crazy
is a bad word
must be shaved from one’s life
like the straggling bits of hair that keep the face from being seen.

but my frame
was steeped in a melancholy
amniotic tea
bitter
and left too long
and crazy
was the air that filled my lungs
at my first wail

bad
hurtful
counterproductive
but if i shave them away what is left?
where am i?
will i be nothing more
than a pile of flakes
upon the floor?

oh
(people will say)
somebody
clean that up, please.

I can hear the angel asking me the same thing as I stoop and peer into the dark tomb where I have buried my dreams.

Why do you seek satisfaction in that which leaves you hungry? Why do you seek fulfillment in things that will pass away? Why do you seek happiness in things that will disappoint? Why do you run around on this planet, thinking you can create heaven on earth, when all the while it is dying and fading and crumbling before your eyes?

This is all we have ever known. This, as far as we can imagine, is our home. For better or for worse, this is it, what we have been born into, with all its pain and misery, this is all we can imagine. And He doesn’t hold that against us. He has pity on us, knows that we are dust, and treats us gently.

Which is why the scripture is so wonderful “Nor has it entered into the heart of man the things the Father has planned for His children.”

We cannot imagine it. We cannot. In all of our wildest, most fantastic daydreams, what He has for us is beyond that.

He doesn’t really expect us to be able to grasp it. He knows it is beyond our comprehension. There is  no condemnation there, just a simple declaration of truth. He says “Go ahead. Make up the best possible outcome, and then multiply it by the power of infinity. And then add some chocolate sauce. Because that’s just how good it’s going to be. You can’t even fathom it. And I never get tired of seeing your faces when you come through those gates.”

This is the Good News, folks. This is It. That He came and made the way for all of us, every single one of us, no matter how depraved, no matter how crippled and twisted and ugly, to enter through those gates and fall on our faces in disbelief. His goodness and mercy know no bounds, and we can throw ourselves upon them again and again and again and again and it will never fail.

He then says that, though it has not entered into our hearts, yet He has revealed it to us by His Spirit. He has given us that taste, and now we (should) know better. We seek, and we find Him. We taste, and we find that He is good. He alone satisfies. And this is the glimpse of Heaven that we have, within us, that spurs us forward, that puts a gleam in our eye and gives us hope when that injured thing within us wants to curse God and die.

We are not left to wallow in the pain and misery of this earth. We are to hope for better things, believe in His goodness, and trust in His love. We are to put our dreams into His hands, where He can shape them into more than we ever could. This is the message of the angel to the women at the tomb, and it is the message to me today. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

Let’s seek the living in He who lives, and shut the door on the dead.

Luke 24:5
1 Cor 2:9 & 10

Why do we wonder that life is hard? Life is unrelenting, impassive, and heedless to our grief. It simply happens, as the waves on the ocean happen. We are along for the ride, children on a playground merry-go-round, and it is spinning with a furious intensity until the shouts of glee become shrieks of terror . Sometimes we are flung to the ground by the violence of the movement, dirt upon dirt, hitting hard and laying still to ascertain the damage before rising once more to cling again to the bars with the peeling paint, hands sweaty and metallic from the gripping.

Sometimes the motion is gentler…kinder…and the breeze in our hair and the thrill of the spinning keeps us well pleased to stay.

Mostly, though, I find it is the former experience. Why is that so? Because I was born melancholic? Because I think too much? Because the particular cocktail of chemicals in my brain is less confectionary delight and more science lab experiment gone awry? Because I make it so? Am I the one spinning the blasted thing; somehow spinning and riding at the same time?

I don’t know. Maybe.

Mostly, I’m just tired. I’m tired of platitudes and exhortation. I’m tired of abrupt sorrow and unpleasant surprises. I don’t like surprises, even nice ones. A surprise, in essence, is not nice because its very nature is to startle, which I do not care for. I’m tired of dreams that vanish as quickly as they appear, of hopes that require too much energy to maintain. I want things to just make sense, dammit.

Truthfully, I would like just one thing to make sense.

But what makes sense to dust? Dust cannot comprehend complexity. Dust simply sits, being dusty. Dirt is dirty. Earth is earthy. It is weak stuff. Crumbles in the hand with the slightest pressure. Add water and the right combination of material and you might get brick, or concrete, or adobe, which is another matter.

But I am just dust. Says so right here. And somehow, that thought comforts me. It tells me that I don’t have to understand, that I am not expected to understand. There will be no final exam to this life, no entrance exam for the next. I can just be. And as I am beaten and pounded by life, if I can allow myself to be augmented and built up by my experiences, then one never knows.

Something beautiful might grow out of me. Something lovely might remain.

And that makes some sense.

They say the heart is reckless and
they say it runs the soul.
They say to keep a tight reign on
or sense it will cajole.

They say the heart is traitorous;
it only wants the wrong.
All weakness lies within its walls
where mad desires throng.

They say the heart has little truth
to know the wrong from right;
for all subversive lusts will seek
and, violent, will fight.

But all I know is that an ache
lies where my heart should be.
More like a dying fish it gasps
than fierce monstrosity.

I bid it rise and find the will
to walk this narrow way,
so–trembling–it summons strength
and staggers one more day.

Where is the rebel outlaw, then?
Where is the fearsome foe?
Oh how I wish there was some spark
to make the engine go.

No conflagration billows up
and burns within my chest;
the fire in that cold space is
a dying coal at best.

Yet stumbling I’ll walk this path
and often will I crawl
Until the coal burns out at last
and only ashes fall.

Tonight I got angry with two of my boys. They were fighting, and I sent them to bed. I went in afterwards and kissed and explained; sought and gave forgiveness.

Tonight I laid with my ear against my 2 year old’s back as he breathed deep and his blinks grew slower and farther apart. I heard the whoosh of air in lungs, the gurgle of belly and the whisper of infant words through the walls of flesh and bone. His warmth became my own and I saw the baby he once was becoming the little boy of today, and tomorrow.

Today I tried to encourage, felt the pain of one child’s heart, laughed with another, reprimanded, exhorted, embraced, loved.

And now, I cry, tears splashing wetly on my desk as I sit.

They say tis better to have loved and lost, but I want to know are you sure? I want to grab Tennyson by his lapels and demand Are you sure?? With certainty, say it! Prove to me that all of this, all flesh, all life–all that you hold dear and close–all that could be extinguished as quickly as breath blows candle flame on a birthday cake–is worth the risk!

People say I am blessed to have found love, blessed that I have so many around me to love, so many reasons to love, so many who love me…but I am not sure; I am not sure, and I admit it.

Are you sure that stopping to listen to heartbeat and breath is worth the agony that missing it will bring? If I never shared a walk in evening air, never stopped to discipline, never laid ear to ribcage; if I never looked into child eyes and listened to child prayers and comforted child grief, then what would I have to miss if it ever went missing?

Is it not better to keep oneself solitary, shut up like a hermit crab in the sand, alone against the wide world, without the care that loving brings? Would it not be easier…simpler…safer?

Yet Love is but a wily jade,
and tests both moat and barricade
it steals in softly through the chink
to push you cruelly off the brink…

It is not safe, this loving. It is a dangerous business. Yet before you know it, before you can exert caution, the thing is done and the loving has occured. And then the loss comes, as it always will, and we flounder. We are overwhelmed, surprised, shocked, by the very thing–the one thing–that is certain in all of life: death. We know it is coming. We see it in the seasons. We read it in the news. We watch it touch others, and yet when it dares to approach us, we are…angry. Amazed. Horrified. Distraught. Destroyed.

Grief does not feel like blessing.

I don’t know the answer. I still grapple with these thoughts; I wrestle and struggle and bleed and weep over the what ifs and the why nots and the outright damn it all to hell why must it be so?

My heart, oh my heart. It has been laid so very bare by this life. It has been opened and its contents spread across the pages of the years in a great messy smear. Is it pain, or love? Is there a difference? Make me strong I demand of God. Make me strong, to withstand this life! Yet He sees fit to perform this open heart surgery without anesthesia, and I am on the table writhing.

What is strength? Is it being untouched, or being touched in all ways, and leaning ever deeper into His scalpel?

He carves my heart with the thinnest blade; He slices and whittles and comes closer and closer to what I am clinging to, and His scalpel is Love. But it feels like pain.

And again, I ask…is there a difference?

My tender eyes
read sorrow there
on every written page.

And so I locked
my heart up tight
and kept the thing away;

I vowed I’d never
be exposed
and held all love at bay.

My heart’s own book,
a tale of fear
where love meant dread and pain;

I couldn’t see
it was a lie
I read it all the same.

And then, upon the
darkest page
that simply said “The End”

I felt a hand
and heard a voice
that said “begin again.”

“Tear out the page,
rewrite the tale
and I will show you then;

My perfect love
casts out all fear
if you will share your pen.”

The book I wrote
was all I knew
and it was sad and grim;

Yet how to trust
to tear it up
and go ahead with Him?

I gripped the pen
still tighter–pushed
the gentle hand away.

“I will rewrite,
I know I can!
and better things I’ll say!”

Yet once again
the score was dark
and hopeless was the rhyme;

No matter how
I tried to change
no happy end was mine.

Despairing then
I shut the book
and cried in broken need

“I cannot make
the words make sense–
this tale no one will read!”

Again the voice
and gentle hand
then lifted up my head

“We’ll write anew–
I promise you–
give me your hand instead.”

And as I put
my hand in His
the words fell into place;

the song was sweet,
the story true
and overwhelmed by grace.

No mystery
was written there
save that of His design–

that He takes His
unending love
and somehow makes it mine.

I stand once more
an open book,
and hope that all will see;

His tale upon
these pages is
romance, eternally.

Inside my head
the voices taunt
“you are a worm, not man!”
They chant, accuse,
berate, abuse,
and keep me feeling damned.

I know this weight
that stabs my brain
is twisted and untrue,
yet Grace is poured
and drink it in
is all that I must do.

I am an heir
along with Christ
my punishment He bore.
In sufferings
I’ll find His peace
and love Him all the more.

A crown of thorns
is how it feels
and difficult to bear;
yet one day I
will stand with Him

and crown of joy I’ll wear.

These are simple answers; we would so something. We would step in and defend the victim, or at least get help. Maybe punch the teacher or coach right in the nose for being such an asshole. Yeah, that would feel good. Because who on earth would behave in such a callous, evil, deranged way? Who on earth would expect such impossible things? Only callous, evil, and deranged people. It’s ridiculous to even think about. We expect different things from handicapped people, we alter our expectations, we do not hold it against them and deride them, we do not accuse them of being unwilling, or stupid, or unmotivated. We do not believe the handicap is somehow their fault.

Yet we are all born handicapped. And we do exactly the above to one another, and to ourselves.

We are born handicapped in invisible ways, and hopelessly crippled. This is not our fault, any more than the Down Syndrome child is at fault for his or her genetic abnormality. Again, I assert this is not our fault.  We didn’t ask to be born this way. We didn’t choose it. Heck, we didn’t even ask to be born at all, much less birthed onto such a terrifying planet!

But because we judge and sneer at one another and ourselves, we believe God to be doing the same. Because we try to make sense out of our twisted limbs and drag ourselves along the racetrack until we are bloody, we believe this is what God wants from us. Because we demand that He give us what we need so that we may run the race smoothly, and we don’t get it, we believe He is a deranged school teacher, beating us with a celestial ruler for being so hopeless, demanding that we try harder. And we teach this to our children, and we expect it from our leaders. We strap on prosthetics of works and clothe ourselves with self-righteousness so no one will know how badly we are failing. Yet all the while, we leave a trail of blood wherever we go.

He is not that merciless coach. He looks upon us with pity, with compassion. He grieves that we are so crippled, so broken, and that we don’t even realize it, but continue to try to run on bloody stumps. All He has ever wanted was for us to acknowledge our inability and turn to Him. All He wants is for us to turn to Him. And not because He has some divine ego that demands satisfaction, but for the simple reason that he holds the answer. He has the cure. He provided the way. He did everything that needed doing. When He sees us wallowing in our humanity, He does not despise us! He loves us. In fact, the only reason He continues to allow people to populate the earth is because He just can’t get enough of us. He delights in us, His creation. He loves us. He simply loves people.

Let me say that again.

God. Loves. People.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but this is a big deal. Because somewhere in my crippled brain I always felt that God had something of a sadistic streak. Like the Roman and Greek gods and goddesses, He was simply moving the important pieces about like pawns for His own amusement, callous to our suffering and indifferent to our pain. Some people, the really good ones, He used for His purposes. The rest of us, well, not so much. Maybe He saw us, maybe He didn’t. Maybe He cared, maybe He didn’t. Otherwise, why did He allow such genetic messes to exist? Why else would He make me, to get right down to brass tacks, when He knew what I was up against on this mortal, broken sphere? Why did He make my mind so flawed, my emotions so grotesquely large, my soul so unstable, if not to watch, and laugh with scorn as I try my best to work with what I have? My opinion just depended on the day, my state of mind, the current horrors on the news, and probably, to some extent, the seasons.

You may be thinking to yourself right now “wow, she really does not understand grace.” And I will tell you that no, I didn’t, and I still don’t feel that I do, not completely. In fact, I believe with all my heart that most people calling themselves Christians in this present age understand grace in an extremely crooked way, if they grasp it at all. I don’t believe that most of us with really get it on this side of heaven. Even if we spit out the words “unmerited favor!” as though we are on a game show with the winning answer, what the hell do we know about that? Do we really know what that means? More importantly, do we behave as though we know what it means?

Most people “know” the definition of grace, but they move and breathe and run and work as though His unmerited favor is so very, very merited. As though it must be won, again and again, on a daily basis. His mercies are only new every morning for those who earn them. What? Tell me that you don’t believe that. More importantly, tell me that you don’t behave like that. I am at least brave enough to own up to it.

But it occured to me the other day that God loves us, and it was suddenly different. For a moment, I believed in His love as more than theoretical, or theological. It blew my mind clean away. The possibilities were all changed. The conclusions were fundamentally altered.

Because suddenly I believed that GOD LOVES US not with an existential sort of detatched benevolence, but with a burning, passionate, horrible, heartbreaking, saving love. The kind of love that stoops down and lifts us from the bloody puddle we wallow in and gives us His own legs to run on. His strength. His life. His mind. Yet we accuse Him of perverse behavior towards us because we persist in slapping His hand away, shouting that we can do it ourselves, telling Him we don’t need any help, that His business was in directing us to the racetrack, not in actually helping us to run the race. We complain that He has something against us because it is so hard for us, that He plays favorites because so-and-so runs with such beautiful strides while we hobble and fall, and then we make fun of so-and-so and believe they are simply hiding a better grade of prosthetics beneath their clothing.

The only thing those beautiful runners have is more of His grace. More of His help. And why? Because they didn’t slap His hand away. They recognized their need, they didn’t stay buried under the weight of their pride and sensibilities, and they wake each day with a determination to do one thing only, and that’s lean on Him.

Lean on Him? Pshaw. What a bunch of wussies, I’ll do this myself, thankyouverymuch.

And that right there is my problem. Maybe it’s yours too. Yet, from the very beginning, God was not interested in pointing out our incapabilites for the sake of deriding us, but so that we might turn to Him. He is no sadist. He is not asking us to run the race with shattered legs. He is not asking us to do the calculus with scrambled brains. He does not scorn, but weeps with sympathy, because He felt the weight of flesh and knows exactly how many cards we have stacked against us.

In fact, we have the whole deck stacked against us, save the King of Hearts. And He waits and watches, not for the day that He can gleefully toss us into the fires of hell, but for the day that we will shed the works we clothe ourselves with and allow Him to clothe us with His grace. It doesn’t really matter if I understand it completely, He gives it completely. If I will admit that works aren’t getting me anywhere, He will show me the way to run. If I can grasp just a glimpse of the breathtaking love He holds for me, I will stop working and start worshiping.

And finally, run my race to win.

psalm 103:13
1 John 4:18-20
Heb. 13:1-2

It is not always our fault that we get off center. Sometimes we rebel, yes. Sometimes we wallow in our shit. Sometimes we scream at the potter that he’s doing it ALL WRONG. But not always.

We are all born weak. We are all born frail and human and genetically flawed in some way. And those things push us off center. Sometimes the people who raised us pushed us violently off center when we were small and unable to push back, and we have done the best we can ever since to scoot and crawl and drag ourselves back to the center of the wheel so that we can be raised up solid and secure.

It matters not to the potter how the clay got off center. It is his work to correct it. If the clay is still malleable, he stops and rethrows, recenters, and goes forward. That is more disappointing than painful. But sometimes we are hardened into that misshapen lump, and we think to ourselves that it is too late for us, it is our fate to be frozen forever in that crippled form, but we are wrong. We can still be reworked. He is able.

He takes us and pounds us, we the unyielding must yield to His pressure. He shakes and burns and dashes us until we wonder if there will be anything left in the end. It hurts. We cry. We doubt. We want to die. We even beg for it. But He whispers better plans into our crumbling ears, and we remain. We open, and he does surgery. The old scarred places, the hidden wounds, He begins to heal. Then the soft rain of His tears, falling over us begins. He weeps over the lost innocence, over the helpless victim, over the uncentering that we suffered. He weeps over our bad choices and our poor decisions. But He does not abandon. He does not, ever, no, never ever, does He decide that we are irredeemable. That the clay is unusable.

He knows better.

He knows better.

And the rain of his tears brings the dust back to life, back to clay, back to something useable, something that can be recentered and made beautiful. And used to declare His power and mercy and grace and goodness.

And that’s what this little lump of clay is gonna do. I just want to remind those who are being ground into powder, those who are in the midst of the burning and pain:

When everything is burning to the ground, when everything is shaking, you don’t have to claim that all is peachy.  You don’t have to count your blessings and think that is going to help (honestly, counting my blessings made me feel one hundred times worse because hey, look at everything I have to be happy about, yet how very, very unhappy I was. How much of an ass am I???). You don’t even have to praise Him for that situation, for that day of turmoil, for that loss, for that hideous tragedy that came your way, be it fifty years ago or five days ago, and has turned your world upside down. Praise God IN all things, not FOR all things! You can admit that it is chaos, that it is horrible, THAT IT IS HARD AND THAT YOU ARE TERRIFIED THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT IN THE END.

So what can we praise Him for in that day, when our world is ending?

For this: that there will come a day, when all that can be shaken has been shaken, when all that can burn has burnt, that the broken pieces will mix with His tears and be reshaped on His wheel into something beautiful. It seems impossible now that it could be so, but I will testify that it IS so. The ashes of everything that burnt will be breathed upon and something will rise from them that will put all the things you thought were beautiful before TO SHAME. Look to that day. Claim peace now because of that day. Claim joy now because of that day. HE WILL BRING THAT DAY.

Praise Him for THAT day. IN this day.

Be still, and wait. And watch that phoenix rise.

Hebrews 12: 26-29
Isaiah 61:3