class, I fancied I could still feel damp spots at the knees of my jeans, where they might have met with the wet ground of that field.

You are.

This is the product of listening to Fernando Ortega’s “All That Time” and seeing people hurt. S’that simple. This one comes more directly from my heart than anything I've ever written before, I think, so handle with caution and read if you dare.

To A Broken Heart:

Your face is the broken surface of every hurting heart I have ever glimpsed. You might be one of my sisters, a member of my youth group, or a very close and dear friend. You might be all three. You might barely be an acquaintance. Yet I love you with all the love of Christ I have to give. It doesn’t seem like very much in this press of pain.

You are aching—cracking—crumbling before me. I know I ought to say something, something to soothe the hurt and mend the gaping wound. In the onslaught of your pain, the pain in my own life rushes around me. “I’m hurting too!” the words wait behind my lips, ready to leap out into your needful ears. “I know how you feel!” I hesitate, realizing that I don’t know how you feel. I know what it is to hurt, and I could selfishly distract you by diverting your attention to the hurt in my life.

I don’t know your hurt.

Pain is pooling in the place where the heart hears, threatening to spill out like the glass over your eyes threatens to shatter drop-like down your face. I take the words and fling them back into my mind so that you’ll never hear them. Maybe you wouldn’t have heard anyway.

The glass over your eyes breaks and you weep. You’re crying— oh, God! It hurts! —and the aching freshness of tears spilling onto your face clamps something around my throat. I’ve never seen you like this before, never knew you could be so broken, yet somehow the brokenness is the same I’ve seen a thousand times before in a thousand other faces.

The ancient newness of your grief combines into one weight with the strength of a thousand griefs, pinning my heart to the back of my chest. I want to rip it out and show you how broken this frail heart of mine is, but the weight of your brokenness holds me back. It tells me that my role here is to be the strong, comforting one, to hold you and help you back to Christ.

Help you back to Christ? I do not know the way myself!

I try anyway, words working like fingers. Yes, words are clumsy fingers, ploughing into the crumbling walls of your sandcastle heart. I fumble to strengthen you, but my words only seem to speed the oncoming wave of destructive despair.

I should be praying with you. I cannot pray. It is as if my tongue is shackled. I think the weight in my heart has reached its chains far. I can only look at you, begging you silently to understand that although I cannot tread this water and hold you up, I’m willing to drown with you. Even my sincerest look is empty, devoid of compassion. More words come, but they are dry chaff. Empty words somehow pulling us down all the more for their lack of substance. Heavy nothings.

I tell you I love you. I want to tell you the truth: I cannot love you. If I loved you, I would be strong enough to push the weight aside and tell you how unloving and broken I find myself, that you are not alone in any of this.

We hug, brokenness meeting brokenness. I tell you I’ll be here for you. We both know I won’t.

I love you. I’m sorry. Another empty-armed hug, both of us embracing our self-confident lies. Embracing nothing.

We prop ourselves up with wobbly assurances on your part that you’ll be okay. Sleep comes. Water washes away the rest of the sandcastle.