And it begins...

I was just checking my email before sliding into bed (since it is well into the am here) when it dawned on me, "I haven't checked that one syllabus for my Thursday night class yet."

Since class starts next Wednesday, I didn't think that it was so dire for me to check my syllabi yet, but lo and behold upon opening the syllabus I learned that I have one book, another 200 or so pages in another book, and written answers to several questions all due next Thursday night for our first Thursday night class period. Ugh. Double ugh.

So my (hopefully) last semester as an undergrad student begins. Or will begin. Or apparently began, and I'm already behind. :( Blah...

While talking with Eric and Brian tonight, we discussed several different versions of reality...one topic we discussed was time, and how as humans we chaff against the constraints that time places on us. With sentences like, "Time sure flies," or "There simply isn't enough time in a day!" we express pain over the fact that we are stuck in this temporal, limited existence--people made by God to experience eternity! Which brings me back to that "seeing through a glass darkly" and the looking forward to seeing face to face and the knowing outside of time that will happen in heaven...

In the meantime, I'll just be scurrying around, trying to cram as many words and concepts and relationships and jobs and life into my head as I possibly can...I know, it's a personal choice, and God will bring times of rest...sigh. I'm going to bed; this will all look more doable in the morning. :)

"Cry out to Jesus"

Since we haven't had any homework/work nagging at us over these last few weeks, it has been awhile since Brian and I have sat down and chatted, so tonight we took the opportunity to sit down for awhile and catch up on life. We have a relationship that was built maybe on desperation and necessity (Brian needed internet, and I needed a friend that I didn't have to talk to :)), so there is a certain level of candidness that we can reach, and processing through some of our earlier discussion during these "wee hours of the morning" has led to a couple aha moments. Of course, they may not truly be so "aha!"-ish, but go easy on a tired brain here... :)

The brilliant realization is (drum roll!) that human beings are flawed right now. This is why I always feel this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when people want to get "too close"...there is absolutely no way that I can hide my flaws from them or hide their flaws from myself. Again and again I have heard things like, "I really appreciate your faith" or "I really appreciate your values" or "Your Christian walk inspires me." But the truth that these guys aren't seeing is that my faith is always going up, down, and all around--rarely is it stable and a "sure thing" that will keep me involved in the religious traditions around me. My values may seem ok, like compassion and honesty and things like that...but in the end, it comes down to valuing myself. Selfishness will trump every time, because that is just the way that my nature operates right now...maybe I am not training it enough? Grrr for this stupid mirror and the fact that the darkness that clouds it comes from not only outside, but inside my very desires and motivations!! Is trusting others even an option? I can't even trust myself and my own heart!!

As I've been reflecting and writing on all of this, the Third Day song entitled "Cry out to Jesus" came up, and since hearing it I've been listening to it again and again...especially the chorus:

There is hope for the helpless, rest for the weary, and love for the broken heart. There is grace and forgiveness, mercy and healing, to meet you wherever you are…cry out to Jesus.

And again I am reminded that God's greatest pictures of healing and restoration involved a bloody cross, a woman crying at a grave...and more frequently seen "pictures"--you and I, caught up in torn and wounding relationships that somehow can be healed and blessed by God and bring blessing and joy. I'm still scared...

Cleaning...

Today a few of us spent most of our day helping clean, sort, and throw-away different things belonging to a woman who died recently. It was crazy...I have moved before and have dealt with the emotions involved in sorting and throwing things out, but I have never before witnessed what happens when one person "moves away" before the his or her other half has moved on... The husband of the woman who died struggled as he showed us things that had belonged to his wife. We heard stories, folded clothes, cleaned dirt...and I watched and prayed and sang under my breath songs about peace and light as I was faced with his pain.

There are looks that communicate, without words, a torture of the soul. Separation of loves, of family...I feel almost as though I stepped into a home with a happy relationship and tore out half of that relationship, leaving bleeding veins and broken bones behind...

What do people do who don't have hope past this life? How can they get past the boxes and clothing bags and garbages? How do they get past the tombstone and well-wishers and empty chairs, beds, and rooms at home? I don't think that it is just because I am naive that I find comfort in my faith at this time...

For some reason, the pain today did not make me run from God or from people. I left the house reflecting on how right it seemed to have had a family inside that house and to have a family still, in some respects, through the memories and pictures and traditions. Lives were intertwined there, and that seemed...somehow right. And God blessed them with that time, with that place, with those memories and moments where joy was so obvious that they had to laugh and smile and document it with a picture or something else.

Interesting day...sigh...over and over again, the prayer from 天国にあるもの went through my head, as well as this plea from Holden Evening Prayer:

"God of daybreak, God of shadows, come and light our hearts anew...Mighty God of all creation, gentle Christ, who lights our way, loving Spirit of salvation lead us on to endless day."

Vulnerability vs. Safety

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket --safe, dark, motionless, airless-- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." - Clive Staples Lewis.

A few of my friends have been passing this quote back and forth in some of our emails, and it has caught my eye more than once over the last couple of weeks. I was simply thinking of it tonight without even reading it...thinking of how often I put up walls and put my relationships in boxes so I do not have to truly be vulnerable OR truly love people. Tonight for the first time I saw the house of a friend I've known for 7 years...I just met some of his friends...spent time hanging out on his turf, watching him do things that are a normal part of his life rather than keeping him following my plans on my turf. Sigh. I'm such a jerk. Why has it taken me 7 years to do that? When is protection good, and when should a person be vulnerable? Can a person be both safe and vulnerable at the same time? Wouldn't that be an oxymoron?

Along with these thoughts there are the few minutes--not many, of course--that remind me that I could somehow have a "normal" life if...I don't know how. But there are moments when I'm sure it is possible, and then I wonder how all of these strands will come together. Sigh again.

I don't even know what selfishness or vulnerability means right now...again, another reminder of why grace is important. But I do know that God has called us to love. And I can trust God's protection. And even if all of that is confusing and messed up and wrong, I can trust in God's redemption. :)

Advent thoughts

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

So, in the last two days...or the last day (I'm in the middle of this strange night-day confusion that comes from working overnights several days in a row) I've had two conversations of absolute beauty...conversations of relationship and separation and hope and longing...conversations brimming over with love, with hearts' cries to know and be known...conversations of rescue and restoration...

One conversation was with an agnostic who couldn't quite accept how science and faith always came across as being opposite from each other. When I asked him about faith, he said that more important than defining and putting faith in terms and boxes he would rather grow, question, experience with love and authenticity. Moments when he experiences right relationship are moments that are spiritual to him, but the Christians around him won't buy it and say he is not blessed. "What would slapping on the label of 'Christian' really mean?" he asked...

The other conversation was with Eric, who was talking about singing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" today and how excited he was for it. Somehow, as he passionately spoke about the exile, mourning, pain, and longing, and the call for God to come and be near, my mind was filled with flashing images and poetry, and the words from my previous conversation echoed in my mind.

Love. The authenticity that is seen when someone is mourning, groaning, crying, in exile away from their beloved. Then suddenly, brilliant flashes of light, songs of joy, a flood of peace, and the warmth of knowing that God is love...and not only loving, not only saving, but is near, is present, and will never leave us alone.

A new goal and end-of-semester thoughts...

Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. - 1 Cor. 13:12

It's the weekend before finals, and almost all of my journals and papers have been turned in to professors. Now the only things left are tests and presentations, but I feel such a lack of motivation that I'm typing this rather than studying the stack of textbooks next to me. :)

The semester has been...painful. There were weeks of hating myself for not being able to love other people the way that I wanted to, or make decisions the way I wanted to, or think or communicate the way that I wanted to... But there were also moments--so many more moments that were a part of every day--of joy. Laughter with Brian and Carissa. Class with Dr. B and our cohort of outreach people that I love dearly. Homework and work up at OHSCO, where there has started to be so many of us hanging out that it feels like we are all family and work with sensei back in Japan, for some reason. There were so many, many classes where I first felt like a failure and then slowly started feeling like a fighter, and then even began to feel like the teacher a little bit...I love to learn (except for science...oy :)).

Thinking about the biggest message of the semester though has brought me to thinking of the verse above from 1 Corinthians. It is by far the verse that has ministered to me the most this semester, and it is one that Dr. Dave uses frequently in choir. There is the tension of the darkness, the murkiness of the glass in the mirror and the longing brought about by the separation of two people who only see reflections rather than the real things for which they are searching. There is the secrecy, the inner hiddenness of everything behind the reflection that is crying to be let out. But even in the tension, the murkiness, the loneliness, the secrecy, there is hope in knowing that one day all of that ambiguity and uncertainty that was so difficult to be read with confidence will actually be gone, and there will be a "knowing"--a reality so deep and full and rich with relationship! The verse affirms the pain and the hope, the tension and the peace, the longing and the fulfillment...

In choir this semester we sang a song called "Crossing the Bar," with the lyrics by Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the opening words are as follows:

Sunset and evening star,And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

I'm pretty sure that I cried through 75% of the times I was trying to sing this song, because it was so much mourning and hope twisting together in aches of pain and brilliant flashes of joy...And that is so much what my life is like right now.

But it's ok. :) Even more than that, I think it's good. Dr. Dave teaches all of us so much with his emphasis on "seeing in a glass mirror and one day seeing face-to-face"...It is those people that have the realness of life with pain and hope and relationship with God that I truly respect and want to emulate.

So I have no idea where my life is going, who I'm going to be with, or what I'm going to be doing. Well, I think it probably involves Japan and grad school. :) But...mostly, I want to be the type of person who "sees a poor reflection as in a mirror," but who also knows that one day I'll be "face-to-face" with God my Father...I want to show people that reality.

Days when I feel not-so-23-years-old...

I can't believe this is still only the first week of class...it feels like this has been going on forever, in some respects. Today was another day that somehow ends up going from 8am to 10pm with seemingly very few breaks...but again, the schedule is actually not the problem. :)

Today it was finally my Cross-cultural outreach class and syllabus that broke me--I at least managed to wait until almost everyone was out of the room before crying for a good 45 minutes. For a 400 level course there was nothing out of the ordinary expected of us...but I just can't do all of the writing and service learning and all of the things that are only supposed to take me 30 minutes a day and instead take me hours... I'm used to turning in a paper and knowing that it's good, or taking a test and knowing that I passed. I'm not used to simply shrugging and saying, "It was the best I could do...and I don't know if it's good enough."...Sigh.

Even more than the assignments and expectations though was the vocabulary of the course itself. For some reason, we seem to equate missions with "going" and "doing" and "learning" and "serving"...never just sitting and being filled by God. Even the questions based on the Bible tonight were "doing" questions rather than resting questions, and while it could just be the time of life I'm in right now, it seemed that we needed more emphasis on what God does through us rather than what we can do for God. This is, of course, offered in the humble opinion of a 23-year-old who is still a student. :)

What the "doing" questions really make me think about, however, is not necessarily doing missions. It makes me question all of my reasons for wanting or not wanting to be a DCO in the first place, and it makes me want to throw off all of these DCO expectations that I seem to have and focus on something that I love for once...like literature, for example. Why can I never seem to take a literature class?!?! Why does God have me going down this path that does not seem to fit with my focus or passion...

Well, it does fit in my mind. And apparently it does in some others' minds as well...I had a discussion earlier in the week about the difference between "inreach" and "outreach," and the conclusion that was reached was that they are all part of the same thing. How do I go about explaining that to profs and others who just want to "do"?

But, as is always the case, God is really nice to me. After crying in the ladies' bathroom after class, feeling like I was about 6 years old, I wandered outside and ran into a guy I knew from cross-country...he is no longer a student, really, but is sometimes around campus, and is the only guy who offers safe hugs in my mind... After biking past me without me noticing him, he turned his bike around and came to ask me how class had gone, tell me goodnight, and offer me a hug.
Then, after walking around for awhile to ensure that my eyes were not really shockingly red any longer, I headed into the common area for studying and found another guy that I've been studying with who said, "It's like a sense...I thought you were coming..."

Provisions...people...a place here...a sense that even though I'm 23 and just don't have it all together, it really will be ok. :)

So we made it through another day...by the grace of God...which, I suppose, is the way to go. :)