Protected: Year in Review, Part 2 (pw hint: the name of Much-Afraid’s desert flower)

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Year in Review?

So last year was pretty momentous. Let’s write out the bare, worldly facts:

- I dropped out of college in January and
- I moved halfway across the country (almost) by myself .
- My roommates got me a job at a coffee/ice cream shop in March because I couldn’t get a job by myself;
- And I was, not for lack of trying, entirely unable to find any other source of income the whole year through, though to begin with I’d meant the coffee shop to be a temporary gig.
- My roommates and I moved twice more: once a distance of five minutes, and the second time a distance of more like half an hour, and I was selfish and resistant both times.
- I totaled my car in September and have had to rely be a burden on my roommates for basic needs and transportation to and from work ever since.
- I turned 21 in October and was depressed and angsty–unrelated incidents, but close in sequence.
- In November, two days before I was going to buy another car, I slipped on the ice and broke my elbow badly enough to need surgery.
- My finances have been decimated by medical bills, and my job no longer pays enough for me to live on. The job hunt continues to be ridiculously unfruitful.
- And a collection of careless, selfish, self-pitying, and largely avoidable thoughts and feelings due to my perpetual singleness and seeming invisibility wrung my heart severely in December.
- There did, however, appear some wonderful people on the scene who were willing to let me buy a car from them for really cheap, and the details of that are presently working out.

Does that sound crazy, awful, heart-breaking, discouraging, stressful, and frightening or what? (Except for that last glimmer of hope, anyway.) I write this down not out of bitterness, but with incredulity, laughter, and a fair amount of sheepishness. Yeah, most normal people would stretch that out over a few more years. How good that we don’t have to rely on the bare, worldly facts for a true reading of things! Because, you see. . .

It’s been the best year of my life.

More later (because I’m apparently all about two-part posts.)

4AM!

I have concrete proof of God and His enabling grace. It is this: I’ve often read how early morning devotional time is necessary to anchor your spirit in Christ and prepare for the day. And I have often resolved to give God some time in this way–and just as often as I’ve resolved, I’ve failed. The instant the alarm-clock stopped buzzing, my warm, comfortable bed always won out over the idea of climbing out of it to kneel on the cold floor.

No longer. Recently, my Lord has taken such hold of me, and has been enabling me so much more to abide in Him, that there have been Major Breakthroughs. And one is that three days, running, I have been able to get up an hour to an hour-and-a-half earlier than I otherwise would to put God before everything else. Three days may not sound like a lot, but comparatively, it is. Especially since these last two, it has required that I get up at four in the morning because of my work hours. 4AM! It is dedication that I couldn’t possibly have summoned up by myself. This morning, I think I felt some angels hoisting me out of bed by the wrists.

I am glad and thankful for this, because 4AM is just plain uncomfortable–and I can’t think of any better way to mortify the flesh. (Not to be harsh, but it kind of needs that.) This is about asserting control: His. His strength to make up for my weakness. His will to carry more weight than my comfort-seeking indulgence. I feel myself being trained in obedience.

Speaking of obedience, the Lord has been smoothing out some wrinkles related to that last locked post. (Synopsis: It had to do with the bread of life, and how does one dare offer the Lord a divided heart?) For I was greatly uncomfortable with my divided heart, and knew that it was beyond my power to make it whole, and whole for Christ, now and by myself.  But I think He is gently instructing me that all that is required is obedience moment by moment–where my division lies is in a hypothetical future.  There is something among my desires for this life that I just can’t quite offer up yet and say: Not my will, by Thine. But it’s okay because I can offer the Lord an undivided heart for this moment; for this present moment I can surrender the flesh. He has enabled me obedience equal to This moment, This test. And by obeying, I am trusting that always what He requires, He will enable and strengthen or soften my heart into accepting and surrendering and obeying again. He hasn’t asked for more than I can give–and when He asks for more, I’ll be able to give it. I know this, and I am unworthy, and I love Him.

Protected: Reflection on tonight at Ellerslie (pw hint: subject of message)

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Addendum

Never mind. Dickens and Dostoyevsky can wait. I can’t afford any distraction.

“Each of the builders wore his sword at his side while he worked…”

Once I come back to writing after it’s been quite awhile, I always feel like I ought to catch you up on what I’ve been doing while I’ve been Not writing. Even though if you’re reading this, you probably already know.  Anyway. In September we moved out of our Little White House and I totaled my car. In October I experienced grave doubts as to my salvation and general angst, and turned twenty-one. And in November all of my doubts were put away when I broke my arm and the Lord used it as an opportunity to convince me once and for all of His love, His will, and His providence.  (And His miracles. I broke my elbow badly two weeks ago tomorrow, and already am nearly completely healed. If I move wrong my elbow twinges, and my arm can’t bear much weight, but already it’s restored almost to its former range of motion and usefulness.)

What actually put me in a bloggy frame of mind, though, was that I’ve come to the decision that I need to stop watching movies, and I remembered how I’d written before of unintentionally giving up reading fiction.

I randomly stopped reading fiction some time this past spring or summer. It wasn’t a choice; it just kind of happened when I started focusing on Christian non-fiction—–and this was Really Weird because I used to be an English major. All through my lonely childhood, books were my best friends. I downed Jane Eyre at the age of eight, and bolted through Brian Jacques twice as fast as his books came out, and during my senior year of high school on top of AP courses and college applications and all of that craziness, I read massive books for fun–Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, A Pilgrim’s Progress and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are just a few of the many I remember reading that year. A lot of my reading happened before school or over my lunch hour, because I had no one to sit with or talk to. By that point I didn’t even mind, though. I was inured to loneliness and would have been sad to lose my reading time should other opportunities have arisen–I revered the written word: the concise expression of people’s minds and souls, the pithy phrase that hit right at the center of an idea.

Reading was almost central to my existence. So for it to suddenly be peripheral at best was astounding to me, and a sign of great moving and shaking within my inner make-up. I picked up the next book in Jasper Fforde’s Eyre Affair series at one point over the summer, because I’d always meant to get round to finishing it and had greatly enjoyed the first, and after all, there isn’t any inherent harm in reading fiction: I’m not such a puritan as to propound that. But I didn’t get past the third chapter. It couldn’t hold my interest and seemed such a reprehensible waste of time when I haven’t the mastery of the Bible and there are so many great Christian thinkers that I’ve hardly looked into. (I mean, A. W. Tozer or Jasper Fforde? E. M. Bounds or J. K. Rowling? Can there even be any contest as to who deserves more attention?) I re-read Anne’s House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery in October–it was an old friend that wanted re-visiting. But aside from that, I have been fiction-free for nearly six-months.

I’m thinking that fast may have run its necessary course now, though. In the week I was laid up with my arm, I read Hannah Hurnard’s allegory, Hinds’ Feet in High Places and it was exactly the right thing at the right time; and I cut my teeth on some George Macdonald and it reminded me that behind novels are authors, and just as we encourage each other in our walks with the Lord, Christians from times past might encourage and share with us today in stories they’ve sent down the line. I might pick up The Pickwick Papers or Crime and Punishment and see whether there’s anything in them. I’ve been thinking about Russian literature lately, and how filled it is with searching and stumbling and suffering–and to me that sounds like the sort of path of people who are looking for the Lord but don’t know it or haven’t found Him yet.

 

 

However.

 

It is definitely time for movies to get out of my life. I’ve felt like this before–if a movie’s any good at all, it sucks you into its made-up world and distracts you. Most of the time, after watching a movie–even if it’s good and has a lot to say–I just get into such an abstracted moral void. Yesterday (Saturday) I was convicted that on Friday the Lord had directed me towards Nehemiah and I had been supposed to be reminded of the builders who worked diligently and vigilantly with their tools in one hand and a weapon in the other in case of enemy attack, and even at night they didn’t go home or outside the city limits: they stayed in where it was safe around the clock until that wall was up. I didn’t take the lesson to heart and wasn’t vigilant, and went out of Jerusalem, and the enemy was sneaking up on me. So Saturday afternoon I became mindful of this and repented and prayed and resolved–and Saturday evening we watched Up! Now, I love that movie and it’s absolutely adorable, but it distracted me, and various temptations snuck in and were given way to in such a way that was even more pernicious than what I’d repented of mere hours before. I had completely forgotten most of my resolves somewhere during the mind-blankness of two hours of movie-watching, and so I didn’t keep them.

I can’t afford that kind of distraction. So now, for an indeterminate time, I’m not going to watch movies. This time it’s a conscious choice.

And I just felt like writing all this out, because it occured to me how odd it is that some things are sin to some people while completely harmless to others. And also, I don’t want my roommates to think I’m being antisocial when I purposely miss out on movie nights.

P.S. Before Wednesday, I don’t think I’d ever read Nahum or Haggai. They are treasures.

Sonnet 74 by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
–John Donne

Patience, Pruning, and the End of the Rope: Part 2

(8/25/09)This follow-up is taking a long time to come out. It was easy enough to write out the appearance of things–well do I know that in the eyes of the world I am on a downward spiral.

(9/2)Actually, more than a downward spiral: simply by taking the Bible literally on what it says about riches and poorness and how we are to spend our lives, to those concerned lookers-on of my life, it must look very much like I’ve taken a deathly plunge from all that is secure and realistic: with no thought of the future (we aren’t supposed to concern ourselves with our future security, though–He says so,) I’ve leapt off the precipice we, in general, stay sensibly atop of with an invisible parachute.  And I know there are those terrified of the crunch and splatter they expect I’ll make when it turns out I was wrong.

(9/3)Anyway, yes. Easy enough to describe appearances. What’s really going on, though, is such an unfolding work that it’s hard to comprehend. I can see the path behind me when I glance over my shoulder, but to piece together the present steps when I can hardly see where I’m going is somewhat of a different story. Like this quote from Oswald Chambers in tonight’s teaching: “Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.” And yet, I want to make sense of things, if only for the benefit of the folks dreading the splatter.

I get such wonderful glimpses of what’s going on. I am praying for the Lord to prune this branch so that it bears abundant fruit–yet unlike the insensible branch that feels the effect of the blade yet can neither see the gardener that wields it nor the purpose in mind, I’ve been praying to see the gardener–to be able to understand a little bit of what’s going on. And so, these glimpses.

I’ve already recorded how all my job applications and resume-sending forays always seem to come to nothing. I sometimes feel pretty small for making as little money as I do. And yet–it is enough for me to live on at this stage of life. The Lord has undoubtedly provided–and I have enough left over to give abundantly.  I think I am being kept poor so that I must trust and rely.

I’ve struggled with being a college dropout. Almost the first question anyone asks you when you’re this age is, “So are you going to school?” And sometimes when I answer that no, I’m not, I feel like a peculiar mixture of Fail and grey-green sludge. Yet why did I drop out? I attended for three semesters as an English major. I would have probably have ended up a college professor if I kept on in that direction. Maybe I would even have made a name for myself–I was said to have considerable talent and effortless skill. Yet how self-serving. Academia began to disgust me. Of what use or goodness is academic going-around-in-circles and quibbling when people are dying? Does it help a single soul to write thirty-page papers on dichotomies in Shakespeare?? I dropped out because it wasn’t right. It was too self-serving and useless.

But I didn’t know how to serve. I still don’t know how, or what my purpose is aside from the general commands to worship God and love as He first loved us. But I’m learning. I may not be in school, but I have a better Teacher than my money could buy at a 4-year university. He is teaching me to serve. He is teaching me to be the least and lowest and not to mind or even notice.

This is a season of waiting and learning and practice for me. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but so much work is being done that I eagerly await the beginning of the harvest.

A few quotes found in Amy Carmichael’s Gold Chord:

“Why should I start at the plough of my Lord, that maketh deep furrows on my soul? He purposeth a crop.”–Samuel Rutherford

“This sacred work demands, not lukewarm, selfish, slack souls, but hearts more finely tempered than steel, wills purer and harder than the diamond.”–Pere Didion

Sometimes I’m impatient. It can feel like, “Come on, Father, can’t we skip all this and get to the good part already?”‘ I know I’m not ready yet. I have still a stubborn independence and self-reliant streak. I know I need to get to the absolute end of my rope and fully realize the misery of trying to go it on my own so that I might give up on myself entirely and give ALL unmitigatedly to the Lord–it just hasn’t sunk in yet. Knowing it must be so doesn’t make it so. And so I’m impatient, and pray to reach the end of that rope soon, no matter what the anguish–not because I’m a glutton for pain, but because I yearn to be useful, to have a specific call and to get on with it.

But truly, there is no skipping to the good part; this is a good part, too.  I was thinking about the famous Psalm the other day–”He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” The word maketh is interesting. I think sometimes He makes us lie down in green pastures whether we like it or not. And exploring the shepherd metaphor (once an English major, always an English major, huh?) I have to remember that it isn’t the sheep deciding where and when to go–they must simply follow the shepherd. And this is good, because let’s face it: sheep are dumb.

Something that lifted me up yesterday, also found in Gold Chord:

“When a soul sets out to find God it does not know whither it will come and by what path it will be led; but those who catch the vision are ready to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, regardless of what that following may involve for them. And it is as they follow, obedient to what they have seen, in this spirit of joyful adventure, that their path becomes clear before them, and they are given the power to fulfill their high calling. They are those who have the courage to break through conventionalities, who care not at all what the world thinks of them, because they are entirely taken up with the tremendous realities of the soul and God.”

Joyful adventure, indeed. I love it. In these past few days especially, I have tasted so much of the love and wonder of our Lord.

I know it looks crazy, I know. But please don’t worry about me–I’m taken care of.

Patience, Pruning, and the End of the Rope: Part 1

Everybody has a plan. They want to go to this school, pursue that career, climb Mt. Everest, write a novel, learn to dance, retire at 55 to take up painting, and/or collect all of the state quarters.

I don’t. I don’t have a single plan. When I look into the future, it’s one vast, substantial–Void. It’s not that the road is twisty and turny or obscured: there simply isn’t one. At all. I can turn all around and see a limitless horizon, yet who’s to say which compass point is for me? I have less of an idea than ever of what I want to be when I grow up.  I just don’t know what my purpose is or where I’m going.

While I’m waiting, I’m working at an ice cream shop, doing a job I got not by my own merits, but by virtue of who my roommates are. Whenever I try to endeavor something else on my own, my efforts are entirely fruitless. And a lot of the time, I can start to feel pretty insecure and useless when I see everyone I love getting more and more busy, heading off to slay their own personal dragons, getting more deeply involved with things that Matter with a capital M, and working towards the things they know they want to do. What do I do? Well. I scoop ice cream and appear to be sitting around waiting for divine enlightenment. Yeah.

This sounds Very Bad. And there are a lot of people who could and probably do think I’m crazy. What am I doing?? I was an effortlessly brainy 4.0 student! A gifted writer! I used even to be working at a sensible customer service job where there was room for advancement and pay raises. In fact, I turned down a pretty darn big one when I quit. And now I’ve dropped out of college and am scooping ice cream. Whaaaat???

But except for brief moments of panic and uncertainty, I have a feeling this is just as it’s supposed to be for the time.

I’ve been working on writing this out since last night, and it’s very slow going. I have to go to work this afternoon, though, so I think I’m going to divide this up and make this Part One and post it as-is. More later.

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