It is so like me to be unoriginal. I think I'm being original and then I find out that everybody liked Slumdog Millionaire even before it won a million Oscars and everybody knows that kettle corn is the best and everybody really hates Disneyworld. So please forgive me for being hopelessly unoriginal today and talking about a book that nearly everybody lauds as a great post-modern piece of Christian literature. I know, okay, I know. Nobody's accusing Donald Miller of being the next Diederich Bonhoffer or C.S. Lewis though, so shut your yapper. The rest of everybody disdain it with upturned noses, so that's not really original either.

A few weeks ago I started to reread Blue Like Jazz and remembered how much I'd liked it the first time around. On a short roadtrip last week we took turns reading chapters out loud to each other and no one really wanted to stop, but we all really had to use the bathroom and breaks like that sort of mess up the mood. So we stopped. But I continued reading, short paragraphs, whole chapters, a sentence here and there. Today I came across my favorite section. I remembered it being my favorite section three years ago and realized today how unoriginal it was of me to pick this section as my favorite. Here's why: it's where the title came from, so it must have been the author's favorite section too. Blast.

In any case, I still like it. Which is not the point of all this at all. Here is the point, a snippet of my favorite section:

That's the thing about giving yourself to God. Some people get really emotional about it, and some people don't feel much of anything except the peace they have after making an important decision. I felt a lot of that peace.

Contrary to popular belief, even though I easily cry over very small meaningful things and very big inconsequential things, at the most pivotal junctures of my spiritual life there are not usually tears involved. There are resolute jaws and hard and fast rules and a whole lot of grace. But not usually emotion. But then sneaks in the peace. Crawling over my shoulder, nesting in my heart, finding a nook all its own. Peace.

And then I know I've made the right decision.

So there are decisions in front of me: rights or lefts, rights or wrongs. And even though there's a part of me that just wants some emotional reason to creep in, a feeling that just feels right, a certainty first and a decision afterward, the truth is that I've got to say yes and then the peace will come.

I was just hoping things would be different this time around. Which is so unoriginal of me.

Settled in?

Two months ago a friend and I were having this great conversation in which we were talking on the phone and sending links from the internet back and forth to one another. He's an artist and I fancy myself sort of into art too, which is fine because I'm a writer but he fancies himself sort of into writing too. Whenever I find something interesting in the art field, whatever medium, I send the link to him. Appreciation is only half the fun if you can't share it with someone.

Anyway, we were talking about hard work, sweat on your brow sort of stuff, he in regard to painting and I in regard to writing the next great memoir, but we both were really talking about it in spiritual terms. Art is spiritual to us. As it should be. He sent me this link to one of our favorite musician's blogs and directed me to this section:

Music and art and writing: extravagant, essential, the act of spilling something, a cup running over... The simultaneous cry of, You must change your life, and Welcome home. I've been trying to write songs again, and I've been hitting a maze of dead ends. I want the songs to reveal something to me, teach me something. It's slow going. I'm not sure where I'm going. Uncertainty abounds. But the writing works on me little by little and begins to change me. That's why I would recommend not putting off writing if it's something you feel called to: if you put it off, then the writing can't do the work that it needs to do to you. Yes, I think there's something there. If you don't do the work, the work can't change you. (No one expects to change overnight.)

And I love that. I said it to my friend that night, I love that. I made him read it out loud to me twice, that section. Because I loved it so much.

Here I was thinking that I was the one scraping two pennies together in the act of writing, writing out of my poverty, squeezing drops of creativity out of an empty, sweating brain. But I love what Linford said here: if you put it off the writing it can't do the work it needs to do to you.

I've seemingly taken the hard route spiritually, working out my salvation with fear and trembling. I like the works gospel, I'm not going to lie. I like knowing that if I mess up there's penance to be done and I can handle it. Read my bible a little more, throw in a few good repentant-like prayers, stir and walk on. But the truth is, that's actually the easy route. The truth is that grace isn't something we do, it's something that's done to us. And it can't do what it needs to do unless we work on letting it.

That's the only work the gospel requires.

And I find that when I actually do get down to it and write, write, WRITE, that I don't put out a bunch of stellar writing. What I get is a heap of life and strength and a hope for tomorrow. I find that the work it requires to make myself write isn't really all that much compared to what the work accomplishes in me.

This morning I skipped the sermon. I did. I sat in a chair in my office across from a friend and we pervaded our conversation with the gospel. We talked about how it's not at all about us and that if the work of grace were only for us individually it would be a sorry gospel. The truth is that what is worked out in us is for others. It reaches in, squeezes our innards, works us over, and does what it needs to do to invoke Change. That's what the gospel is about: Change. New Creation. Spilling over on all creation.

I love that.

I talk big, I know. I talk about vision and life and purpose and the kingdom, I know. But my life is small, it is. It is filled with small things done in succession, rudimentary living done as right as I can, but still so small when the world only seems to get bigger.

I am talking to the girl across from me, but really I'm just asking a question that we all have at one point: Is it just me? Did I miss the time when all of this stopped being important and we moved on to bigger and better things? Because, to me, it's still a big enough thing. Which makes me feel smaller than the rest of the world, as though they've got some corner on the market, some hotline to God and government and I'm only riding on their tailwind.

The thing I've been realizing in the past few days is that to get vision we have to lose sight of everything else.

I gave all the keys to my kingdoms to that same girl and am hiding out in safe places, places where I won't be touched by the seemingly big things, big ideas, big talk. Because right now I need small things. I need a God so small that he fills the end of the telescope through which I look, determined to see nothing but Him. I need a God who teaches me the small things again because the big things aren't really that important anyway. We're going to heaven, we already know that. We just need to know the way.

So here is the way, right now: the way is to pursue undistractedness. Even the good things must pale in comparison to Him. I remember a few years ago when we were all passionate about undistracted devotion, when a lifetime of celibacy looked appealing because none of us were married and all of us could. It is tempting now to think, like Elijah on the mountain, that I alone am left and that that changes things. But it doesn't.

The unmarried person is concerned with the things of the Lord, how they may please Him.

I am more concerned with my life, however small, than I am captivated by Him. Will I ever own nice pots and pans? Will I ever feel settled down? Will I ever have a best friend? Will I ever be someone's best friend? Will I always be found lacking or will my cup ever overflow? These are the questions that distract me. These are what I am wrestling to lose sight of. These are peripheral concerns:

I want to see only One.

This morning I realized it's been four years since these feet stood on foreign soil. I had grand plans for this summer but, as usual, grand plans fail when they're more of a noun than a verb. I dream of spicy food and dirty streets and children babbling in different languages. And jet lag. I dream in nouns.

In the office we listen to an eclectic mix of music and every once in a while a song comes on that reminds me of the happiest summer of my life. In it I spent the mornings in class, the afternoons life-guarding poolside, and the evenings on our front porch reading poetry by candlelight and sorting out deep life issues. Nothing was ever resolved, unless you count happiness. We resolved to be happy. And we were. David Gray was the soundtrack to our happiness.

I say to my pretty officemate yesterday that I just haven't gotten peace about a decision I made recently. Peace feels like no pit in my stomach, it tastes like nothing, and it sounds like laughter and excitement. Instead I'm just feeling like in order to bring a harvest we start with a plow and maybe it's time to put my hand to one.

It's hard, sometimes, to not feel like the leftovers are my portion. I have a file-folder of things I dream about, blues and greens and art and hydrangeas and little girls names. I stopped putting slips of paper in it over a year ago, it was too painful to see things I dreamed about become others' realities. The problem was, I didn't give up what was already in there and I walked forward, fists clenched around the dreams, growing more discouraged each time someone took my idea and passed it off as their own (as though hydrangeas were my idea in the first place: who was I kidding?).

I've been thinking recently, though, that unless I start making my life more of a verb and less a file of nouns, I will go to the grave like the Pharoahs. Buried beneath of mountains of gold, horded treasure held onto until the bitter end.

...for where your treasure is,
there your heart will be also. Matthew 6.21

It's supposed to rain for the next few days. We let the sun shine long enough to get in some kayaking, weeding, and walking, then we turn off the sunlight and suffice ourselves with thinking about next week. The ground needs rain more than we do.

I say to a friend the other day something I didn't say first at all: It rains on the just and the unjust. I used to think that was just a platitude for scoundrels and saints, a pat on the head to comfort or condone, I don't know. All I know is that it's a rainy season, which is good or bad depending on how how you look at it.

Last night I got home to a notice from the IRS saying my taxes had been filed incorrectly and I owed another several hundred on top of the exorbitant amount I've already graciously given them. I wondered what unjust sort of thing I'd done to deserve it. I mentally catalogued my doing and being and going and came up empty. I think God does that on purpose, just so we don't get too caught up on our merits.

Then one day, while we are tripping over ourselves with sin and snagging every loose thread on character flaws, puddle jumping because the rain is so plenteous, we can remember that rain isn't just a inconvenient interloper: it can be a reward too. Depending on how you look at it. It's not always a cause and effect thing.

So I'm puddle jumping and looking for buttercups because I don't see the point in the downpours of late, but I'm sure it's bigger than my good deeds or bad. It's got to be.

Besides, this dry ground is thirsty.

I page through the conference brochure we just got in the mail at work. It feels pretty. It looks pretty. It shouts names like Louie Giglio and Andy Stanley and Francis Chan. It has a cool cut out in the centerfold, a X marking the spot where you, I, all of us belong at this year's conference. I look over my monitor at my pretty co-worker and said (as I am expected to say after paging through such prettiness) "I want to go."

Instead I open the InDesign project I'm working on and adjust character styles and justifications. Because I'm learning to reframe things.

There's been a lot of talk about moving to China and Philadelphia and Korea and Rochester and Somewhere Else in the past few weeks. Anywhere else for a change of scenery, circumstance and chore. He called the office the other day and asked if I had more vision for here. I said no. He asked if there was more vision for Somewhere Else and I also said no. There isn't a lot of vision for anything much right now. That's what I like to hear he said. And I know it wasn't the lack of vision that he referred to, but the fact that until God speaks something clearly, I'm not dumb enough get waylaid by pretty brochures and historic downtowns and a good Thai restaurant within walking distance.

And even though God didn't speak clearly, I've learned from experience that God not speaking at all is nearly the same as hearing an audible voice from the Heavens. Or hearing a slew of good teaching from reliable sources like a friend's journal, the front of a Sunday School classroom, or the front of a church sanctuary. In each I hear this repeated: circumstances don't determine one's ability to be effective in the kingdom.

And here I thought they did.

I'm held captive by the thought that I'm only as good as my circumstances, only as effective as my immediate vision, and only as mobile as my county line.

I stare at success, even what seems like Kingdom Success (pretty conference brochures and designs and ministries and missionaries in Indonesia) and I get mesmerized by it all. I belong there! Not here! I belong in a community like that! I belong in a church like that! I belong in an atmosphere like that.

When really, I'm just looking at the wrong things. So this week I'm learning to reframe things:

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself.
He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself
that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what.
Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity
and took on the status of a slave, became human!
Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process.
He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life
and then died a selfless, obedient death. Philippians 2.5-8

The moon is full and orbed in a pane of the french doors to my bedroom. I am sitting on our couch, listening to summer through open windows. Today I run into someone I haven't seen for a long time--she is happy and full, smiling when she tells me that she feels like she's in the center of God's will, feeling it fully. She is sorting organic produce at the food co-op two doors down from me when she tells me this. But she is happy and full.

Today a friend sits across from me, reads me a page or two from her journal, some recent counsel she recorded: when you find yourself at a crossroads, remember what the last thing the Lord spoke to you was: does it jive?

We both stop and look at each other. When was the last time the Lord spoke to us? What did He say? What were the specifics or even the generalities? Did it really happen or was it make believe?

And I remember the last time the Lord spoke to me, something that resonated so deeply in my soil, something that pushed me to touch the hem of his robe, something that made me feel like things were in sight. Vision was soon. Or at least the harvest. But that was last summer. Last August. And I waited and waited and waited. Because He said it was soon. He said that.

Instead all I felt was more pruning, less joy, less fullness, less harvest.

I trip on the Ephesians this week, the lost love ones. They knew they put it somewhere, they just couldn't find it. That's a hard place to be in, I concur. It isn't like we lose it on purpose, stuffing it away like winter clothing in favor of something lighter or a hide-a-key stuck to the wheel-well. No, it's been lost. Misplaced. Crowded out, like a middle child or an important receipt, a nondescript thing of value.

But we still want it. It still belongs to us. It still feels right to us. That joy and fullness that accompanies the knowledge that we're in the center of God's will. Not the actual being there, but the knowledge that this is right. God has said it, and it is right.

There are deep furrows in my soul. Lines of pitted dirt waiting for seeds. Everybody wants to know these days: What's your vision?

I want to know too.

There are easier, cheaper seeds to plant. Shallowly dug holes, dusts of dirt covering over precious lots. What will they do when the rain comes? And the wind? And the searing sun? No, we must go down more deeply, into the dark earth and cover it over with black soil. We know they're there, but no one else does. We know they're there, but sometimes we forget.

Our noses pressed against window panes, our bellies resting on garden perimeters, watching, waiting. The only sign of what's to come is a popsicle stick with Sugar Snap Peas written on it in purple magic marker. Otherwise we'd forget what we planted.

So it is that I've forgotten what I planted. So I'm not sure what I'm expecting to grow.

I pass the coffee shop downtown last night, a For Sale sign is taped to the window: I want to buy it, resurrect it. I wake this morning and want to buy the florist shop for sale in West Potsdam. I see a photograph of a white dress and a happy bride, I want to take pictures of white dresses and happy brides. My phone vibrates this afternoon and I smile at the message, I want to be there too. Anything is better than waiting, forgetting, trying to figure out what lays beneath this dark patch of earth.

What do you want? It's the question that I hate most these days because I don't know the answer and I don't like that. I know it's not right of me to not know what I want.

What I should want is to be happy here, content to serve and live and walk and give and go home every night and do it all again the next day. I should want that. But I don't. No, I don't know what else there is to want either. Because what I want isn't spiritual, it's real, it's tangible, physical, touchable.

What I want is a quickened harvest.

Last night for a few minutes the conversation turned to Ebenezers. Monuments set up, places of remembrance, piles of ordinary stones marking extraordinary situations.

We're on our way and it seems to be the theme of our friendships recently. I picked up a friend from the airport the other night and we talked about places we've left behind and the places we're headed and how still Zion is in our hearts. Yesterday as we kayaked toward the sunset we three asked the question, "Why not?" And surely, why not? At the end of the night, peppered with worship and laughter and a campfire he closed his prayer saying this: we know we're on our way to eternity, but God, eternity starts here, now.

We're on our way, but we're already there.

I have set an Ebenezer up somewhere along the way, it doesn't matter where, but its placement confuses me sometimes. I thought I left it here, but then maybe it was there, perhaps it was in this situation, or maybe there. Until someone asks and I throw my hands up and say, "I don't know! I don't know what or where the goodness of God is! I don't know where I left it and I don't know if I can find it again."

But today I read about Samuel's Ebenezer, his monument of God's faithfulness and I love this. I love this:

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far has the LORD helped us."

Thus far has the LORD helped us. Up to now. At this point. All the way to this moment. Thus far.

But we're not through yet.

And I am reminded of Psalm 84: Blessed is the man whose strength is in you, who have set their hearts on pilgrimage. Another version says, "in whose hearts are the highways to Zion." And yet another says "whose hearts are the way you travel."

We are vagabonds at heart. Setting our sights on eternity, but starting now. Setting Ebenezers along the way, making Thus Far part of our spiritual vernacular.

We haven't arrived, but He has and so we're on our way.

It's settling in, the furious sound of silence. I stand at our dining room window last night and look out on Elm Street. It's 10pm and usually the sidewalk is littered with people heading downtown, the street is still one line of cars, the police station across the street keeps a steady revolving door. It's springtime in Potsdam.

But then in one day, or week or two, it all stops. Four universities have finals, graduations, commencements, awards, and a trail of taillights is seen in every direction. We hunker back down to boring old New York State license plates and quiet streets.

I love summer, don't get me wrong, God is more real to me in the summer. People are more real to me. I am more real to me. But this summer feels like a sucker punch in my stomach. I promise her I won't cry the other day, even though she says it's okay. She's always telling me it's okay to cry. But I hold the tears back until Sunday morning, worshiping, listening, hugging girls who live on the other side of the world, hugging people I won't see again on this damp earth.

At breakfast the other morning he said people are replaceable and winced a second later for my certain glare. But it plays over and over in my mind this week. Who is replaceable? Whom have I replaced? Who will be replaced?

I sit on my ideals, horde them like riches: people are not replaceable. There are piles of ache in my heart for all the people who haven't been replaced.

I read the end of John 14 this morning. I'm sad to see it go. So were the disciples:

"You've heard me tell you, 'I'm going away, and I'm coming back.' If you loved me you would be glad that I'm on my way to the Father because the Father is the goal and the purpose of my life."

If we loved Him we would be glad that He is on His way--because the Father is the Goal and the Purpose of His life. I love that.

Because we're standing here expecting a crucifixion, we're standing here with baited breath, waiting for certain mourning. We're the ones left standing at the foot of the cross, at the bottom of the ascension, puttering around earth for the next few thousand years. We're left, while He pursues the Goal and Purpose of His life.

But what if that's our Goal and Purpose?

I'm adding another ideal this spring: that we were meant to pursue the Goal and Purpose of our lives. If it is here, in Potsdam, NY, I am happy for that, because that's where my heart is serving and I want to be joined. But if it's elsewhere, Korea, Pennsylvania, Rochester, Waco, New Hampshire, Albany, San Francisco, Chattanooga, Virginia, Ohio, China, Turkey, India, if that's where its found--so be it.

I love and so I am glad.

The Father is the Goal.

I grasp for the tenor of my heart, fingering the flesh and the feeling, the Spirit and the Living. I find nothing. I take measured breaths, an intermittent gauge, a test.

The scales are leveled: nothing weighs nothing.

I mean and I purpose and I try and all I find at the day's end is a lot of nothing. I hold my breath, maybe good things come to those who wait. Maybe they don't, but what if they do?

I know to spit out the What Ifs of yesterday; they left sourness in my mouth, coldness in my heart, but I took comfort in the What Ifs of tomorrow. I used to think that disappointment was the cause of my melancholy, hopes that never saw fruition, dreams that never woke up. But today, while I take the pulse of my life, I find that Hope Deferred is Hope Suspended, Prolonged, Delayed, and this is why the sickness of my heart.

Gathering too much manna for today, I horde tomorrow's supply, stretching my hope too thin: it can't sustain.

It isn't meant to.

Today's portion for today. Hope Suspended, held taut between today's unbending reality and tomorrow's nebulous future, makes the heart grow sick.

John 14 is my dwelling place this week. Learning to ask and not fear, abide and not run, helped by the Holy Spirit, not thinking I must be Its helper. He says that if we ask anything in His name, He will do it. He doesn't give timetables, we are human, bound by time and circumstance; He is God, free of constraints and tomorrows. He gives grace to the doubting, though: Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.

This comforts.

And so I find evidence around me. I pick up clues from my world. I catch myself believing in the evidence because the hope that there's more is too grand, too big, too overwhelming for today. I pick up white flakes that sustain my hunger, abase my desire. The taste is secondary to the provision.

He provides, that is enough.

Holy Spirit, Helper, help me now to believe. To place the evidence on the scales of my heart--to weigh them heavily against the nothing of their counterpart. To know that You are present. You are here. You are speaking. You are providing.

And that You have, too: given evidence for today.
And that You will, too: give bright hope for tomorrow.

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

There is an unexplained sadness cloaking the cherry blossoms and fresh green this spring. I habitually stand on the edge of change and make decisions: will I stay or will I go? Will this sadness lead to death or life? Will I make the right choice? Because death isn't always the end, sometimes it's the thing that's needed for resurrection to occur. And sometimes life is the right choice. Sometimes it's to face change with sheer determination, will-power and not much else and just plow through it.

I say to my friend last night that I'm never sure if we have just enough grace to walk through a season and then either the season or the grace is gone. Does that make sense? We're Americans and we're Christians, so we'll plug on, roughing the harshest of seasons and pioneering through the driest of lands, counting on a shred of grace found somewhere, under the next rock or hard place. It's got to be here somewhere.

But what if it isn't?

What if the grace has gone and it's time to move on? The hope that the grass is a deeper green and lusher quality on the other side isn't a very good way to live life: if we're making grass the goal. But what if the goal is Further Up and Further In!?

I remember being nine or ten years old and my mom reading aloud from Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. I never knew until a decade later why The Last Battle gave me goosebumps under my grandmother's afghan:

The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked like it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean. It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia so much is because it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"

I love that. I love that.

Because here we are wandering around this representative kingdom, looking for shards of grace, shreds of comfort, something, anything, that looks like what its supposed to look like.

But we won't find it. It's not more grace we need, or more friends, or more hope or plans or goals: it's a deeper country, one that smells strangely familiar, like our current one, only so much better.

That's our real country. That's where we belong. Here? This sorrow? This season? This moment of change? This lifetime of unsettledness and fear and uncertainty? Mere shadows of the real thing.

You have a problem, she said, sticking her cold feet underneath mine and handing me a box of tissues. We do things in order here: comfort, necessity, correction.

And after it all I agreed with her. I never denied that there was a problem and that it was mine, all mine. Problem: I don't trust God. Didn't I just say that?

Problem: I consider a matter and decide that God has already decided the outcome and it's not my preference, whatever that is. I'm no pessimist when it comes to others' lives, I think all sorts of grand things about them, but my own life, it's small and inconsequential whether what I want happens. I think that, I really do.

Along with being a boring God, my God is also always proving me. He is always setting the bar just too high, out my reach. Always asking a bit too much, more than I can stomach. He's withheld all the good things I want and gives me all the good things I don't care about. He is a God of relentless pursuit, always nagging me to get up, give more, be more, be less, sit down, shut up, and wash my hands, for His name's sake!

And I always feel proved. Not proven. Never having come through the fire, emptied of impurities and free of all dross. I feel constantly shifted and strained and mixed back together again. As if everything I do will never add up to one complete, thoroughly tried, clean piece of gold.

I've still been listening to that same song all week. "Jesus, Jesus, how I trust you, how I've proved you o're and o're." And I'm reading about Gideon besides. I read about him over and over again. Here was a man who was proven, yes, but more-so, he proved. He said, God, You are who I think You are and I'm willing to give it all, do it all, walk in that land and claim it with only 300 men, but first, do this for me. Then this. And this too.

I think that we're not supposed to test God, but maybe we are. Maybe the only reason I feel tested all the time is because I haven't once tested Him. I've never pulled a Jacob, holding on until He blesses me. I've never demanded like Jabez, using strong verbs and big requests. I've never laid down a fleece like Gideon and expected, really expected, a miracle. I've never prayed for three nights in the belly of a fish, really believing that I'll make it out of there alive.

I've never asked for more than I'm absolutely sure that I'll get.

It's twelve:thirty am and I can't sleep. Perhaps it's the sudden change. We have bundled for so long, now our windows are open, my chocolate brown curtains blowing humidity across the room. I've always written best late at night. Don't expect much now though.

I've been listening to this all day. Not for real, just in my head. A repetitive reel of what really matters.

I've been crying a lot recently. Not the sort of sobs that isolate and suffocate. The sort that come at inopportune moments and others that aren't. I'm laying here awake not because I'm not tired, but because all I can do is think.

I'm thinking about how this earthly tent is housing a body of death and not much else. I'm lazy and inconsistent. Irritable and fond of substitutes. I'm selfish and entitled to it. I burned my hand on the oven the other night and I scratched my finger along the blistering skin an hour ago. It hurts. We hiked seven miles yesterday, a bit of it in the rain; I slipped down a hill and my knee hurts. Badly. I shake myself out of the slump I've fallen into at work, frustrated by how little I accomplish and how much is left to do. I look at my bank account and I shrug. It's just living, right? It's supposed to hurt a little.

That might not all seem to link, but it does. Believe me.

He sings, Deliver me courage to guide me, Deliver me Your strength inside me.

And I'm singing it too.

Because we're all slowly dying, slowly fading. We're all fainting away and getting old. We need a Deliverer. I need a Deliverer. Because, honestly, I'm a take it as it comes sort of girl. I wait, peruse my options and if I don't like them, I turn up my nose. Or, I wait, don't get any options and shake my fist at God for not making good on all His promises.

What I mean is that I'm fearful and suspect. And ungrateful.

What I mean is that I need Him. And that I'm aware, in an ever increasing way, that I'm a person prone to wandering, failing, and dying. I need a Deliverer. I need a rescuer. I need Him.

We talked long last night. Wet and sore and spent. Him and him and her and me. And a sleeping other.

Why do we love God? she asked. And we all had our answers, because He first loved us, because without Him we're nothing, because we should, because there isn't anything better, because...

I had confessed to her earlier, though, on some trail in the foothills, that I love God but sometimes I don't trust Him. And that's the truth. So when I answered later, "Because there isn't anything better than Him." I meant that. I did. I'm not one of those Count Your Blessings Name Them One by One sort of Christians whose love is hinged on good things versus bad. I've tried the scale method. It doesn't work. It doesn't.

Because regardless of the weight of good things on one side, something heavier will fall, death, divorce, being left, disappointment, on the other side. And the scales will crumble. But He doesn't. Things do, but not Him.

And there are things weighing heavily on the scales, it doesn't take a conversation or ten to realize that. We are shaken from every side, tossed around and given opportunity to be glad or grumble. But we are confident of this one thing:

He out-weighs them all.

A meager attempt at beating the Block Monster:

It's summer in Potsdam. I know. Surprising huh? We're all walking around in a winter stupor one day and then the next people are barbecuing and walking around in tshirts and shorts. Potsdam is a college town. Some towns have colleges in them, but aren't college towns. But not here. The median age is low to mid-twenties and the ride of choice is two feet. I love living here.

I'm sitting on a robin's egg blue chair. When the Mother of the House painted a kitchen cabinet this color last spring we all respectively guffawed and threw in our respective opinions. It was painted quickly back to its original red. But when the Mother of the House offered to repaint my childhood desk chair the same color, I had to contain my excitement. But I didn't.

I'm truly excited every time I look at it and especially when I sit on it. You would be too.

Today several of my dear friends are in an eight-hour long exam, the passing of which is required in order for them to graduate. I vacillate in my prayers. At 7am, when they were just emptying their pockets of cell phones and other contraband, I prayed for them to relax. At 9am, when they were an hour into the test, I prayed for clear heads. At 12 noon, I prayed that they would keep their minds off their stomachs and on the impossible equations in front of them. It's now 1pm and I just realized that if I changed my prayers a little bit, like say, pray for them to do horribly, then they wouldn't graduate, would have to stay, and all my selfish prayers would be answered.

But a few other friends and I are making them dinner tonight, so I think that makes up for one silly selfish prayer.

I did say I liked living in a college town, right? I do. I do. But last night when said friends, plus a few more give or take, and I were wandering around Ives Park, I stopped for one second or ten and looked at them. I know that they're all happy to graduate in a few weeks, and I'm proud of them, I am. But sometimes being kept has its low-points, and every May is mine.

They're all packing up, moving on, moving out, getting jobs, or not, moving home or making a new one. I am here still, though, and this is my home. And I'm glad. Really and truly. I'm glad I love where I live. But it's hard to love so many people who don't live here too.

The other night on the phone one of the Makeshift Family admonished me. We'd been playing phone tag for so many weeks, you see (being very vigilant at it, though, none of this calling once a week and pretending that our duty was done. It really was fairly daily.). He said, "We can't let this happen, Lor." And I knew he didn't mean phone-tag or months of not talking followed by a rush to fit the stuff of life into a half-hour. He meant, we can't let time and distance be the undoing of good things. We can savor and reunite and laugh best with those people, but we can't let the middling and meantiming fall.

On Tuesday a good man walked into our office and filled it with good things, namely smiles and compliments and a big sigh. "I wish I had enough time to spend time really visiting with you lovely ladies," he said. "It's okay," I said back, "life is a vapor. We understand that."

That's why I like it here. In Potsdam. At home. It may not look like much to the naked eye. But it is. Meantiming and middling is the stuff of life and I'm not on my way anywhere except heaven. Eternity is written on my heart and I'm, somehow, touching it from this small place.

Somehow.

There is a pile of green by my window that just keeps growing. I think they love the sunshine and warmth of late, I know I do. They've been stretching their tendrils up the window and across the sill. I should separate them, maybe being so close together isn't good for them, but I like the different shades and textures. And I like piles of green.

This week is prophetic presbytery at my church. I say to my friend on the way home last night that it's stirring my faith and it really is. Then she put her hand on me and prayed for me and I cried, sobs that should my shoulders. Then my faith really felt stirred. I love presbytery, I do, but what I love more is unity among people.

The other day another friend asked me what my plan is. I wonder if people who have real jobs and real families ever get asked that. I get asked all the time. Sometimes I make things up, sometimes I tell the truth, sometimes I say, I don't know but I think about..., most of the time I just say, "You know, I'm really excited to be a part of what God is doing here. My immediate plan is to continue fostering excitement."

Why are we a people so obsessed with A Plan? Life is just a vapor and then it's over. Plan on eternity instead, it's a better investment.

If I must make a plan, though, here's mine:

Figure out what's wrong with my car and find a boy who will take it to the mechanic: I have Cheat Me written on my various extremities.
Give more generously of my finances.
Go food shopping and buy spinach for sure.
Call ATT and pull the loyal customer for five years card: I have 3000 rollover minutes, I'm on the lowest plan possible and I still pay 70.00 a month. What?
Clean our apartment and do laundry.
Take my vitamins.
Be a better friend, not just better company.
Exercise gratefulness.
Stop getting into messes by accident and fumbling my way out of them.

That's it for today.

Oh, and try to climb out of a bad case of writer's block.

We wait, in collective mourning, for the rumbling of an earthquake or some great disaster or last hurrah. We wait, huddled in a room, for the wrath of a Father for the loss of His only Son. We are waiting for the slap on the wrist, the furrowed brow in our general direction, a stony silence.

We denied Him; now we are afraid that He will deny us.

I am not sure what we thought would happen. Miracles are believable when they are in first person. But we are second persons now, we are the observers; no longer participants in the greatest act of God since creation.

Peter is swallowing the guilt of denial, his words echoing off the corners of his heart. Matthew is distraught, still, over Judas's mathematics: 30 gold pieces are chump change to him and he would have given thrice or more in exchange for one more day. The women are weeping in the corner. Mary throws her wrap over her head and leaves the room by herself, holding scents and spices and a plan. Thomas is saying he told us so, and so he did. So he did.

We have forgotten quickly. It is two days since then and we have grown accustomed to the gnawing disappointment. For moments during His agony we expected and waited, then when the sky turned dark, we thought Surely Then. The veil is torn in the temple, we're told, this is the sign perhaps?

We will finish our Sabbath, though nothing about mourning is restful. We will leave the room and enter life before Jesus. Next year, perhaps? The Messiah will come? Next year?

This is our wait. We hover over seventy-two hours and a promise we didn't understand and didn't think to ask.

The clouds roll like tumbleweed over the Saint Lawrence, gathering their supply before heading back over the mountains to our right. It is grey everywhere recently, not like Summer or Autumn around here, where everything is lit with color. We grow accustomed to the sameness of Winter and Spring; even the daffodils and small violets are a minute shock to our existence. Which of these things doesn't belong?

I have made a Caricature God. What's yours?

Mine is a God of sameness. When I was small the parishioners would sing in four-part harmony "Great is Thy faithfulness, there is no shadow of turning with Thee, Thou changest not.." and you know the rest. I envisioned a God who had a lethargy any five year old would disdane. I did. Mine is a God of deceptive bordem, a continual plod toward a New Heaven and New Earth. This is no journeyman with a wunderlust for life, this is no rigid taskmaster with a end goal in sight, this is a God who marks tallies on a cave wall: Day 263. Day 8754. Day 24,788.

Mine is a God who has been seated on a throne for more days than I understand and whose beard has grown past his knees and who has grown accustomed to my mistakes and missteps. He nods from that great throne and glances at the calendar to see if it's almost time to just bring us all home where we belong.

I wake every morning to deceptive sameness. This week is full of grey spring rain, enough to make the grass turn a brilliant green and to break the icy winter dams that have held back the rushing and wild water. And maybe it's the rain that makes me think that every day changest not, but more perhaps it's the daily grind of life. The same coffee maker churning out the same cup of coffee keeping me awake through the same morning to do the same things to go the same places. Ad nauseum.

And I wonder today, how He does it? This Caricature God of mine. How does he remain faithful? How does his changelessness and faithfulness defy the impressions of a five year-old and this twenty-something year old? He says Faithful, I say Boring. He says Unchangeable, I say New Toy Please. The book of Hebrews says:

In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath,so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us.

Right about now I need some strong encouragement. Not that I'm faltering or failing or hopelessly flailing around, but just because His unchangeableness seems a little grey right now, a little too constant, a little too familiar. I'm asking for something that doesn't belong to jolt me wide awake and put some color into my world. I'm asking for a fresh impression of God.

I play the waiting game. Waiting for the light to change. Waiting for my phone to ring. Waiting for my coffee to brew and waiting to wake up one day found perfect. I'm waiting for righteousness to clothe me, to be credited to me, and to be the legacy behind me.

Today I am reading in Micah, chapter 7:

He will bring me out to the light, and I will see His righteousness.

The funny thing is, even when I'm dwelling in darkness I can still see what is bathed in light. A small light goes a long way. Yet when I'm brought out into the light it's not my righteousness that becomes evident, it's His.

See, I'm still here, twiddling my thumbs and kneading my knots out of my flesh. I'm still here practicing good character and stepping up to the plate. I'm here just waiting, waiting because it's good to wait you see. It's good to not pluck that fruit before its time. And it's good to not rush the game, good guys finish last we know from middle school and marriage proposals. But on the other end of waiting, on the other end of coming out, it's not us who gets completed. It's Him.

And something about that makes this, all of this, much more doable. It's not my righteousness I'm waiting for, it's His I'm walking in.

Enough of these bullet point posts. I read an article a few weeks ago, one paragraph particularly catching my heart:

The second thing on my mind was to encourage the young man not to think of these days as wasted--a lost parenthesis interrupting so-called "real life." Every day he trusts God is real life, and something good is going on behind the deceptive sameness. One day it will erupt into the visible, as God brings about a new and beautiful thing when the time is right.

There are a few notable verbs in that smidgen: encourage, think, trust, bring, and my personal favorite, erupt.

I like the idea of erupting. I like the idea that someday while we are riding our bikes or skipping over cracks in sidewalks, eating chicken salad or tying our shoes, answering the phone or twinkling our eye, that there will be something instantaneous. I like the idea that it will happen quickly and surprisingly. That the parenthesis of our lives, the dash between the dates on a headstone, all of it will suddenly be so meaningless. That the dead in Christ shall rise right then. I like that.

But here we are still, in the meantime, bated breath catching on real life and seemingly wasted days. Here we are tying our shoes and riding our bikes and working 9-5 and paying our bills and twiddling our collective thumbs. I am not so good at the Every Day We Trust God is Real Life. I like to think that it's preparing me for real life, that this hurdle is only a minute scale of the real hurdle yet to come. And perhaps it is, but what if it's not?

What if yesterday was preparation for today and, really, that's it? Isn't that enough? If I had somehow skipped yesterday, wouldn't my today be muddled up and frustrating?

And something good is going on behind this deceptive sameness, this computer monitor and three color logos and ten 10 minute jobs. And I don't know what the new and beautiful thing is, or when the time will be right.

But I know it will erupt. It will surprise. And it might not be for a long, long time. But it will be worth all the days punctuated by questions and quotes.

Period.

34 hours of driving: check
A depleted ipod battery: check
Many hours of Louie Giglio, David Crowder and good tears: check
Security check at Fort Jackson: check
Hours of driving around base: check
Hours of sitting on grass just being: check
Lots of physical touch: check
Lots of hugs: check
Lots of stories: check
Cups of coffee consumed: 12. check.
Adopt-a-niece met: check, an oh so adorable check
Bad food for me consumed: a lot. check.
Pics uploaded to facebook: check
Pockets of grace: check
Hours of sleep total in four days: 15. check.
Flowers bought: check
Surprise three boys: check, check, check!
Presents delivered: check
The Scarlet Pimpernel and Co. seen: check
Arrive home finally: check

Piles of pride in my heart: Yup. Piles. Heaps and piles.

Coldplay says summer is coming.
So does an open sunroof.
And flipflops.
My friends Brent and Christina are coming to visit me for a week in May.
Then Brent will go to grad school and be smart.
And Christina will spend the summer with me.
We will dangle our toes in the river and eat bad things for us, like ice cream.

Louissa and I moved our office furniture around.
Peoples' reaction to this are varied:
What is this, a dorm room?
Do you like being so close?
Why would you want to have your monitors back to back,
doesn't it annoy you to see each other all day long?
I don't care what people think.
I like our office
and I like seeing my favorite person all day long.

I am driving to South Carolina in two days.
For two days.
That's 34 hours of driving in four days.
Stupid.
My brother is graduating from Boot Camp Basic Training
in Fort Jackson.
So it's worth it.

I ran out of vitamins two weeks ago.
I'm feeling it now.

I'm practicing something and I think it's working.
This is what I'm practicing:
Yes, why, yes! I DO like my job!
In fact, I love my job!
My bosses are Fives.
My coworkers are Fives.
My church is Fives.
My friends are Fives.
My life is Fives!
Only I started doing this before anybody mentioned anything about Fives.

I have friends.
For the first time in a year and a half.
I have local friends who I actually like hanging out with.
Who I have great conversations with.
Who I'm going to miss in a few weeks.
When they all leave.

Not everything is perfect, just so you know:
People sin.
Me too.
People are graduating and leaving.
But not me.
I still feel far away from things that I want,
people I love,
and
certainty.

But I think something is in the air,
and it's changing things.

I've been thinking about the church recently. Goodness knows, I ought to be. It consumes 45 hours of my week and The Church consumes the rest of my waking hours.

But I've also been thinking about March too. It's consuming 24 hours of my day, which is to say I am immersed in it. Everywhere I look is March. I walked long yesterday wearing an open sweatshirt and I woke this morning to a half inch of ice on my car. The lion and lamb are bipolar methinks.

Today I drive slowly on ice covered roads, stuck behind school buses and snowplows. I'm not listening to music, but I'm thinking it. I'm thinking that Surely We Can Change. If March can change so quickly, so violently, than surely we can too.

I'm having good conversations recently. Nothing earth-shattering. Nothing awakening. Nothing life-changing. But good. The sort of good like the sun beating on your back while you sit on a deck in March, staring at your toes and talking about fear. Good like holding friend's babies and not just talking about community, but living it. The sort where friends get indignant and call me at the office to shake some sense into me, or at least shake the phone at me. The sort where I nod and try to formulate the thoughts, but mostly just need to listen to theirs. I'm talking about The Church. I'm talking about small changes, slow changes. Small mindsets, slow awakenings, cracking through the veneer of ice and finding living, breathing earth below.

Asking for seeds.

Saying I don't have the answers and I can't explain the weather. Saying I don't know why I'm here and why you're there and why the sun isn't here either. But I know it's changing. I know it's coming. I know the Kingdom is in us and I know we're bringing it to earth. And I know that this is what it is, this church, This Church, this people. Incomplete and insufficient. Wrinkled and mussed. But won already. Love is for the Springtime and He's done that for us. He's said it's time to change and he's already set it in motion. So we wait out March, expectant and sure.

Because it will all change.

Once we went camping up in Chilhowee, the swiveled mountains of eastern Tennessee. We brought two tents because there were enough of us, but they still weren't nearly enough. We meant to have a campfire and laugh and howl back at the woodland creatures, but it was one of the most torrential downpours of that autumn. We entwined, curled around one another and huddled for warmth and surety. There is a picture from the following morning, boys in the back, girls in the front, and we are waterlogged and happy. Deliriously happy.

Another time, with another friend, we took a class in Wilderness Leadership and Survival and proved our prowess in both. We slept under tarps in 30 below weather in different mountains of the more northern sort. She got frostbite and I held my bladder for over thirty hours, sure that if I bared my skin to the elements I wouldn't feel it again. When we got home it was to shouts of "Welcome and don't you ever do that again!" But I believe we both pulled some of the only 4.0s in that class. I know for sure that our small group of five was the only group who slept on the summit.

I love camping, I do. And these are only two stories of the dozens that mark some of the best times of my life. This week I've been thinking about that. A lot.

See. A lot of someones have been asking me if "this", their fingers pointed in the general direction of something they deem as less than satisfying, is what I really want to do with the rest of my life. And I squirm and say no, of course not, would you? But later, when I have crawled under my down comforter and set my cell phone alarm and check my email, I think of the constants. The things that I really love to do.

And they include things like canoes, tents, dirt under my fingernails, and a million lessons in a million creations.

I worked at summer camps for ten years of my life, trying my hand at counseling, lifeguarding, directing, and bystanding, and it's in this environment that I feel fully alive, fully me, fully immersed in Who God Is and What He Has Created. And I love that. But because it was always a summer thing I have it in my mind that it could never be a full time thing.

But maybe it could?

Maybe deluges and snow that has formed a mold for my sleeping body and ghost stories and Tin Foil Dinners and the Glorious Greatness of everything out there could be what I do.

I'd be happy with that. I would.

I said it before, but I'll say it again. Because this post is about remembrance. Former things. Other things. Said things and implied things.

John 14 is my bread these days. I chew it. I mull over it. I forget it easily. I need it the moment I think about it again. And, like bread, when I am full, I forget it again. Case in point, I had to look the following verse up. I've let the crumbs from my bread spill all around, making a mess of my spirituality.

I always think of Christ as the end-all, the principal, the phenom of all that is good. He was sinless, homeless, and mud and miracles were his drugs of choice. He was the Rabbi, the Master, the Teacher, and the Hider. The crucified and the betrayed. He was all good. Nothing short of good. But even He knew that His 33 years of goodness would be a hard sell for thousands of years of disbelievers yet to come.

Don't get me wrong, the work of the cross completed the work of the cross. I'm not adding to His perfection. But He did.

These things I have spoken to you while
abiding with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will bring to you, He will teach
you all things, and bring to your remembrance
all that I said to you. John 14.25-26

Even if Christ had spent every moment of those three years with His disciples just teaching, instead of doing miracles and loving the masses too, He couldn't have finished the ongoing Word of His Father. We needed more. We needed the Holy Spirit.

So I'm remembering all that He's said to me, but I am also learning new things, and I think they're part of the all things.

I don't know why this winter isn't wearing on me as much as winter normally does. Typically I face the Lion in on the first of March with a snarl and a growl of my own. I won't take any more of his shenanigans.

But not this year. Not sure why.

Because it would make sense that this year would be the epitome of disappointment: I'm still here, for one. I thought I'd be in grad school, or married, or editing some non-profit publication, or even spoon-feeding orphans in India by now. I really, really thought that. I also spent half of this winter with mono, that has to count for something. I also miss my friends so much sometimes that I think that God really, really doesn't mean for us to ever repeat the same goodness twice. I also have cold feet right now. These things add up to a hunk of disappointment and disappointment for me usually comes out in some sort of revolution against the weather.

What can I say, I'm passive aggressive like that.

But I don't feel it. I mean, those things are true, but they don't feel disappointing to me today. And sometimes I feel guilty about that. I've got problems. I feel guilty for not feeling badly.

Last night during a very long phone conversation with a good chum, the conversation turned to the Israelites and manna. I told him to blog about it. I told him at the very least to email me every single good thought so I could remember it for real. Especially since I was driving while talking on my cell, which is illegal in New York and it would be even more unwise to drive, talk on my cell, and jot thoughts down. Unwise and illegal.

But he said something that I won't easily forget: manna means "What is it?" but it still sustained them for forty years. This nameless, flake of edible dust, this daily rain, daily bread, sustained them.

I say to him when he's finished his passionate sermon to one, that this is what I needed to hear. This is my manna season.

Because I look at the state of things right now and I think "What am I doing? What is sustaining me? What is this?"

Not knowing that I'm answering my question with my question. That is the answer: What is it? Somehow that sustains, somehow that feeds, somehow that fills.

So it is the winter or the wilderness or just the wandering season--but it is somehow the thing through which we walk, fed by our questions.

So take that, Winter.

I turn the verse over in my mouth and mind, like a peppermint candy, til there is a snowflake-like round skeleton of truth left. It's the barebones of faith: Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Abraham + belief = righteousness

I am not so sure it works the same for me.

My faith only seems to equal misinterpretation and misconception. I think this yesterday when I hear that she died suddenly, leaving behind a four year old, a four day old, and a husband. I think this last night surrounded by friends and a long, hard conversation. I think this driving to work today, shouting along with David Crowder again: Are we left here on our own? Can you feel when your last breath is gone?

I think this when I think that it is my faith that pushes me around, stumbles around, turns me around and stuns me into some sort of righteousness. Without my knowledge. I am faltering, failing, fearing, and then I am realizing and it is righteousness that is my realization. But not my own, not the marriage of my faith and works. This isn't righteousness.

Abraham had faith. He believed, but didn't become righteous. He was credited with righteousness. He got something he didn't deserve by doing something that wasn't natural. Like a paper-doll, he was clothed with it. It dressed him and completed him, but wasn't of him.

So when I begin thinking that it is my faith that makes me righteous, I stumble badly.

God doesn't see me when He sees me. He sees Christ. He sees the goodness of Christ dressing me. He credits me with Christ just because I say I want it. Because I believe. This strange math doesn't make sense, but it makes believers, and so I believe it.

I'm driving to work, dodging potholes left by ice pockets. I'm blowing on my hands and listening to David Crowder. I'm listening loudly, if it's possible. I'm thinking about Isaiah 60. I'm thinking about waking, coming, seeing, looking, seeing.

In November someone, or a few someones, said that this would be a long one. This is not what we want to hear on the cusp of our longest season. We do not want to hear that it will be a warm one, even, because temperatures closer to 30 mean more snow and we want less. At least I do. I'll take the frigid cold, so cold it's painful, but Lord, please, no more snow. So I bundled my self, my nerves, my attitude, and waited for the Long One. But the long one didn't come. I kept expecting it, holding my breath like the game we play in highway tunnels: who can hold it the longest? Waiting for the blizzard, waiting for the mountain of snow that would confirm Someone's words.

But it's the middle of February and It hasn't come. And all my projected disappointments have lingered still, waiting, opening every morning and pulling back the curtains to Is This The Day? The day that the Long One will begin?

And I think about this because I am thinking about anticipation. Someone else asks me the other day if I am doing what I want to do and I am smart and quick back to them, "Are any of us doing what we want to do?" And what I'm thinking is not smart or quick, "Aren't we all just waiting for the big disappointment? That we'll lay dying and think, well, I made it through and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be." That the wars and rumors of wars and persecution and hurt and unfairness of it all were just, well, they just were and weren't as bad as they might have been?

We're all waiting for Spring and it hasn't even really been winter yet.

Isaiah 60 says it like this:

Get out of bed, Jerusalem! Wake up.
Put your face in the sunlight.
God's bright glory has risen for you.
The whole earth is wrapped in darkness,
all people sunk in deep darkness,
But God rises on you, his sunrise glory breaks over you.
Nations will come to your light,
kings to your sunburst brightness!
Look up! Look around!

And so this morning I add an addendum to my smart and shameful words and thoughts: We are sunk in deep darkness but God rises on us, His glory breaks over us.

Waking is not the realization that it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be or might be or could be. Waking is Seeing because we can. Right now! Not dwelling in projected disappointment (It might snow or It will snow and It might last until April or It will last until April), but walking in Light and Faith and Glory because the rest of the world is hibernating away the winter of their lives in darkness.

It IS nearly Spring, nearly over, and it hasn't been as bad as we thought it might be. Certainly not as bad as past winters and certainly not as bad as it will be in three years or ten. But it is now and it is today and we can let out our collective breath: Look up! Look around!

It's already finished!

Public speaking and a lifetime of Sunday Morning sermons have taught me one thing: (unlike the summation I am about to give,) life cannot be summed up in twenty minutes or three points. I say this to fifteen girls sitting girls sprawled around our living room last week just before I begin to talk about the Sayable and the Said. I say it to them because I am a cheat and a scoundrel--hording ideas on scraps of paper, scrawling words in the margins of my Bible to pull out at opportune times. I copy the methods I learn for good speaking, good learning, and good works and spew them on Tuesday nights or whenever questions need to be answered.

Which is always, I'm finding.

She stands in my kitchen today as we cook salmon and smell cilantro. She says: I'm trying to figure out how God can be the God Who is There and Who Cares, and still be the God who lets soldiers die and divorce rip and cancer steal life. I make a mental list of all the suffering I see, the suffering that touches the people I love, and silently agree. How can He be both? This is a question that three point sermons can't answer.

We suspend on hope, on ifs and on If God Wills. Emily Dickinson said it this way: I dwell in possibility. And the father of the demoniac in Mark 9 said it this way: If You can do anything, do it! Help us! This is when only the Sayable can answer.

I mean to say that sometimes the answers to the questions we trip on and swirl under are not found in knowing the answers at all. Sometimes the answers are in the saying of truth and that is all.

There are no ifs in following Christ, Jesus said to that father. Because we believe and because God doesn't need our help anyway, the only thing that needs help is our unbelief. So we pray like this: I believe. Help my unbelief. A statement and a question. A statement and an exclamation. A question and a statement. It depends on your punctuation. It depends on your prayer. But pray it anyway. Ask it anyway. Any way.

Because we believe in this man who was God and flesh simultaneously. We believe in a perfect garden and we believe in death and resurrection. We believe that sufferings aren't for sins sake, but Glory's. We believe that lost coins and sheep are worth it and we believe most of all that sometimes we don't believe. So we say that, too, right out loud.

Then we see the miracle, small and hushed, quiet and unassuming, slipping in unannounced because the best miracles do. And we wake one morning and find that we believe and that we really do.