postscript

a musing more on the theme of loving people...

what do we do when people fail us? do we give them another try and believe the best, or assume they will always be that way, even allowing the failure to seep back into the history of our relationship, colouring every memory with disappointment? it is a hard line to walk, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things...especially in the face of defeat.

walk with me down the other side: what do we do when we fail? when we find we gave our hearts to the wrong people, when we find we cannot meet their expectations, when every effort to say "I love you" went awry. 

the dark night of the perfectionist's soul is failure. is there moonlight to find the early dawning? or must we accept defeat and realize that the future will always be this way--lonely, misunderstood, frustrated? 

should you read this and think of Him, yes, I've walked there. He does promise overcoming...the question remains what that looks like in each individual life.

May I find the strength to make it one more day, and may that day hold hope. This road you've given me is full of potholes and the signposts are missing. I'm running out of gas and the will to keep driving. Please, please...take me home. 

The rest was hard to explain

Something I keep coming back to, a recurring theme if you will, is how to love people. It seems we spend so much energy analysing, discussing, boxing the walking complexities with whom we live and work. Whole careers such as counseling are devoted to figuring out what makes the human machine tick. And then, if we’re honest, the moment we have it all figured out--the lover securely on a pedestal, the enemy behind bars, the friend embraced--they go and do something “uncharacteristic” and we, reeling from damaged expectations or misunderstandings, want to give up, throw in the towel and just say (as someone did to me) “all conversations with you must end in ‘I don’t know’”. 

Perhaps you have never arrived, or rarely, at the place of “I don’t know”. The place where you realize that you see in a mirror dimly, but you long to see face to face. Where you face the shattering reality that the person you love will never completely understand you, or perhaps, which is worse, that person gave up the fight to understand...which is a small refusal to love. But if you have arrived, you know the ache to be fully known and the surrender to the only One who will ever fully know, that is, until that day that all in Him are truly one.

Lewis’s artful novel, Till We Have Faces, deals with the tension that love constantly faces in desiring to know the other. In one sense, knowledge relates to control. If I can define you, analyse and dissect what makes you be and act then no mystery remains and you become mine--completely. Just as Orual wanted Psyche and Bardia to be all her own, the love became twisted. True love holds with open palms, recognizing that we can never own anyone, much less be owned. 

My loves must rest in His hands, knowing that His will will prevail, that my overwhelming hope for those I love must be that they hear His voice and follow...just as I must. And I don’t know. Why we do the things we do. Why I run so often. Why life doesn’t work out the way I hope...especially when it comes to the immortal horrors and everlasting splendors with whom I banter and break. 

At the moment when I can take no more and I fall, say I don’t know, is the moment I find peace. It is hard to explain and He is gonna have to take me home, heal the inevitable heartache that comes with loving people who don’t love you back.

spelunking

so this week on my day off we went spelunking to ape cave. the misadventure sparked a poem that, if you know me, is somewhat of a metaphor for my life.

missed opportunities

in this cave

it's dark

my little light

shows the way

but I'm still lost

by now I thought

there'd be turns

ups and downs

surprises too

instead it's quiet

too quiet

too wide open

I think I missed

some signpost

or side passage

oh, no! it's narrow

the walls closing

I'm crawling

on my belly

too late to turn

nowhere to go

and then it ends

I must go back

return to day

never see

the right cave

never know

what I missed

only feel

this sense of loss

emptiness

the haunting face

of a dead-end cave

altars

trying a new medium...well, an old medium I don't usually share...and a poem to go along with it. (btw, it's reversed on the computer from the original)

offerings

why is this hard?

it's only dreams

some worn-out hopes

less than it seems

I piled them high

each filled parchment

scraps of heart songs

memories spent

a few pens too

symbols of more

lines yet to be

now I kneel poor

I don't want it

this burden deep

I give You it

raise my hands, weep

hides a ram close?

or do I die?

take my Isaac

my only cry

untitled *20 nov 2008

"I can handle this," she said

to the fish in the sea

"I've been here before,

I know what I'll be."

"I can handle this," she said

to the star in the sky

"I won't become blind,

I won't even cry."

"I can handle this," she said

to her heart deep inside.

Back came the whisper

"You already tried."

surprise

I rounded the corner of the mount, striving to catch my breath and run harder after weeks without regular runs. The day boasted the usual pigeon-grey sky but with some distant visibility. Glancing by habit towards the mountain (usually hidden) I did a double take for beauty surprised me--the snowy peak rose glistening in the half-light. My pace slowed as I drank it in.

This past week I had the privilege to attend a surprise 50th birthday party for a friend. It got me thinking about surprise and how that affects our lives. In English we say, “oh, you surprised me” “you caught me off guard” “I wasn’t expecting that” “I wasn’t ready...” and so on. Being “on guard” and having “expectations” always ready conjure up in my mind a soldier--armed, protected with his defenses up--and it truly is how many people walk through life, myself included. I expect people to act a certain way and I put up the necessary walls in order to protect myself from the hurts that come when I am unprepared. And most of the time it works marvelously; that is, people do live up to my expectations. But some people don’t. 

Last Saturday I worked the WV booth at a woman’s conference and I have to admit, going into it I was expecting to not enjoy it at all. Lots of women, after all, is not my idea of a good time. Too much estrogen and cutesy sermons. But God surprised me. The two woman who spoke were authors and amazing, weaving talks of dreams and God’s miraculous leading of those who are willing to live dangerous lives that love others beyond the hurt. Unprepared for a message that cut straight to the vulnerable heart of where I was living, I wept. Amazed at a God who delights in cutting past the walls we weave to protect us from love. 

A song I heard today goes like this...

I was born to laugh / I learned to laugh through my tears / I was born to love / I'm gonna learn to love without fear

A bit ago, I walked down a stream of thoughts in my head to the place where I--hopefully reverently--said “I told You so”, being that things were turning out the way I expected them to back when He asked for my surrender. The inevitable pain, the brokenness and then it hit me how much I don’t want things to turn out the way I expect them to. I serve Him partly in hopes that the miraculous can happen--that He will tell me so. A surprisingly wonderful life is what my silly heart really wants deep down.

I realize that I don’t want to live a safe life. Even looking back over this last year of pain and the potential for pain that is in some of my relationships this year I make a choice. Maybe a life without surprises means less heart attacks or strokes, less bleeding hearts to mend. But it also means less times of wonder. Less moments when you pause, gazing at a flock of birds, white underwings in formation sailing into a grey sky. Less surges of hope in the smile of a friend. Less opportunities to find at the end of yourself when you walk off the flatbed you are “walking on the hand of God” (_Peace Like A River_). 

prayerful fear

in loving, as lewis says, you become vulnerable. so as my friend prayed for me i also pray: may i have the courage to continue...

courage

i thought i showed you love

in a million little ways

but the message intercepted

and now i find i’m lost

adrift in a sea of misunderstanding

and you are staring from land

with accusing eyes

no life preserver in sight

and i think the waves are cold

but welcoming as well

maybe i’ll just sink

can i find hope for new

the courage to try again

is this pain worth the return

that is never guaranteed

my arms are tired

help me float

Courage is fear that has said its fears. ~Dorothy Bernard

To grow up is to find 

the small part you are playing 

in this extraordinary drama 

written by somebody else. ~Madeleine L'Engle

grey dawning

down the trail an impromptu stream, swollen by the rain, runs at my feet. in the distance fireworks cackle loudly, the remainders of the night's festivities, and a dog furiously barks a reply in sudden shock at the peaceful holiday's disturbance.
as this new year begins, my thoughts wander to time. "in the fullness of time", perfect timing, the opportune moment, the time is now, etc. so much of life, at least especially western life, is centered around the idea that time can be harnessed and used. people plan weddings, outings, careers, lives around days, hours, moments. the successful seem always to know what time it is and where they will be next time.
then there are those, like i, that have always found time more of an enemy. it's not that i don't have enough time, nor that i cannot be on time, nor that i run out of time, but rather it's that time never seems to move with me. like mismatched pairs, i try to follow his lead but time and time again i miss a step, step on his toes, find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong dreams. i apologize, and hope to do better next time but...
i find myself often thinking in song lyrics. isn't it rich?...losing my timing this late in my career but i never had good timing, or a career. and when the sunlight fades to morning You'll still be burning in my eyes, Take my life, take away all the shattered dreams in me...
of course, there is the ongoing discussion of this little time in light of Time...eternity. and for all that i long for the day when i step out of my missteps and failures into perfection, i know the time given me is crucial. so perhaps that is why i look forward with agony, yes, but hope as well. this new year is a blank slate. maybe this time i will get it right.

postscript:

thoughts from _A Severe Mercy_ that relate: "...we had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time--moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. Or time-free moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus--the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen. We had dreamed of Grey Goose as a way to escape the pressure of time, though now one escapes entirely. Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little. When we speak of Now, we seem to mean the timeless: there is no duration. Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now."