my ant brain.

this is a chunk from an evolving chapter in the second half of the book. (for the newbies, other excerpts are in the earliest postings).and for the record, i'm not a fan of "hysterically hiccuping" either...but that's why i said it's an evolving chapter.  

i’m often afraid of heaven. if i think too long on it, i feel a shivery nausea run through me before my thoughts skip somewhere safer. the sheer unfathomable otherness of such a place or existence always overwhelms me.

one of my earliest and most revisisted memories is of my mom calming these fears. she found me hysterically hiccupping into my carebear in the dark of my canopy bed. when I admitted that the source of my panic was the thought of spending “a forever” in heaven, she laughed (the nerve!), but then got very serious.

“what’s the hardest thing you’re learning in school right now?” she asked. sensing a diversion and feeling wholly above such tactics, i answered hesitantly

“…long division?”

“now imagine an ant trying to do your long division homework…do you think that’s possible?”

i remember cracking up, thinking that was just about the funniest thing i could picture, his tiny antennae  twitching and sizzling as he struggled to  compute. stupid little ant.

 “no! their brains are way too small!”

“exactly. that’s what it’s like when we try to understand something like heaven. our human brains are too small to handle something so God-sized. You don’t have to be afraid of something just because you can’t understand it. the trick is learning to trust that God does.”

she asked me if the two of us could just keep sitting there on my bed and talking, would that be scary, even if there was no end in sight? no, that didn’t feel overwhelming at all.
 

i come back to that memory all the time to reassure myself that there’s a difference between fearing something and not understanding it. this is a distinction I tend to forget time and time again.

and really, would i want to worship a God who fit perfectly inside of my tiny little ant brain?  

ashton kutcher.

i think it was mother teresa who said "may God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in". i used to pray this prayer, like a good social worker, but after a while i realized...the whole world is pretty freakin huge and that actually hurts...alot. once God starts to crack your heart open to fit people in, it feels like He will never stop. (and i get images of all of my middle school classmates cranking their palate expanders, as the gap between their front teeth grew ever wider. i always wondered if they cranked too quickly if their head would split in two, right up between the eyebrows) and if He doesn't stop, where do i begin? who do i help?how do i help the refugees in Lynn but ignore all of the homeless people i pass on my way there? how do i focus on them when overseas, there's villages of girls brought into sexual slavery? and the crack babies and the lonely old men and the battered women and the crippled children....it never ends. IT NEVER ENDS.

for assistance addressing this particular overwhelmtion (yes, i made up that word), i'd like to defer to my good friend ashton kutcher and his co-star from The Guardian, kevin costner. (and my only viewing of this movie was also the first time my now-husband, then-"he's so dreamy!" put his arm around me, so forgive me if the details are blurry.) quick overview: the movie is about rescue divers. the people who - if you are stupid enough to get caught kayaking on the open sea in a hurricaine - will jump out of a helicopter to save your foolish self. so ashton (cocky, insubordinate trainee) is asking kevin (troubled, seen-it-all veteran trainer) how he decides who to save when there's more than one person drowning. 

and kevin, in his simple drawling wisdom says 

It's probably different for everybody. Its kind of simple for me though. I just, I take the first one I come to or the weakest one in the group and then I swim as fast and as hard as I can for as long as I can. And the sea takes the rest.

ashton thinks about this for a while and they have a real heavy moment. and the camera is zooming in on their serious eyes and capturing all the meaning in the room and ashton asks:

do you think i'm ready?

if i did not think you were ready, i would not drop you in the Bering Sea.

sometimes it feels like there's too much hurt in this world and if i come across one more hurting person, my heart is going to crack in half and fall to my butt. so when i start to feel the overwhelmtion take over, when i start to feel like i'm in the bering sea, surrounded by drowning people, i have to remember - i have to trust that God wouldn't drop me out here if i wasn't ready. i have to focus on the ones closest to me, the ones who are the weakest. i need to love them as hard as i can and as long as i can and keep swimming until He takes me back up. (too many metaphors?)

but here's the thing. i have to also trust that He's dropped other people in with me and we are all trusting swimming and loving the hell out of those around us. i have to believe that like frenchpressedfridays says, God has come to each of us with a vision for our lives and like mary, we have the choice to say no thanks or to say "my soul magnifies the Lord." we're all dropped in a specific area of the bering sea with a specific set of talents, abilities and passions that we are supposed to use.

i have to believe this because there's too many drowning people out there for me not to believe this.

another wise person said that sometimes in a world that's bleeding out, all we can do is hold our palms over the wounds. so jump in, reach out and find a wound you can reach. find one that your individual hand fits. and hold on. 


so maybe mother teresa is right - maybe God will continue to stuff people into my heart until the day i die. but the thing is, i have to remember that i can't fix them all - i can't save them all. but i can swim around all day, every day "preggers with grace and truth".

percolating.

there's a new post brewing in my head and it's ricocheted off of another blog. check out frenchpressedfridays in my "inspiration" tab and read the Dec. 6 "Preggers with Grace and Truth" posting.

percolate on that for a while. i will too and maybe post some thoughts of my own by the end of the day...

moths. gag.

today i was driving on the mass pike, gagging into the steering wheel. a text from my little brother:

" a moth just flew into my forehead and flittered its wings on my oily skin"

everyone has a phobia, right? mine just happens to be one of the lamest. don't ask me how it came about. it was a bizarre and admittedly stupid combination of the mothman prophecies, a nightmare, high school boys with a bug zapper and a perfumed visit to a butterfly farm. just thinking about their feathery little antennas....you know what- i can't even write about them. it's making me sick.

so, now that it's dark when i get home from work, i face the daily terror of The Threshold. Millions - ok dozens - ok like, 10 - moths gather on and flutter around the glass pane of our apartment landing. my dreaded task is to make it through the door without being
a) touched    b) landed on    c) followed.
because if they touch me i will vomit, if they land on me, they will either hide in my hair or worse, flutter near my ears (gagging) and if they follow me, they will either take a crack at option a or b or they will sneak into the apartment and get me once i fall asleep.
so far, i've successfully avoided all of the above through a trickily choreographed combination that goes like this:
....a 5-6-7-8... pep talk!don hood! full sprint! hit door! 360 through threshold! (a quick twirl is crucial as it is a successful anti-touch/anti-land maneuver as well as a vacuum generator to suck them back outside and squelch the possibility of being followed) simultaneous door slam! hair flip! (just in case) run up stairs without looking back! (make their little moth brains believe you are not afraid, just a spontaneous and bizarre dancer)

i have a point


even more essential than the quick twirl is the first step: my pep talk. without it, i would not have the courage to do my little dance. i think about the one moth in the wide multi-specied world of moths that does not make me gag. it is fictional. it is from lord of the rings (yes, i'm taking it there.) the one that visits gandalf when he is imprisoned (i swear i'm normal). it's so pretty and so helpful just as i'm wanting to turn off the movie due to depression. then gandalf whispers to it and sends it for help and saves the day etc etc etc.

i still have a point.
believe it or not, it qualifies as "commentary on the christian culture" (per my subtitle).

so i think about this one non-evil moth and convince myself that these gross, terrifying flittery insects on my door are friends with the gandalf moth and i have no need to be afraid. this lie usually lasts until mid-sprint and  momentum takes me from there.

i know there's alot of people who think of christians and want to gag. they've been traumatized by a series of bizarre and probably stupid encounters and now want nothing to do with anyone who calls themself a christian. they come up with complicated maneuvers to avoid these people.

but what if they met JUST ONE christian who didn't make them want to run in the other direction?

someone who was authentic. someone who didn't pretend they were perfect. someone who cared more about loving relationships than a checklist to live by. maybe it would change their entire life.

i started out writing this entry to say that i want to be that gandalf-moth-christian. but as i wrote down and thought about what that would look like, i thought meh, i'll probably screw up and ruin it.

and then i thought about jesus. most people i know who don't like christians have no problem with jesus - just the people who claim to represent Him. i think that to people who don't like christians i would like to say,

"ignore me. i'm human and although i'm trying to be more like jesus, i screw up all the time. but if you get to know jesus, i think you will feel differently toward christianity. in fact, it won't matter much at all how you feel about christianity. i think you (more importantly) will feel drawn to Him...much like a moth (gag) to a flame."

shake and bake.

“I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T-Shirt because it says I want to be formal, but I'm here to party.”

“I like to picture Jesus as a figure skater. He wears like a white outfit, and He does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey.”

Will Ferrell. Talladega Nights. Kills me.

I thought about that scene a lot when I was writing my Werewolf Jesus chapter (somewhere back in the earlier archives) and thinking about how I like to picture Jesus.

“I like to think of Jesus as a mischievous badger.”

I like to think that He’s my best friend, someone to talk to and share with.  I like to think that He answers prayer in the same way I send it out there: absentminded and sporadic. I like to think that He is tame, meek and fits in the palm of my understanding.

Is this any more absurd than liking to think He would wear a tuxedo T-shirt?

Throughout the months of writing this book, my picture of Him continues to change.  Like a rippled image viewed through invisible heat waves, He’s there, but pretty distorted.  Just when I think I have a real glimpse of Him, something changes.

Because, here’s the tricky thing: once you actually start reading the Bible for what it is, not just a storybook or a spiritual energy shot – but a true account of life-changing historical fact, your assumptions start to look real dumb.  And you realize that God, like all truth is really mind-blowingly complicated.

Lately, I don’t know what to think or what I would even like to think.

I’ve been reading the Bible in big chunks, just trying to get a better grasp on the person of Jesus.

I read the Old Testament, where Jesus is still weirdly apart but the same as God up in Heaven and they are so, SO kickass. God takes out armies and flattens cities. He kills people when they screw up and He has all of these bizarre rules that no one can really keep up with. Not so BFF. 

I read the Gospels and imagine Jesus just doing His thing, walking down the road and being like “hey you! Boom, follow me. And you – give away all of your money. Done. You! Go get me a donkey to ride on. And you, shut up and let those kids talk to me” Not very meek. Not very tame.

Then I go to lunch with these people who pray for God to send someone to pay for our meal and He does. HE DOES. He feeds all 70 of us. Totally reliable. Totally willing to answer prayers and bless His children.  

I read the book of Luke and Jesus is telling all of these parables and basically explaining to the Jews “Hello- I’m the Son of God, the one you have been waiting for.” And they are still so confused. Even his disciples, the people he hangs out with every day, who have seen him perform countless miracles and live in a way that no ordinary man does – they still think He is some weird political liberator or an abnormally insightful prophet. They don’t really get it till He’s dead.

“I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I'm sayin grace. When you say grace, you can say it to grown up Jesus, or teenage Jesus, or bearded Jesus, or whatever you want.”

What makes me think I know Him at all? 

cheep cheep.

people have been congratulating me on my recent strides toward authorship. and while this makes me giggle and blush, it also makes me feel a little twisted inside. that feeling under your ribs that stabs you when you take credit for someone else's work.

i picture myself like this little baby chick - so fragile and shiveringly vulnerable. and the only reason i have made it this far is because so many sets of gentle, caring hands have been sent to carry me from one milestone to another. i know there are alot of dbags out there in the publishing world - yet somehow i have just been blessed with the most caring and genuine team of mentors and encouragers.

if it weren't for these people, i would have given up a long time ago. (or, if we are sticking to the baby chick analogy, i would have been crushed in a very Ozzy-esque frenzy by empty pockets, professors who say I'm too honest and the question "so what do you do for a living?" - not to mention the "ssshhhyea right" look that follows my answer.)

but how do you balance satisfaction over 6 months of hard work with the knowledge that you're really just this tiny fluffy creature who Someone is paving the way for?

archives.

hey guys just a reminder- if you're looking for book excerpts, they are in the archives...the latests stuff is just...chatter.