Summer Reading

This summer, we're reading every Caldecott Medal Winner from 1938-2012. I'm excited and plan to report.

Coming Out Part Two.

 

This is actually the Cahaba River, but it looks a lot like Bishop Creek. (Photo, I think taken by Beth Young.)

I had grown up in the church and I was familiar with all of the inconsistencies and ugliness and mean-spiritedness that can be a part of a Christian life. I didn't want to play the game. I knew I couldn't be "good" and that if I tried, it would only be phony and hollow. I thought I needed to be good, like the other little girls at my Christian school were good, to know God.

When I was in the sixth grade, for some reason I can't remember, I said "bullshit" at lunch. My teacher Mrs. Edwards (who I loved dearly) called my mom and said "Will you ask Susan if she knows who said 'bullshit' at lunch?" My mom asked me and I told on myself (doh!) and got in some serious hot water. Then, I knew for absolute sure that I wasn't capable of being good.  My mom was embarrassed that I said that I know, but just the other day, Dad teased me about it and laughed.  I said shit in the sixth grade and Dad has been laughing and giving it to me ever since.
 

When I was about twenty years old and a Junior at Auburn, I developed a condition that required surgery on both my legs. I was engaged and hoped to get married when I graduated. I told people I was a Christian and I believed in God, but I still clung to the notion that I needed to be good. And I knew I couldn't. Once I went to a Bible study by a relatively well-known "Bible Study Guru" at Auburn. She lectured this group of 20-something single women about how important it was to be a good wife and mother. She suggested we apprentice ourselves to a large family following graduation so that we could learn to be submissive and take care of children. I walked out of that Bible study and bawled my eyes out. I thought "Seriously? Jesus died for this? No thanks."  I was looking for Jesus. I was desperate for Jesus. And all I got from the church at that time were behavior modification techniques and, well, weirdness. I stopped at Tiger Package on the way home and bought a pint bottle of black label Southern Comfort.

 I don't know why I bring up the surgery other than that it was the difficult circumstance that started making the jars rattle off the truck so to speak.


The relationship between my fiancé and me began to deteriorate rapidly following my surgery and I didn't really know why. He had gone through the really heartbreaking death of a dream a few months before and I later learned he was struggling with drugs during that time. We broke our engagement and I was confused and heartbroken. I remember lying on the floor of my apartment and asking God to help me. It was during this time that I discovered a few television programs produced by Charismatic ministers. I grew up in a church that was committed to the truth of the Gospel, but wasn't particularly Charismatic. I didn't understand these people, but I sensed that they really KNEW God. So, I listened and I heard about a God who is real and present and active in our lives.


During this time, I was working as an intern at a small newspaper to meet my graduation requirement. One of my assignments was to report on a mother and a daughter who were going to graduate from Auburn at the same time. The mother was finishing a PhD in psychology and the daughter was finishing a BA. I called to interview the mother and I asked her how she, a single mother who had a baby girl at fifteen, could be finishing her PhD. She said "I stayed in prayer. God is real. God changes things. He can empower us to do what we never thought we could do. I'm telling you, Susan, stay in prayer. God will hear you. He will help you." And I believed it.


I came home to my little apartment and I prayed. Ok, God. I said. I'm ready. If I have to be like the other Christians to follow you, I'll do it. And at that moment, I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit say Now, I can work with that.  And he told me that he wasn't going to fix the relationship I had with my fiancé, And he told me that he had someone for me and when I would meet him.  Three years later, almost to the day, I met my husband. Six years to the day after that, I gave birth to a Goofball. (Which wasn't really surprising to me since I knew there were some Goofballs in my family tree who had passed for Sane.) I've never been the same since that day. And I learned that I didn't have to be like other Christians after all. I just had to be like me and love Jesus.


And what I've learned since then, to greater and greater degrees is that Jesus Christ is all the good I can ever be. I don't have to fake it or pretend to be something I'm not to please Him. Because it isn't about behavior. It's about knowing Christ and allowing him to work in my life.


I've been learning lately just how personal a "personal relationship" with Jesus can be. It's a phrase I've heard all my life. It isn't about religion, it's about relationship. And we want a personal relationship with Christ. I didn't get it then, but I'm getting it now. As I walk through my life and see all the ways God touched my life and spoke to my heart. He has literally been with me my entire life. He's just giving me the eyes to see it.

I'm little. My purpose in this life is little. That has been revealed to me. I'll never have a big influence or a fancy ministry. But what work he has given me to do, I accept. Part of my work on earth is uncomfortable because it means having other Christians think I'm a heretic. Part of my work is uncomfortable because it means having other Christians think I'm a prude! Unfortunately, my work in this life hasn't involved a whole lot of other Christians being absolutely thrilled by my presence, but I'll be honest. There's been some of that. I've been loved.

Most of my work on earth is so small and so seemingly insignificant that I sometimes forget that it is important. But I don't ask Him to make me great on earth or in heaven. (Being great in Heaven involves a lot of hardship on earth I think!) I just ask Him to make me faithful and to let me be content to stand in my place in the ranks of all the saints and do the work assigned to me. There is a place for me in the Ranks of the Saints. I'm amazed.


This is my story of faith. This is my testimony to the faithfulness of the Lord.  This has been really hard to write! Amen.

This is Me. Coming Out.

Lately, as I've been spending time praying and meditating on the Psalms, the Holy Spirit has been reminding me of certain events in my very early childhood. I'll be reading and praying and then I'll be back in 1979 standing in my back yard again. From the time I was born until the time I was about eleven, my family lived in a house with a big back yard on Bishop Creek. Bishop Creek is fed by a little spring in Shelby County and it flows through Alabama until it meets the Cahaba River near Selma. One day, I overheard my parents talking in the kitchen. "Bunny," Dad said, "I know you won't believe me, but I saw an alligator in the creek." I'm sure Mom was nice, but probably didn't believe him. But sure enough, the next week the Shelby County Humane Society had Steve Irwin's redneck cousin Bubba standing on the Crosscreek bridge hauling a five-foot gator out of the creek. Dad installed a chain-link fence between my play house and the creek that summer.

Dad kept two hives of three-banded Italian honeybees in the back yard. Almost every-other week in the summertime, he would suit up and rob the bees. He had an old fashioned honey extractor with a handle on top. He'd load a few frames in that extractor and crank and crank and crank until the honey would run out a little spout at the bottom. I'd put my face under the spout and drink the honey straight. (I never had bad allergies!) Mom would make homemade brown bread and we'd have honey and butter and bread for supper.

I got honeybees in my hair from time to time. I always knew not to be afraid, but to find my dad and let him pick the bees out before they stung me. I would often step on a honeybee and be stung, but a little meat tenderizer always made it feel better. Honeybees, unlike wasps and hornets, have barbed stingers that literally pull the backside of the bee off when they get stuck in your skin. They can't sting more than once and then they die. If you ever get stung by a honeybee, scrape the stinger out, don't pull it straight out or more venom will go into your skin.

One of the memories I recalled recently was of a time I was playing in the back yard by myself. I was crouched down behind my playhouse underneath a white oak tree stirring a stew of leaves and sticks and mud in my mother's mop bucket. I remember feeling warm all over my whole body and instinctively holding very very still while this warm presence hovered over me and then was gone. It's almost as if the Holy Spirit was saying That was me, Su. That was me all along. I must have been about three years old.

I'm not what you'd call particularly "reformed." I'm not sure that I believe in predestination. But I do know that from my cradle,  Jesus has been calling me.

 When I was about seven years old, the P.E. coach at my school came to speak to us for a chapel program. He told us that we were all sinners and couldn't ever be good enough to please God. I was horrified. I wanted to please God and I wanted to be with him in heaven forever. But even then, I recognized my sinful nature. I knew I had this "sin" in me. Then Coach Young told us that Jesus, God's son, had come to earth and lived a perfect life. He told us that Jesus had been crucified on a cross so that we could know God. He said that if we would pray and ask Jesus to come and live inside our hearts, he would. And we could know God for ourselves. I was absolutely amazed. When Coach Young asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to pray to Jesus, I raised both of my hands.

Later, I realized how totally absurd this story was. I realized that the idea of a God sacrificing his only son for us was kind of weird and bloodthirsty. Surely that isn't true, I thought. Not entirely. Surely there had to be something...else.  I knew that I was just a child when I prayed that prayer. I wasn't all that serious about it after all. But, Jesus was. Jesus was serious about it. And he tracked me down some more.

When I was about 12 and living in an apartment with my parents while our new house was being built, I would lie awake and pray "God, have mercy on me and don't let me die. I am not ready to be one of your crazy Christians." I was starting to believe that I did need Jesus to go to live with God in heaven, but I was also starting to believe that to become a real Christian meant that I had to somehow stop being Susan. It was a battle I waged within myself for the next ten years.

Part Two.

Kitchen Meditation

I'm experiencing a little melancholy this morning. It's just a bitter little signal from my soul that implores me to listen up. Slow down. And pay attention. So I don't of course. I get busier and more restless and avoid the unmistakable call of Jesus to my spirit that lets me know he has something to say.

And in the practice of my avoidance, I come to Modobject at Home and see Christian's pictures of spinach leaves in a colander in her kitchen sink. I wonder, no marvel, at the beauty of their pink root-ends. And He catches me.

I'm sure I've written about it before at Answered Prayers for Owen Meany, but I spent two of my high-school  summers working in the kitchen at a camp for girls in Tuxedo, North Carolina. It isn't your average camp kitchen. The "kitchen manager" (quotation marks because I think you can safely say "chef")  graduated from Le Cordon Bleu and apprenticed with Frank Stitt here at Highlands Bar & Grill before coming to North Carolina. Like his mentor, he picked the freshest local produce he could find to feed the campers and I chopped and peeled and diced and sliced for about nine hours a day for ten weeks. This is where I learned to cook.

One afternoon, I sliced open a cantaloupe and stopped in absolute wonder at the rows upon rows of seeds suspended by tiny creamsicle threads in the middle of the melon. The order and design was a world unto itself. All the beauty of God's creation lay hidden in darkness until I opened it to the light. I began to marvel at the universe inside a bell pepper (don't you love to find those strange little tender bits that attach themselves to the stem inside?). I began to notice the world of beauty in the dimpled skin of a fresh strawberry. I became intoxicated by the smell tomato stems make when you get them just a little bit wet. And I began to consider what kind of God makes such beauty solely for our bodily consumption.

Is this not a kind of Communion? To ingest the beauty of a living God and feed upon it in our hearts with faith and thanksgiving?

At the end I write these words as my testimony and as the song of my heart to all of you who read it. I have looked upon the beauty of the Lord. He has taken me to the banquet hall and his banner over me is Love. All of my black dogs slink into shadow when his presence fills the temple and sings rejoicing over the works of his hands. Amen.

ministry of reconcilation

Today I am lead to consider reconciliation. I am tempted to say that I am more familiar than most with fractured communication and estrangement, but I think it more truthful to say that these are aspects of the universal human condition. Every plate is filled with a helping of estrangement. Without exception, I imagine.

Our first estrangement is from God and we are not reconciled until Christ stands between the people of earth and the Person of Heaven and propitiates for our sin. It seems that once the fundamental reconciliation is begun, we cannot help but long to be reconciled with ourselves, with nature and with other people.  I long for these reconciliations and the restitution of our prelapsarian glory. Don't you see it sometimes? Doesn't it make you sure that you will see it again? I long for the coming of the Kingdom in truth and fact and in the recesses of my heart.

I'm wondering if this unsheathed longing is a fundamental aspect of my observation of Lent this year. I'm hoping to consider it as Easter approaches and I'm hoping to consciously submit myself to this longing for the restoration of the human relationships I've lost. I will pray about this fervently and see what will come of it.

St. Paul writes in 2nd Corinthians 5 about the "ministry of reconciliation" granted to every believer who has been/is being/will be reconciled to God through the work of Christ. It's a mystery ministry and I'm not sure what it means. But I like that idea. I like the idea that we can at once show other people how we were reconciled to God and participate in that reconciliation in some way.

The more I think about the riches of God and the idea that we as believers are co-heirs with Christ the more I am absolutely gobsmacked at the earthly power we are afforded and with my own complete inadequacy. I feel like an ant with a really large sword.

The Bells of Highlands UMC

This day began with an explosion of the scatological variety, last-minute ironing and burned breakfast. I'm not a "morning person" on the best days and by "morning person" I mean that I sometimes find it difficult to wake up at 4:30 am which is when the alarm clock rings. (So, don't get all judgmental on me you sad wake-up-at-seven sacks.)  I felt anxious and harried and it was difficult to keep my composure and stay in the moment. But when I went outside with the trash, I actually heard the bells ringing at the Methodist Church about a mile away. They rang for an unusually long time and I lifted my hands in prayer to receive that blessing that must have been borne on some strange wisp of cloud. I came inside a different person.

Christ was. Christ is. Christ will be. Present in the moments. A fully-attentive father. Amen.

Olivet Mantra

I hired a landscape designer who came with her graph paper and fancy pen and sketched a plan for the Quintessential Southern Cottage Garden. My excitement knows no bounds.

I am concentrating on my life as the papier-mâché that I form around the values of simplicity, joy, and beauty. Beauty is the superlative of godliness.  God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.  

My life isn't simple, but I strive to pause to savor the pleasure of simplicity as a sort of meditative practice. Form in function. And art in a pot of strawberry preserves or a sleek pimento-stuffed olive (or five) bobbing languidly in a martini of the filthy variety.