Idle and Blessed

Words have not been jumping out at me lately. While my best friends set out for grand adventures, sign up for risky travels, and board planes, trains, and buses, I make my way down a path that is inward. My adventure is to get smaller; I beg my roots to grow down and weave me into this one space of soil. Atlanta. Seminary. A smaller space of ground than I feel comfortable in. A narrow goal that doesn't sound like a grand adventure at all. It is harder for me to stay put than it would be to wander. And in the silence that comes from the ordinary, I sit and wait for words to come. They don't. Somehow I have this sense that great writing comes from great adventure. All of mine has, I think. So I wait to speak until I have something to say, and the words retreat. My soul's eyes strain on the horizon for a glimpse of Russia. It's been so long. Even a destination like Portland or Charlotte, El Paso or Vancouver. The Redwoods and Sequoias of California. The beach or ...

My sister is my hero. This wasn't always the case. Growing up, the mere 21 months between our ages was a catalyst for fights of the worst kind. And as the firstborn that I am, my way of handling fights with my sister was to wield an iron fist of adolescent bossiness. We used to spend a lot of time acting out made-up stories in our backyard, and she was always forced to assume the role of errand-runner and stick/leaf/flower-gatherer. She was the best helper. At the time I didn't realize our way of relating said a lot more about her character than it did my leadership skills. A lot of people look at me as the brave one in our family. I have an ambitious disposition and like to blaze my own trail. Academics are where I feel at home, so getting the degrees and accomplishments is life-giving for me. I also have this love of travel that gives everyone the impression I'm fearless. And in a lot of ways, I am. The Lord has blessed (or cursed?) me with an ability to reason my way...

Some days I don't feel like the resurrection is coming. You know, the resurrection. Of the people in our lives we want so badly to come back to us. And the parts of ourselves lying unresponsive at the bottom. Some days the story seems bleak, like a tragedy. Like Shakespeare is writing it, and high schoolers will have to act it out in literature class five hundred years from now. Characters being taken from the storyline willy-nilly, leaving us standing there, marveling. I believe the story is intentionally bittersweet. The bitterest of sweet, intentionally . My experience does not reliably tell me this. My experience tells me the bitter removes the sweet, like a zero-sum game where they compete with each other for percentage points. Fight the bitter, taste the sweet! Grab it while you can and eat it fast! Before the bad guys win and the Shakespearean tragedy comes to an end. There's a book of Puritan prayers called The Valley of Vision , and its introductory prayer says...

There's been something going on in me this semester. Sure, we're only 2.5 weeks in, but the conditions are right, so it's moving quick. Everything is moving quick. Classes are busy, work as demanding as ever, and new things are on the horizon for the next few months. An internship with the ethicist at Grady and a Pilates teaching certification, to be precise. In the meantime, two things are colliding for me that I feel are going to be extremely formative. It's kind of like I'm looking down on my inner landscape and watching it change in slow motion, which sounds so dramatic. But I have perspective on a couple things right now, and it's a profound thing to have perspective on the changing of your own inner landscape. I have a class on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great martyr and theologian. He wrote a great deal about the church and our responsibility, about social issues like race and politics. He encountered the black Christians of the Harlem Renaissance, and ...

Knife by Mary Oliver Something just now moved through my heart like the thinnest of blades as that red-tail pumped once with its great wings and flew above the gray, cracked rock wall. It wasn't about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by. Sometimes, when I sit like this, quiet, all the dreams of my blood and all outrageous divisions of time seem ready to leave, to slide out of me. Then, I imagine, I would never move. By now the hawk has flown five miles at least, dazzling whoever else has happened to look up. I was dazzled. But that wasn't the knife. It was the sheer, dense wall of blind stone without a pinch of hope or a single unfulfilled desire sponging up and reflecting, so brilliantly, as it has for centuries, the sun's fire.

There was no heartbreak and no joy in 2013 that God didn't plan for and lead you through. And there won't be any heartbreak or joy in 2014 that God isn't planning for or won't lead you through. We mark time this way, in years, and we make all these resolutions every go-round. But the trick to it all is just plain faithfulness. There's not a whole lot in this life we can plan for. It won't stop us from trying, but it's true. I think there are directions God wants us to travel in, attitudes he wants in our hearts, but he won't measure the success of our years by the resolutions we kept or the goals we attained. He won't count up the times we were derailed by tragedy or failure as through they detract from our grade point average. The world works this way, and so do our heads. But we have life wrong when we count up the wins and losses. We have grace wrong, and growth and meaning and all the really important things. I like New Years. I like reso...

There's a song that goes, "What a glorious day when my heart finally rose from the grave. When you called my name, I came running," The first time I heard it I was walking down Belmont Boulevard on a warm summer night, getting some air before bed and listening to my ipod. And I remember I lifted up my hands like a crazy person, but it was dark so it's ok, and I thanked God so deeply that it's true,  I came running. He called my name and I came running. Praise be to God that we sometimes come running. I never remember a time when I didn't know Jesus. When he wasn't present with me in my inner world. The Lord is a someone who spoke tenderly to me from the beginning and drew me in, and I responded by loving him, somehow. It is only and all grace that allows us to love him. Mark 1 talks about the day Jesus met Simon and Andrew, his first disciples, beside the sea. He simply said, "Follow me," and Mark writes, "Immediately they left th...