EPIPHANY Part II

During the sermon that morning, the minister brought up this concept of identity and self worth. The point he was making, based on this section of Psalms, is that God's love for his children is based on knowledge of one as a person, as a creation of His, not on what kind of success you have had in your life. My mind wandered off his words a little bit, to wrap my mind around "identity" and "self worth", with the question being, "what makes a person worth loving?", not in God's terms, but in ours.
I didn't feel like I needed to pose at myself the question the minister posed to the congregation, which was "who are you?", the subject of identity. I know who I am. Perhaps more than most people, as my friend Rhonda suggested last week. Identity and self understanding has always been important to me, even mentioned in previous entries. Determining self worth has been a hard one for me, though. It's closely tied to related words, such as "self esteem" and "self image", things I've struggled with in the past...or have I...that's sometimes the question. From a historical sense, I know I have sold myself short on big occasions due to problems in this area, some residual effects of childhood wounds and a failure to sort of understand what to value in myself enough to raise the price on. I struggled with that walking into this failed marriage, which is what made it so hard to leave.
I think about that now, as the minister is talking. I remember something that affected me greatly last year, words that proved the death knell of the marriage, words that couldn't be taken back, things that directly indicated that the failure of my husband to love me was my fault, for not being worth loving. I knew he was wrong, at the time, because...well, everyone is worth loving. Not just because we are God's children, but because we are human. Humans have a need for love, a need for attachments, and truly everyone in them has something worth loving them for.
On the way home from the service, I was talking to my son about both the message of the sermon, and that night he witnessed his father saying these terrible things. I wanted him to understand what the minister was talking about, how God defines our worthiness of love, and how it parallels the way I feel about him. Truly, by the time a child is brought into the world, love has already been developed without the child having to do or be anything for it but themselves. Every little expression of personality, character traits, the positives and negatives and everything in between that makes a person who they are, simply the knowledge of who they are is part of that love. It should have been part of the language between husband and wife, but it wasn't what was spoken in our house, and I wanted my son to understand that, too, so that he could understand the choice I had to make. Surely most children don't want to see their parents split up, but I want him to grow up knowing it was a choice I made to live a life more worth living. I wanted him to know I was walking away to give myself the chance to live a life loved.
The night that time bomb exploded, I went to a friend's house with the children. I talked to her about what he had said, and she told me he was wrong, not just to say that (especially in front of my children), but to think that. "I love you," she said, "because you are a good person who genuinely tries to do the right thing."
Is that what a person has to be to be worth loving? I had spent a lot of time after that night wondering. I asked my close friends why I was worth loving, asked that husband himself to take back those words by giving me reasons. Everyone had different answers, because there are different reasons why each person placed value in me. Jen kept telling me, "it doesn't matter what I say, though, you are going to have to figure out your own reasons why you are worth loving. This is just what I see. You have to see it yourself to believe it." It's not that I questioned it. I always knew he was wrong, but for some reason it just kept hurting. That feeling went away some months ago, though, so I became healed, whether it was through acceptance or through the virtue of real love. I hadn't thought about this in some months, what it was that made me worth loving, but now I rolled it around a little.
I wondered, what is it that people think about themselves that make them think they are worth loving? What are those qualities we see in others that makes us want to emotionally invest in them? Among many other questions, I posed this one to my son, whose ten year old answer astounded me with its maturity, and the way it matched my other friend's idea, and even what the minister was saying, although I doubt my son was actually listening to him when he spoke these words.
"What makes a person worth loving," my son said, "is being good to others. Helping other people, being nice to other people, treating other people well....that's what makes a person worth being loved."
I looked for a little while online, curious as to what other people thought made them worth loving, or made others worth it to them. I looked at personal ads, thinking that this might be a place where you could see what other people, looking for love, used to describe themselves as being someone worth it. "Fun loving" was the most common term used in the women-seeking-men ads. "Trustworthy". I started to wonder if this was truly what women thought were the qualities that made them deserving of love,or if it was based on some idea that this is what men these days are seeking. I wanted to dig deeper into this concept, but got distracted by turning the question on its head, wondering, "is love worth it?" After all, in many experiences of life around me, I see it fade and change and hurt and disappoint. Is it worth all you have to suffer as a result of its potential consequences?
I was still thinking about that when my sons and I headed to the cemetery that afternoon. We were on the way to replace a geocache I had hidden by the graves of two girls who touched my heart. I didn't know these girls, but their headstones made me sad and caused me to reflect on the value of the life I share with my own children, of the love we hold for our children in our hearts.
We paused for while on a shady bench to wait out a family visiting a new grave nearby, the grave of yet another girl who died way too young. I watched as the family each took turns solemnly approaching the fresh headstone, spending time in their mind remembering, speaking to her, telling her how much she meant to them. My heart bled for them, with the imagining of how hard that must be. We waited near another new headstone, that of a young man in his prime. Fresh flowers lay next to his headstone, one with a note whose words had bled in the recent rains, but were still legible, a testament to how much he was missed and how special he had been in the life of the person who left this for him.
Finally, I made my way over to the area I was seeking, noting the flowers and balloons left for the little girl who recently joined the others. I replaced my geocache, then made a nod to the little girls lost. I opened up the picture on the older girl's headstone, again struck mute with her beauty, and thinking about her life,which I had read about on a website tribute to her following her early death, at age 20, by the hands of a drunk driver.
Then I gathered up my children and kissed them. I thought about how life is so short, how time might stop at any minute, how our time on earth is so fleeting, and how precious it is. I thought about the love that family had for the little girl that they now would miss forever, and how it is that, those things, that make love worth living for.
That make love worth leaving for.

EPIPHANY PART I

Driving home from an outing with the children, I found myself reflecting on a collection of thoughts from the morning. The children and I had been at church in the morning, and at the end of the service, I noticed my oldest child looking at me, wondering what he was seeing in my eyes. As the service ended, I was overwhelming with emotion, this curious kind of emotion that looks like sadness to other people but really is a manifestation of humility when confronted with the power of God's love, and is in actuality an expression of happiness. I tried explaining this as such to a girlfriend on the way out of church when she asked about my wet eyes.
On the way out of church, my son wanted me to explain my tears. At one point, I stopped the car to look directly at him and explain this concept that I was getting in full doses, that I wanted him to understand. At home, we sat down and talked about it some more.
I was trying to explain to him the content of the sermon that had reached me on this emotional level. I also wanted him to get it for himself as well, to understand that this love that God had for us, for me, for his children, paralleled the love I have for my sons, and what it means, what's it worth, and what you have to do to get it. This conversation followed us in intermittent means throughout the day's events, and yet left me questioning some facets to it.
One of the points that was made in the scripture reading today, from Psalms, is that God's love comes from his knowing of us, that He knows us so well and intimately that the words we say, the things we do, come as no surprise to him. Have you ever loved someone like this? I think we all have. Children are full of surprises, for sure, but ultimately that's the feeling of "family" - that these are the people who really know you, who can anticipate the way you would respond to certain things, who know you so well that they sense what appeals to you and who you are.
As my son and I talked about this concept, and about family, and about expressions of love seen, said, and unsaid, his grandparents came up. This was related to a point I wanted him to get about my childhood, and The Void, and why God's unconditional love means so much to me. I asked him if his grandparents ever told him they loved him. He said they didn't say it, but he just knew that they did. I asked him how he knew, and he described certain actions, the way his grandmother took care of him, granted him things, prepared special meals for him. He told me that although his grandfather expressed these things less, he knew that he loved him "just a little bit more than Grandma does". When I asked him how he knew that, he told me that his grandfather just seemed to know what he liked, that it was like they had a special connection or something. When I pressed him for examples (because I could not imagine my father beginning a conversation with him about, say, Bakugan or something), he described situations where my father acted on a perceived interest of my son's, and presented him with something that appealed to him on this basis, "like he knows I am interested in the military, and he brings out a war movie to watch with me", he said. This made me laugh, thinking about my father, but in the end, our talk in this segment ended with my son saying, "It's like Grandpa and God are a lot alike. They both love me in the same ways", and despite my own issues with my parents and upbringing, I accepted this as truth, and I am so glad for my son that he has both experienced this kind of love in his life, and accepted it as such.

IN ALL THINGS

It seems like I've been concentrating much of my latest entries on matters of the spirit. It's not all I have been thinking about, and there are reasons I can't get into everything that has been moving me lately, but these ideas on faith have been compelling enough to put into words, especially after church on Sunday, and today was no exception.
In these entries, I find myself describing the initial stages of the church service. The combination of the imagery on the projection screens, the music on the stage, both in terms of the people involved and the songs themselves, the dark atmosphere of this contemporary service, even the design of the altar serve to set the emotional table, so to speak, and prepare the heart for the message at hand. I like that this service engages me emotionally, but it's the sermon that provides the intellectual fodder than I crave. Move my heart, but move my mind the most.
So this morning's scripture reading had me excited from the get-go, because it was words from the Apostle Paul, and I was waiting to take them apart and look at them with discernment. I've been wrangling up my complicated issues on Paul all week. To a degree, some of these issues are part of my quest for truth in all its forms, which means not accepting the idea of being spoon-fed my spirituality, but arriving at truth through questioning and seeking. In my seeking the truth about Paul, I find that about half of the books in the New Testament attributed to him are believed by many Biblical scholars to not have been written by him at all. Also, there is this question for me on whether Paul's message was truly divinely inspired, or simply originated in his own mind. Sometimes, I find myself wondering if what Paul was preaching was truly, in fact, the same as what Jesus was preaching. Sometimes I think that we, as a church body, actually spend more time processing and trying to follow Paul's word than Jesus, and I am not sure then if some of the intent has been diluted along the way.
At any rate, I cannot dispute that today's scripture was Paul speaking in line with Jesus, and it was a reading from Romans, which is one of the seven (out of the 13) books attributed to Paul that are undisputed as being authored by him. I looked up the reading when I got home to examine what I liked about it closer, but found that my NIV Bible was not reading the same as the words used by Bryan this morning, exactly. I liked his wording better, especially for Romans 12:10, which in my Bible reads:
Be devoted to each other in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves.
Bryan's version read something like, "Treat each other with mutual affection. Try to outdo each other with honoring one another." I liked that idea much better, and it seemed much more clear to me than the lines above. I'm not sure which translation he was using though, because I looked it up in 21 different versions and none of them read like that, including The Message, which I was told he preaches out of. (This is another one of my issues with interpreting truth from the Bible, but that's a whole 'nother entry).
At any rate, Bryan was using these lines as a vaulting place to explain how the church community is supposed to be to each other. He got into this idea of the original Greek words in this text, or in other places in the New Testament, that were used to describe God's love. There were actually, according to Bryan, three Greek words for love originally used in today's verse (Romans 12: 9-17), three words meaning different types of love, and he expanded on those and what they mean. I've been thinking about the Greek ideas on love for the past couple of weeks, so this part was very interesting to me, as well as the bigger idea on how we lose some of the meaning of the Bible through time and translation - in the course of translating it from Hebrew to Greek to English and somewhere there and back again at different times during Biblical history. Sometimes the original words used in the Hebrew or Greek translations actually have a much deeper meaning, or say three different levels as opposed to the one in the English language. In truth, the English version of the word "love" is a conundrum, because it is one word that means so many different aspects, whereas in other languages, such as those mentioned above, they divide that word into several different words to reflect these different aspects.
So the point of the sermon was that there are these three types of love that God desires for us to show to each other as part of what it means to be a Christian. He described them as the following: agape, meaning unconditional or selfless love, koinonia, meaning fellowship, and philadelphia, meaning brotherly love. He is describing how these types of love may play out in a church community.
As he described the three forms, the words he was using were bringing memories to mind. When he elaborated on agape, on the giving without expecting back, I thought about Michelle. I thought about all those times Michelle had been there for me without ever asking anything in return. She is the living example of that kind of love. It's bigger than just her, though, it's this whole church. It's Erik and Paul Johnson laying a floor in my kitchen, for the price of nothing more than the materials, a whole day of their lives they gave for me that I could not even repay. Or Rich, helping me move in before I even knew him. His wife Kerri showing up at the hospital when Kaleb was born, and listening to me talk about my sadness about not being able to hold my baby. She offered me a sympathetic ear, and told me a story about her son being in NICU for a month, and how she didn't get to hold him either, so she understood how that felt, but that now he was a strapping little boy and just fine, just the way my son was going to be.
I remember the kindness of the church after the Great Flood incident, how a member of my bible study showed up at my door the night we got home with bags of groceries and a hot dinner, and how the Johnsons showed up the next day with a new car seat to replace the one we lost, and a cash donation raised by their Sunday School class. I was overwhelmed with gratitude when Paul Johnson was standing there with that offering. I remember telling him I couldn't believe a church was this giving to its members, that I had never witnessed a church congregation being like this. He said something to me like, "Well that's what MAKES a church. A church that doesn't do things like this is not a church worth belonging to."
I think I learned what our church is from moments like this. None of it was anything I asked to receive, but yet it was just freely given in a response to a perceived need. I can see Michelle's hand in many of these events, the link between, not only because she was the one who brought me into this church, and provided the example of how to BE in this church and as a person of faith, but how she was the one who asked Rich to help me, who told Kerri where my baby and I were, who drove three hours with two dog kennels in the back of her truck to rescue my family and my dogs from the Great Flood, who told the congregation about it, who saw a need and filled it over and over, if not from her deeds, but from her words. She exemplifies what it means to be a person filled with the genuine spirit of unconditional love. And yet, even though I know in my heart that there is nothing I could do to make Michelle stop loving me, I want to be worth that love. It inspires me to be a better person, for her, and for this God that we share, and for the church she brought me to. I think that kind of unconditional love could make a person complacent, and feel like they didn't have to try then, but somehow it works the other way, and at least for me, makes me want to live up to it. In the way that the giving of the congregation to my family when it was needed makes me want to give back to them, an endless cycle of paying it forward and paying it back.
At the end of the service, I look over to see my oldest son, earnest expression on his face, looking up at the words projected on the screen, and singing along with the hymn. In that moment, I wonder if he knows how much I love him. Understanding the unconditional love that God has for us can be likened to the relationship between a parent and a child. Sometimes I worry that I am not staying within the lines enough to please God, but vice versa, I wonder if my son understands that all the fussing I do at him to stay between the lines is not a reflection on him, or that it means I do not love him, or will only love him if he is perfect. I tell him I love him every night, but I think about the number of times I spend fussing at him and wonder if he knows that is out of love, too. I wonder if he won't grow up in therapy explaining that his mother's attempts to get him in line made him feel unloved as an individual. I wonder if he understands the concepts Bryan was talking about today, and about the agape aspect of both God's love and my love for him.
After church, I took a bike ride with my sons. This older one stayed out in front, leading the way, I took up the rear, and the little one who is just learning how to ride was in the middle. We just started trying to teach the little one about riding longer distances, about how to navigate the obstacles in the neighborhood. Sometimes the older one would have to stop, turn around, and tell the little one the best way to deal with that obstacle. Sometimes he would just lead by example, showing him the way without telling him. There were times where I would have to push the little one from behind to get him over a hill, or a bump, to get him going again when he lost his momentum. Sometimes I was back there rooting for him, "go! pedal faster!" or sometimes I was rejoicing with him when he figured it out. "Good job! Way to go! See, you can do it!". As we made our way around the suburban sidewalks, I was thinking about my church community, and how sometimes we worked like this. Some of us lead in front, teaching us or showing us the way. Sometimes we needed that push from behind when we were lagging. There are times when we want to rejoice in each other's accomplishments or strengths, or when one another finally makes it over an obstacle or figures out the way. It's these kinds of love, the brotherly love for each other, the fellowship, the selfless giving, the living as examples of how Christ wants us to behave that helps us grow as a group together, as we grow as individuals. It's how we keep each other in line, some following, some leading, all the way moving closer to God.

FLASH

It's Sunday morning again, and I'm traipsing into church late again, rapscallions in tow. Kerri and Rich wave at me when I come in, and gesture to their row, a good place for us as our kids are happier next to their kids. As always, the music is interesting on some level, and this time it is Gene ripping it on guitar on stage as another woman and man play backup instruments and vocals. After the music ends, Bryan begins his sermon, and I'm hoping that the bribes hold up as enough incentive for my children to remain quiet so I can concentrate on the words.
This sermon was the first part of a series on "ReThink Church", three parts I suppose to go along with the three times Jesus mentions church in the Bible. The scripture chosen has in regards to a conversation Jesus has with Peter, and I am thinking about this, and how it is somewhat connected to another conversation Jesus has with Peter that Gene was talking about last week in his sermon. In Gene's sermon, he mentions Peter's desire for importance, to be the favored disciple, with Jesus rebuking him with "Get behind me, Satan!" Yet Bryan's sermon focused on Matthew 16: 13-20 in which Jesus tells Peter "That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."
So on one hand, Jesus tells Peter to stop trying to put himself first, that the desire he has to be more important than anyone else is akin to the devil, and yet in here he is telling him he IS important, so important that he is going to base the whole church upon him and in doing that, the devil won't win. It seems almost like a contradiction on the surface, yet when I turn it over in my mind, I think that what Jesus was doing was something that makes leaders great - using people's natural talents and desires to work towards the collective whole. Peter had a need to feel self-important and valued, and what Jesus was doing here was taking that desire and turning it to serve his purpose - to empower him through it, charge him through this need by directing it into the area that would both satisfy the desires of the Self but give it a more noble purpose.
In a way, I think, this is connected to the whole idea of ministers or church groups as a whole guiding people to search themselves, though prayer, spiritual insight, reflection, or education, to discover what their unique talents are and how then to use them to serve God's purpose on this earth. We are all created in his image, but yet each possessing different levels of expertise, experience, or natural gifts that can be used in different ways to serve the world. I am thinking along those lines, the same lines that parallel some of what Bryan is talking about, in regards to ministry, but I am also thinking about this concept of how Jesus is relating to Peter, about how even those things that seem to work against us sometimes, like Peter's self aggrandization, are all part of the Big Picture of how God wants us to work for his Glory. I am also thinking about
how God sometimes illuminates what it is he wants us to see, or reveals his plan to us in little flashes, how he finds a way to help us see how our strengths or experiences are part of the purpose he has in mind for us.
So it happens that Bryan is talking, much like Gene's sermon last week, how being of the faith is not simply about passive listening or presence, but active seeking and participating. It's not enough to sit there on the pew, or to say you are a Christian, but to live it breath it be it. So on that level, I am thinking about how much of my time has been spent making excuses for not serving my God on a ministry level. I have lots of excuses, so I am going through them one by one here as he mentions the specific types of ministry the church is involved in. Money is always so scarce that I pray for God to understand why there's so little leftover for Him. Evangelism is not my style, and never will be. In a way it's probably a shame, because I know I have strengths as a persuasive salesperson (just ask my old boss) but it's my conviction to personal freedom that will prevent me from trying to change anyone's mind except through example of faith. I have issues with the homeless, which are too great to get into within the scope of this entry. Putting a hammer in my hand a'la Habitat to Humanity would be dangerous not only to myself but to others around me. Or maybe it's just being on my own with these two rapscallions that has made me feel like I can't, I don't have the means or the way to give back in that way. But maybe it's not that way I am supposed to be giving, anyways. I don't have a passion for those types of ministry, and it is only through our passions that we can serve the best.
I am contemplating a subject I should know backwards and forwards by now, the question of what are my strengths and my passion that I could use to fulfill God's intentions for me in terms of service to the world, and maybe it's as simple as what Michelle said last week, "start writing"...but of what? What is the intended message that can serve both my God and my self's passion, the world and the individual need to communicate in this medium? But it's not that simple, because I don't believe that God only possessed me with the desire to write, but also with the passion for animals. I used to joke that I was serving God by serving Dog, but I was only half-kidding. Indeed I used to think that I was serving his Purpose for me through my work, and I am sure in a way he still is, but there's something missing from it, something not complete.
In the recent past by way of explaining my background or vision to someone else, I've been thinking about something long forgotten, but it is something that comes to mind every time they start talking about ministry in church. My mind flashes to the image of the vision that drove me all the way through school, my "ten year plan for saving the world", and when I feel that call to ministry, I think, "Not yet", and imagine this vision. It's a dream decades long, of childish drawings of the same thing over and over that took a more distinct shape over thousands of repetitions from the eighties to the nineties, but something I haven't though about much in the past ten years. That makes me really sad, and at the same time, my mind starts planning it over again : a place of animal refuge, where animals come to be rescued, to be cared for, rehabilitated mentally and physically, then re-homed with certain criteria, to make sure what befell them never happens again. In addition, the animal rescue would support human rehabilitation as well, with specific types of people in emotional need in focused work with the animals, to give them back what they were missing or needed work on - empathy towards others, a connection to the physical world, a way to re-program them for caring for another besides themselves.
But as this dream has laid dormant in me these past ten years, so other things have become dormant as well. Even though my daily dedication to animals hasn't changed on some levels, there are changes over time and with exposure that have deadened my heart in ways I wish it hadn't. Over this past week, there were two incidents with J that showed me this. During the week, he sent me a link to a video about a man losing his dog, a video that should have made me cry but somehow couldn't touch me, which is disturbing in some levels to me. I tried to rationalize it with truth - the video was breaking up for one, which certainly detracted from its emotional message, but also the overexposure I've had to these types of situations. The other was watching him interact with a dog at a party. He was examining the dog, noticing the little ways the inferior care she was getting was affecting her. The next day, he was still thinking about her, thinking about the things he noticed and how he wished he could have changed that for it. Seeing him with that dog, or thinking about what he said about her, reminded me of the way I used to be, and how I've changed over time. In some ways it is ironic that in my single-minded dedication to learning and absorbing everything about providing quality of life to animals, I end up becoming desensitized to the little details that really all make up the Big Picture I was working towards - making the world a better place for animals. I felt inspired by those events to re-open this part of my mind and heart again, in order to serve the animals better, by which I can serve my God. I do believe that at least part of the purpose He has in mind for me is in the role of animal advocate, to be the one who gives the voice to those who don't have one, like Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus', immortalized in a plaque on the second floor of the Statue of Liberty, speaks of:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

During Bryan's sermon, he makes a point about Christian service by turning on a flashlight with low battery. The dulled light flickers on for a minute, then goes out. He says this is what most people's faith is like, without the recharge given to us by commitment to presence. This brief flicker reminds me of my own heart's brief lurches in those two dog related incidents above, but it's the flicker itself that matters, in a matter of renewing the flame. He replaces the battery in the flashlight, showing us now how we are to live, how we are meant to be the Light of the World, and his sermon, and those other influences, serve to fill my heart back up to find ways to be that light, in the ways that drive and move me to lift my lamp up beside that golden door.

HIGHLIGHTS

Sunday morning rolls around again, and I am contemplating church, a place I feel a need to get back to but with the usual struggle of inertia and dressing of children in time. With a little nudge and a push, I get the motivation to get them up and out in time. This week, I tried a new approach, and decided to take the restless souls of the children to kids choir practice so I could open my whole mind to the sermon. On our way upstairs, I see my beloved friend Michelle, on her way to the service in which I will soon be joining her, and stop to hug my childhood best friend's mother, who is delighted to see the three of us in attendance again, or just in general. I am already feeling so filled with the people in this church, who have come to mean so much to me over not just the course of my spiritual life, but my entire life in general.
After dropping the kids off, I manage to catch up with Michelle and her mother, and we grab coffee and cookies before finding our seats in the Contemporary Service. Vicki mentions she has been running ragged all morning trying to make sure the changes to Sunday School are situated, but she is stopping now for a spiritual break because she really wants to hear Gene's sermon. Gene has recently taken charge of our Bible Study group, and I have come to appreciation of him over the past months I have been getting to know him. My curiosity is piqued about how his sermon is going to be, and he is already leading into the scripture of the day as we walk in to find our seats, reading the story about Jesus overturning tables in the temple, being angry about the way humanity is changing faith into something it should not be.
After he reads the scripture, the focus is on the four teenagers on stage, two boys playing guitar accompanied by two lovely young women singing. I recognize one of the girls, new to the vocals, as Michelle points it out - it is Rich's oldest daughter. I see Rich and his wife to our left, watching her debut and smiling. I am so glad to see them there this day, and see their daughter up on stage, a lovely youthful version of her mother, and a testament to their upbringing.
Gene's sermon was one I could think about for days, in fact probably will, as it hit me on several levels. The title was "Barbarian Christian", and he turned the scripture story of the anger of Jesus at the money changers in the temple into several concepts, one being an idea I have thought about often in the past few years - that as we are called closer to God, the walk becomes more narrow, that Jesus is not a representation of some hippie-peace-love guru but in fact one who stands up for tolerating only that which represents true faith and commitment to God, not complacency and "free Grace" without conditions. Several parts of the sermon made us laugh, Michelle and Vicki and I looking at each other with understanding and appreciation of his humor. He challenged the congregation to stop focusing on the outer layers of the onion, the "little gods" that got in the way of true expression of faith, while saving only the little nub of the middle for God, when God wants the whole onion, all the layers to be about Him. He elaborated on examples of "spiritual warriors", who would not accept status quo but rose up to influence change, specifically Martin Luther and John Wesley (the founder of our particular denomination of Christianity). The entire sermon served as a method of charging people to be fired up inside, to not accept less but expect more, from ourselves as well as others around us, to turn our souls on fire for Christ and what he was standing for, and stand for it ourselves.
After this thought provoking yet amusing sermon, he turned it over to the vocal group again, and invited us to meditate on what was spoken. As the group sang, I was watching Rich and Kerri watch their daughter, and imagining the pride they were feeling, and happy for them that their daughter was growing up to embody the values they worked so hard to teach their children. The entire hour, I had been feeling this general sense that "church=love" in my heart, that these people were the reasons I continued to come here, that every one of them taught me something or served in some role in my life.
As I put my head down and listened to the music, I opened my heart to God and began a conversation with Him of gratitude, of thankfulness, and I found myself thinking of the beginning of my spiritual conversion, something I have had to defend or explain to people from my past who questioned this re-awakening of faith for their own particular reasons. I thought about how I was hit on so many different levels all at the same time, which all served to open my heart, right at the very same time that Rich and Michelle stepped in that open door and offered me a place to go where all those things could find outlet, and how amazing it was that God crafted that opportunity to bring me closer to Him. From there, it all grew outward, to a place in which these people I find here became my "church-family", the people who are always there to support me when I need it, who are my safety net, the people I run to when I need answers, who help me when I need help, who act in all the ways family would. These are the people who became my true family, so that when my real family, my "nuclear" family, split apart like atoms under pressure, I had a place to fall. I had a system of support already in place. I remembered introducing my real family to my church family at one Christmas service, how proud I was to point out all my friends here, and how I had realized how much these people meant to me at that point. I also remembered during the nuclear fission of my real family last year, some anger from my real family that these people here had come to mean more to me than they did. But that's because this was a safe place to fall, a place where the people were always there to lift me back up instead of tear me back down, where when I fell, I was bounced right back up in order to be the person God intended me to be, like a spiritual trampoline.
I was overwhelmed with God's intentions in providing this for me, like he had the foresight to know I was going to have this need for this, not only because of this family split but for other reasons as well, and set things in motion in just the right ways to guide me to the resources I was going to need later on. I turned to Michelle and started to explain to her what I had been thinking. She completely understood, but then took it past my own understanding to the next level.
"Yes, we are here for you, and we do these things for you because God planned it that way. It's because he has intentions for you, and I know this." We look at each other with an awareness of my history, of how I was hiding my light under a bushel in misery, and am just now coming out of it and becoming the person God intended me to be all along. Her belief in me and my purpose has always been clear, though, and has been unwavering.
"You were meant to do something amazing in this lifetime," she says to me intently. Then she turns away and adds the final instructions, with authority.
"So start writing."

STAGES

I'm cutting through the dark night on a highway I've traveled down hundreds of times before. It's a way I know by heart, or so I think. A phone call from an old friend, distractions from the back seat, and I'm cruising through the memories of times gone by without even looking at the signs, lost in my thoughts and the music. I start to point something out to my son, a story from the past, and I realize this is not the town I thought it was, and suddenly nothing looks familiar. Suddenly I am seeing the signs, incongruous signs for Lake Somerville and Caldwell. This is not the highway I know, and with a rush of clarity, I remember the right turn I was supposed to make God only knows how many miles ago. I call the friend whose house I am on the way to for her to talk me through which turn to take out of this town. Ironically, two GPS receivers sit idly next to me on the passenger seat (they only work if you turn them on, see....).
So I make a turn, and now I'm on another highway, the unexpected highway, the highway that used to take me to San Marcos, and the horse of my heart, but now I am hoping is taking me back to the highway I was supposed to be on this whole time. I'm not really sure where I am anymore, but somehow I'm okay with it all, because I'm tuned into classical music and the concentration of calm. It's all about the journey, and I am just trying to enjoy it without worrying about where it's going to end up.
Except that my friend is expecting me, and I make the night more of a comedy of errors when I try to make it her house from memory and not off the directions. At any rate, I'm an hour behind anticipated arrival when I finally pull up at her house.
She welcomes me in with a smile anyways, and after some discomfort trying to to get the children off to bed, I join her and her husband at the kitchen table. Everything in their house flows in neat, orderly lines. Abstract art hangs from boldly painted walls, staring down at bantam futon furniture. Classical music flows from unseen speakers, settling us into "serenity now".
I sit across from D., who is stirring a cup of tea, and her husband G., who is sketching with charcoal over an etched drawing, lines moving every which way but somehow connecting to a coherent whole. I begin our catching-up conversation with an explanation, a redirection of parenting skill attempts based on the premise that I have to become more self reliant, learn to be mother and father both, because the father is not coming back, or at least not in the ways that it was before.
Each explanation begs another explanation, and we go back further and further, to explain the demise of this relationship that wasn't meant to be. I pose questions, questions directed to G., questions as if I am questioning myself, but I'm not, really, It's almost like I want him to agree with me on this thing, which is "the thing that is not love", showing them the scars as if I need to prove my pain to them. They get it. I ask G what it would be like if he was across the world from his wife, and he looks at her like it pains him to even think of it. "And if you were, would you want to write to her? To talk to her? Would you miss her?" Of course, of course, but it would never come to that. D has her hand on his leg, and he looks up from his sketches to meet my eyes, and then look at hers as he gives his answers. She listens to him with half a face turned towards him, smiling softly. I draw on my own experiences, asking him if he would make the same choices as this man did, and yet knowing the answer was no, before I even asked.
So then we're done talking about 'what is not", now we move on to talking about "what is". I've had enough of the darkness, and I move on to the light. I tell them about hope, and about yearning, and I ask them if they ever felt like that, do they understand what that is. I ask them questions about how these things start out. It seems like it's been so long for me, or maybe that I've never felt like this before. I explain what I am feeling now, and ask them if they ever felt this way. G looks up at me and meets my eyes, and they both kind of smile and start to tell me the story of their beginning, a story I have never heard the whole of. She starts to talk about a note he left on her car, about six months of letters back and forth, of a picture of him she could look at and hold in her hands. "This was in the old days," G. teased, "before Facebook profile pics. Back when we had like real pictures, you know. Remember those things?"
So I ask them questions about how these things start out. It seems like it's been so long for me, or maybe that I've never felt like this before. They identify with what I am explaining, nodding and giving each other knowing looks. Then G explains it better, the beginning of knowing.
"At first, you discover each other's intrinsic qualities, those little things you have in common. And those things begin to take on a life of their own. Then there's the inside jokes, which also begin to take on a life of their own. They build on each other, until you've got this whole...thing going on that's bigger than all of that." He gestures, a hand flowing up into the air. I get it, and I also see from them, from the way they are together, what that looks like as it grows.

Then it's late, and we retire. In the morning, D and I talk as she prepares her day's lunch in the kitchen. She tells me about a radio program that morning talking about a book that reminded her of our conversation last night, and about how sometimes the things that happen to us that are sad, or bad, are really there to help us appreciate the good, and the light, that much more. It's something I have heard a few times, a few different ways, over the past couple of months.
In the end, she gives me some direction on how to get to what I need to get this morning, a map of sorts, outlining some stops along the way. She leaves for work, and I begin preparing to leave. As I went to get the children ready, I saw a picture from their wedding. It was the most beautiful scene I had ever seen. They were standing by a window that looked out on a rainforest, somewhere exotic, like perhaps Madagascar, and it was just the two of them and the minister. She was so beautiful, and they looked at each other with adoration. It made me smile, remembering her as the Prom Queen, and G teasing us about our alleged dorkiness.

I drive off to the next stage of my journey, thinking, thinking about pictures and maps and directions, and how sometimes we have to take the wrong way before we see the signs that are pointing us in the right direction, to the road of light and better days ahead.

AND GRACE WILL SET US FREE

Every Sunday, it's the same struggle. Two kids who don't want to go to church are scrubbed, dressed, and sent out to the car, always at the last minute. No matter what time I get started, we always seem to be leaving right when we are supposed to get there. Realistically, we are always about ten minutes late - the amount of time it would take me to get the youngest situated in some kind of other activity besides sitting next to me in service, struggling to sit still and be quiet. So there we are, and there we struggle.
Every Sunday, it's the same thing. It's the struggle with him to keep his mouth from running, a million little disturbances, the occasional dirty looks from people around us. Luckily, I think, we have choices between two services, and this one I always choose, because it's not nearly as quiet of a service as the other one, not nearly as serious, so not nearly as high of a penalty. If I had my choice between the two, I would choose the other - the other service going on next door is more mentally engaging, whereas this one, the contemporary service, is more emotionally based. There is always something about it, though, that makes me feel God at a heart level, instead of a head level, and this week, it was no exception.
There is live music, and colors swirling, and darkness inside the heart of the church, and pictures projected on to twin screens on either side of the stage, the words to the songs running over them. This week, it started with a picture of light streaming through the open canopy of a forest, a place where God exists to me. I was feeling it, not thinking it. A woman onstage was talking about her decision on a particular song we were to sing, talking about how her life was so full of all these distractions, and finally, when she came to ask God to reveal to her what music she should chose, and sought his counsel on the other issues, the answer was that He had been waiting for her this whole time, just waiting for her to start leaning on him already. And with this revelation, she chose Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) , a modern twist on an old hymn. I always loved this song, but this day, I was being moved by the words.
Clips from a movie about the Last Supper rolled across the twin screens as this week's Scripture was played from a recording that reverberated throughout the sanctuary. The minister began his sermon, a time that is usually the most challenging with the children, mostly the youngest one. Today, it was the usual struggle again, the constant whispering between us, his requests for toys or potty breaks, my admonishments, attempts to engage him in coloring, the questioning myself on if other well-intended people are right, if he is too young for this and I should just make sure he is in the nursery during this, or in the little church choir upstairs, but always the guilt of pushing him into something away from me when all week I spent away from him at work, the desire to show him how I live my faith, how I want it to be for him, the expectations I have versus the reality of taking a three year old to church services that he can't understand. The difference this time, though, was how I felt about it. My heart was so much lighter than it has been in the past, dealing with this same problem, and I say a silent prayer to God, thanking him for bringing that light back into my life, for chasing the darkness away.
I am only catching snatches of the sermon, which is exasperating me, because I really want to absorb it today, and some of what Brian is saying is speaking to me. In fact, he is kind of talking about some of what I've been thinking about, about the struggle, and how we are to deal with it, questioning if we allowed ourselves to be defined by the struggle, or transcend it. "Some of us here are dealing with pain, dealing with past abusive relationships, dealing with dark times, and what God wants is for us to not be defined by that, but defined by this instead", and he gestures to the breaking of bread and the spilling of wine, of the sacrifice of the Lamb. He is talking about Passover, and the marking of the doors with sheep's blood, and the gift of people's presence in our lives, and my mind is rolling.
Then we break for communion, and all these thoughts spill out when I dip the bread into the wine, and take my place on my knees to pray after. I lift my heart up to God, and I am thanking him for the light he has placed in my life, for leading me out of the desert, for transforming my heart the past months, for all the gifts He has brought to me, for His presence most of all. I am weeping with gratitude for this God, who saved/ a wretch like me.
And wretch I was, so darn miserable and aching inside before. I think about that today, think about how on other Sundays just like this, I would go home from church crying, and spend the day trying to lift myself out of this depression. Some of that darkness was from the struggle of trying to manage these two heathen children on my own, but my attitude is different now. I used to wish someone was there to help me, to reach out for someone to lean on, but I've gotten past that, on to the realization that I have to do it myself. Sometimes I feel like no one's really there for me, but all that begats self reliance. I have to do it on my own, because it's not fair to ask anyone else to help carry this load, and that's part of my transformation. Sometimes getting what you need is to stop needing it, and learn how to do without. That's what we've been doing, with the eventual goal of being more complete without, to be more complete for.
Anyway, this day I walk outside of the service with these thoughts, and also the other thought that today was different, because the main thing that keeps me coming back to this place is the connections I have to it - my friends - but today I saw none of those connections. Right as I was thinking that, though, I saw one, and he is just who I wanted to see, after all.
Of all the people I have met through this church, Rich is the one I value the most. His name seems to suit him, in spiritual terms. In fact, he's the one who got me to start coming here in the first place, and after I got to know him, I saw why. Rich is a "fisher of men", a sheperd drawing in the lost sheep. He fired me up with the same enthusiasm, and we used to feed off each other, watching the flock from the back pew, seeing who was new, then almost pushing each other to go round them up, inroduce ourselves, invite them to our small group, which eventually got so big it splintered into many other small groups. Now, Rich and I aren't in the same small group anymore, and so we pass each other in the halls, and even in his house, since my kids are there every Thursday night, but we rarely have a chance to sit down and talk.
Today, as luck would have it, the person sitting by him had just left, and I claimed the spot. He was all worn out from giving blood, and as we sat, people kept stopping to talk to him, to thank him for giving his blood, as if he was part of Christ himself. I joked with him about the state of his heart, had it been drained dry, but knowing Rich, it never would be. As I joked, he caught my eye, noting the tears. Nothing much passes by Rich, and I knew I didn't have to tell him anything, but I wanted to. I told him some of what has been in my heart lately, about the transformation of spirit, of God's presence working in my life, about my struggles.
"It sounds like you've been beating yourself up pretty good, " he said, when I lamented about God "smoting my eye", about my failure to get myself out of a bad situation, about how it was finally time to see the signs in front of me. "I'm going to tell you something...for later. This might not help you right now, but I want you to think about it." He told me about the ghosts of exgirlfriends past, and how even though some of those experiences were bad and painful, in the end, he didn't regret any of it, because it got him to where he was today. He gestured to my kids, the older one who was practicing Tae Kwon Do poses in the hallway, the younger one who flashed us a brilliant smile. "And you got these two out of it, which is something you will never regret."
We talked some more. I told him I felt like everyone was judging me for these struggles I had with the youngest, how I felt eyes on me all the time. "If anyone IS watching you," he said, "It's with sympathy, not judgement. They probably remember what it is like to have small children, and have sympathy, or perhaps are thanking God they aren't there anymore." He gave me some real practical advice on my struggles with the heathens in church, a solution no one had ever suggested, but made perfect sense. "Man, I have missed you," he said. "You always had something deep to say, some intelligent remark, some profound statement to make. I'm sad that we aren't in the same group anymore."
Today, though, I thought it was him that was the profound one, the one who cut down to the heart of the pressing questions, and gave me the gift of clarity, and made me feel like the woe and strife of my past life did have a purpose, something I kind of knew but I guess needed to hear again. His idea for next Sunday, too, gave me hope.
Sometimes things do turn around. Maybe God was just waiting for me to be ready, for me to come and lean on him a little, and all those things I wanted, he just laid them at my feet, like a reward for the well-intended.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought,
So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.

RACING

Crisp Saturday morning. I'm standing with some friends, half stretching and half talking. Thousands mill around us, various versions of running apparel. It makes me think of my father, who picked me up this morning all snub-nosed with "You're gonna run in that?"
My father is always tied to my memories of running: feelings of adoration as we watched him from the streetside during marathons, running along next to him during my junior high years, or him on a bike next to me, coaching me as I ran. Memories of riding my bike alongside him, as he went on long runs, admiring the musculature of his thighs, thick and crab-like. My father was a strong man, and took physical fitness seriously. He was there at my first race, a mile in length, when I was maybe twelve. He was there at the end of my first cross country race when I was thirteen. For a long time I remembered my dad as being somewhere in the shadows, but this was the place he was at, the place of races.
Today it's race day, and I am not really sure I prepared well for this. I had the one decent run with C at the neighborhood track, but I was relying on my time with Britney to get me through. I wasn't even really thinking about it this morning, though, as I was having a heart to heart with a girl pal. We found our place where we thought we might be, time wise. I remembered to stretch my calves, always the tightness that would slow me down in a race. We heard the jubilant sounds of the first race kicking off. Then the line moved up. We moved up.
"We're going now," she says to me, as both of us are getting our Ipods on. I thought about the last time I did this race, with my sister. I didn't have any music that time, just our conversation. This would be good, I thought.
I had no idea, though, how that was gonna work out for me. If I had known, I would have lined myself up in a different spot. For very quickly, as we got into it, I turned to my friend. "This is the wrong tempo," I said. "Do you mind if I go?"
"Go on," she waved me on. And I took off, at the intensity I was dancing at those late nights in my living room.
The problem was, I couldn't go as fast as I wanted. There were too many people around. People all around me, moving next to me, people streetside. Too many people all up in my business. This was an obstacle I had to get around. I began a little game of thread-the-needle. The focus became finding the opening, finding the time to slip between bodies in motion.
I started to worry a little about what the people streetside were seeing. I don't know why that was even bothering me. It reminded me of my self consciousness dancing in my living room, a silly idea to even worry about what you looked like when you were alone. So I decided to deal with it the way I dealt with it then. Block it out. Put your blinders on. Come in deeper. Get inside my mind.
So I went in there, to this place inside where it was just my mind, and the music. In my mind, I always decided to be the star. I just decided to run with it. The problem is, I still couldn't run fast enough. I could only go as fast as opportunity presented itself. There were a whole lot of people in my way, too many people, too many obstacles. Gimme more, gimme more...I was ready to go.
I thought about how different this was from last time I did this race, remembered points along the route where my sister had been wanking out, wanting to walk. Finally, at one point, she broke. If I keep it up, I'm gonna be sick, she moaned. "I got to GO!" Go on, she waved at me, head down, defeated. I was stronger than that. This day, I thought about that race and wished I hadn't have stayed with her the whole time before that moment. I was stronger than that, so I should have just rolled with it.
Right after I passed the memory of this, I caught up with S, my best girl pal at work. There was hilarious girl drama this week about this race between her and our doc, who was also doing the race. S had left her a long time ago. I was full of it when I came up beside her, bumping her hip and messing around with her. "Let's go, girl!" I urged. She gave me an annoyed look, huffing with exertion. She was pushing it already. I tried keeping at her speed for a while, seeing if I could push the right buttons in her to make it a race already. We grabbed some water, walked a minute, tried to decided whether this was going to work out for us. I was willing to give her a chance, provided she could keep up.
The problem now was that we were coming up near the finish. I always got excited at the finish. We're not pacing it, we're racing it, I thought, as I neared the final turns. S wasn't feeling it, but I decided I didn't care. I had let too many others set the pace, this time I was gonna fly at my own speed and not feel a bit bad about it. I was tired of being held back.
And so I let it fly, and I didn't give a damn what anyone thought, not the people I was leaving behind, not the ones who were in my way, not the ones standing with cameras at the finish or those who were at the sidelines with bells and whistles. In the end, it was just me, racing to the finish line.

And my dad was there at the end, waiting to take me home.

CRACKED REAR VIEW

This morning on the way to work, I was thinking about something funny. I was remembering this elaborate prank Jennifer and I had in college that revolved around the punchline of a joke. The joke wasn't even that funny, but was made all the more hilarious to us for that very reason.
The joke was told to me for the first time by Russel John, the improbably redneck I worked with at a summer camp in '96, and I brought it to College Station, after which we worked it into a prank call situation...way past the point of being funny.
So the joke is something like this: This boy goes to the circus, and there is this clown that keeps taunting him. This darn clown just will not leave him alone, calls him names, embarrasses him, teases him mercilessly. It really affected this boy, but he had no idea what to do about it. Every year when the circus comes, this same clown goes after this boy, and he tries all these various things to get the clown to stop, but he can't. He ends up spending years in therapy working on this, and finally perfects his comeback. He goes back to the circus as a man now, and sees that clown, and this time he is ready to show him how all those years of therapy helped him learned the perfect way to deal with him. So when the clown starts messing with him again, he pulls out all the stops, and says....
"Fuck you, clown!"
I was laughing about this in the morning, laughing about an incident involving the punchline and Holly the Ho', laughing about all those college years. I was laughing all day, over other things. Hilarious moments involving me in the parking lot, observed trying not to pee myself with laughter, laughing over lunch, good times in the workplace, smile on my face. At the end of the day, though, there was this conversation, so to speak, that kind of changed my tune. It was a good conversation, but it got my mind rolling as I left work, heading into the traffic and the rain coming down. At first I was fine, playing my favorite tunes and getting deep into Keely Karoake hour like most days drive, but then something broke. And maybe it was just the rain, or maybe it was the deeper damage, but the dam broke and the tears came down.
During this time, there was a missed phone call from Jen, and even though I was on a stretch of road that I don't usually talk, I called her back, because I really needed a girlfriend. I told her what was on my mind, barely able to talk with the emotion of it all. She totally understood where I was coming from, the distorted sense of self that is the remnant of my broken marriage.
"Most people during this time are feeling sad because of what they lost. You're not sad for the loss of your marriage, you're sad for the loss of self you experienced in your marriage. You're sad because you are finally getting away. Thank God you are finally getting you and your children away from that."
We talked about this concept of beauty, the damage to my psyche that was caused by the mental cruelty of this man I lived with for ten years. "All this time, your girlfriends have been trying to tell you how beautiful you are, strange guys in bars were telling you that...I'm sorry it wasn't enough for you. It wasn't enough to overcome the way he treated you."
She told me to go ahead and cry about it, it was part of the healing. As I drove, all I could think about was how I wanted so badly to smash all the mirrors in my house. Hands clenched in fists of rage, wanting to strike out at the memory of him pushing me into those mirrors. "Look at yourself in there. Just look at yourself in the mirror. You're so ugly, how could anyone want you? Just look in there, see it?" And I am mad, not just at him, but at myself for falling into that, for looking in there and seeing what he saw and believing that, for letting that be the image I held in my head as the truth.
And it's all of it that I was crying about, the healing from all of it. During the fall, I was processing this stuff, seeing the sand castles he built in my mind starting to crumble and go back to the sea, the constructs he made to keep me under his control slowly disintegrating under the high tide. I was thinking about San Diego, and an experience that showed me what a liar he was. I was thinking about my parents, and their relationship with me that set me up for later damage. "It's the reason he chose you, honey," the counselor said. "He recognized something in you that was weak and he could prey on."
And prey he did. In some part of my mind, I see that his intention was to make me feel so bad about myself that I would never leave, but that doesn't make sense, in some ways, either, because he placed no value on me. Why would he care if I left, when he didn't care about me when I was there?
That makes me feel like all that time, he wasn't really seeing my true worth, and it makes me angry. It reminds me of the Vanilla Ice Cream guys, and how they saw me the same way - all about what they could get, and nothing about what I could give. In some ways, those Vanilla guys from college had boosted my ego, but they failed to see that there was more to me than this perceived superficial beauty and bedroom skills. None of them ever saw anything I wrote, or engaged me in intelligent conversation, or went riding with me. We never talked about books and ideas and the things that interested me. They never even knew I loved animals. How little they knew me, after all that time of working next to me.
Well, none of them but Ryan. Today I also remembered how I felt when I moved back to Texas, how for some reason coming home made me think about Ryan. In my mind, that was a sad feeling, that coming home emotion, because I thought that no one would ever see me again the way Ryan saw me. Those days were over and done, and I mourned the loss of my beauty, along with all the other pieces of me I left in my past. Over the past months, though, I've started to see that my beauty was simply part of my light that I had been hiding under a bushel all this time. And like Alicia said, it's time to start letting the light back in, and open up the parts of myself that had been closed off from this pain.
When my mom and I were in counseling, we talked about some of these things. She brought up that my sisters had been envious of the way she touted my beauty to them, that they felt insecure because she had been telling them all this time about my "classical features", about my intelligence, and they felt that their worth was unrecognized because of what she was seeing in me. "But don't you think I should have been the one you were telling that, too?" I wanted to ask her, because I never heard a single positive thing from her regarding myself. And it's those broken pieces that upset me today, the fact that those closest around me and who are supposed to love me the best are the ones who destroyed me the most.
This weekend, I was at Jen's house, and there was this man there who knew me during the time I was with him. We talked about beauty, that day, too. I told him how my insecurities, how these sand castles did keep me from leaving, how all I could see about myself was this cracked rear view. I told him how I was scared that man was right about me. Julian looked me up and down, and said, "That's not something you need to be worried about." He told me how hot he thought my pictures on Facebook were, and that made me laugh, the last laugh in fact, because this man I was married to said roughly the same thing. "Funny," he had written, "how that now that we are not together anymore, you look a whole lot better to me."
That makes me want to take some rocks for target practice against the mirrors. It's like we were at the circus, and he took me to the fun house and convinced me those distortion mirrors were my true reflection. It makes me want to come up with a great comeback against it.
Fuck you, clown.

THE DEVIL INSIDE

It's the patterns that I am after. I want to see how the patterns line up to form a whole. It seems like all those little coincidences have to mean something. Maybe I'm just always looking for signs. Whatever it is, I find it here at the fortune teller's. I know I've been thinking about this a lot, and some of my more conventional friends wouldn't understand. It is hard to reconcile my attraction for the esoteric with the outward expression of my Christian mindset.

I think, though, if you dig deeper, you will find that it is not really that far of a stretch.Personally, this is true, because I've been an open minded seeker of truth for a long time. I've flirted with expressions of spirituality within unconventional means. In order for religion to satisfy me, it must have an element of magic, of deep mystery. I left the religion of my upbringing and tried on several vestiges of faith before I realized that Jesus has enough magic to fill that need.

In terms of seeking the answers of tarot, there is an element of the Christian faith that feels that this is something akin to the devil's work, something that results from black magic perhaps, something incompatible with the confines of faith. Some of my friends think the answers of tarot may be within the realm of a a message from God. Still others may see it as a way of bringing the subconscious into the conscious mind. A way of clarification. A guide, you may say, to the signs. Or maybe it's just magic.

However, when looking back on the history of tarot, one might find that it is not so far off base from Christian roots. It is interesting to note that the first decks of tarot cards emerged from a mystical sect of Judaism, otherwise known as Kaballah. There is a theory that tarot decks were developed somewhat during the invasion of Israel by the Greeks, during a time where it was forbidden to study the Torah. Secret messages or symbolism began to emerge on the cards as a way to communicate the Torah amongst the Jewish people. Many of the early mentions of tarot cards were in relationship to priests, and during sermons. So not so far off.

The question inherent in the seeking of the tarot is, why the step away from faith and reliance on God and turn to another source for divination? Are we just not relying that he will show us the way out of the desert? Why can't we just trust him to reveal only what we need revealed, when we need it? I think maybe the mind just needs a little help to get what's in the background to the forefront, or maybe we get impatient and just want to know now what will be.

At any rate, on this day, there was a card that came up in the reading that had a very interesting interpretation. The woman laughed about it, and said there were about six cards in the deck that indicated the same kind of thing. My friend and I were impressed there were actually cards with that meaning.

Afterwards, I wondered about the meaning. I wondered about all of it, but mostly I got curious about that card, The Devil card. I was curious because it tied into a background conversation I had been having with E, regarding my inability to really control my impulse to reach out to talk to someone. The card in the reading seemed to suggest that there was a stronger temptation, of a more carnal nature. I considered if the card was somehow suggestive not of the physical reality, but the imagined reality, or inner drivings. Or was its meaning simply my shameless pursuit of conceptualized happiness?

So I dug deeper into the meaning of the card itself, from various sources. If you want the truth about something, you have to look at it from all the levels. At least that's the way I work. The fortune teller nods to this. "The problem with you is, " (and doesn't it make you curious when people make such statements about yourself), "you can see things from too many levels, nothing is ever right or wrong." What is truth, except all this vacillating?

So I want to know all the levels to this little Devil. The interpretations vary from source to source, and nobody specifically mentions the word the fortune teller uses. The imagery on the card is of a Pan-like Devil with a Goat Head (the ruling sign of this card is Capricorn - the Goat). The imagery also shows a man and a woman bound to this goat man by shackles. Interestingly, the same images of the man and woman are present on The Lovers card (which, possibly, may be one of the other cards with a similar meaning). On the Devil card, though, the man and woman have chains around their necks and are tethered to the throne. Some interpretations make note of this, saying that the card serves as a reminder that we are bound by choice, e.i. the couple can easily reach up and pull the shackles off. This metaphor is extended across various meanings of this card, interpretations such as freedom from restraints, and manifestations such as obsessions, addictions, unhealthy vices - the things we actually have control over, but sometimes feel like they control us. Basically, though, the card also speaks to the side of us that needs to let go of inhibitions, and "Put convention aside and be empowered by revealing your passionate nature."

The card also has some interpretations that involve tapping into a creative side, or becoming more in touch in the God within. It suggests a throwing off of constraints of the past and moving forward. Lust and temptation, however, are part of the equation, with a suggestion of Pan's draw towards primal urges and release, but with a reminder that this can be tempered with strength from the emotional, mental, or spiritual realms.

It represents a choice, basically, between the appeal of the physical world, or the exploration of higher planes of existence.

I consider both of those.

RE-BOUND

rebound: to spring back on or as if on collision or impact with another body
b : to recover from setback or frustration

I've been having this circular conversation with a few folks lately. Really, this conversation started back in October. I was sitting in my backyard with my old boyfriend, Noah, who is still one of my best friends. He had just moved back to town, and I was filling him in on all that was going on. Here I am, fresh from the barn in my boots and jeans, telling him about the ins and outs of my heart. I remember being surprised that when I talked about the pain, no tears were coming, because I was still hurting from it all. He was, as always, rational to the point of flaw - he caught himself talking about the neurology involved in my emotions, and we had a good laugh as he realized out loud that I was speaking emotionally, and deserved an emotional response. I asked him, then, when it would be acceptable to become involved with someone else.

"Your relationship is already over," he said, "the time is now."

But I knew he was wrong. I was still processing the pain of rejection and the elements of un-doing in my marriage. We talked about this often, argued about it, discussed it across Facebook chats and dinners out. He debated his side well, but kept his emotional distance from me (smart man). I think we both knew where I was going with it, during this time. He was sensitive to my vulnerability, and I was trying not to make him my crutch. I needed something, and he kept trying to suggest that the door was open for me to seek it out there, but I knew in my heart that to do that now would be selfish and to no good end.

I felt I needed to be sexually validated by someone outside the relationship, to overcome some of the issues in the marriage (you're so ugly no man would ever want you), and also had this strong desire to be emotionally attached to someone else (nobody loves you, nobody will ever love you, because you aren't worth loving). I wanted to prove that this man who hurt me was wrong about me, needed to prove to myself that it was possible to have what I wanted. I needed those words to go away in my head and be replaced with positive validation, and during this time, I keep seeking that outside myself.

One night during this time, say in November, we went out all night downtown with some friends. That was a crazy random night with mysterious connections, but the best part of all was meeting up with Raj, a friend I made a couple of years ago. Raj is a magic man, sagacious and suave. This night out, we sat in the corner of a greek cafe and Raj and I had a long talk...about Truth, Beauty...and Sex...fabulous subjects. Raj touches me deeply on some intellectual level, but this night he also gave me verbal validation for my attractiveness, which helped me feel better. That was a strange night of walking around Montrose with beers and bands and goth kids, and bar hopping and Denise and her sister drunk at their apartment, and then the long drive home with him, with Noah. The night ended in the early hours of morning, with my headlights shining on the street and he and I talking...there was some emotional context to the evening, another fight I was having with my husband, another decision to run away from. I was crying about it, and of course he let me cry on his shoulder. We have grand affection for each other as friends, and that night he stroked my hair and told me he loved me forever and ever, giving me the emotional validation I needed without the hint of sex. I remember asking him that night, "But why? What makes me worth loving?" Tell me, my old friend.

"Because you are a good person, and you never give up. You keep fighting."

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I was struggling with the desire to seek validation without involving someone else, because the time wasn't right. I needed to smooth over the scars and start healing, but from the inside. Mari gave me a number to the hotline, and I had called and talked to some girl, who told me I needed to find that validation inside myself. It's pretty simple, really. No, really, it was a struggle, but something I needed to focus on, on finding the ways to feel good from the inside out. It was work, work on self, work on image, always working, working, working. It was a time of metamorphosis, and I was in the chrysalis stage. My cocoon was blasting Britney. I was focusing on getting in touch with my inner diva, working on achieving self validation for the self's sake. I needed my soul to bounce back before I could be complete enough to seek what the heart desires.

During this time, I was going through the Bargaining stage. The Man and I were trying to work it out. It was an earnest effort on my part, but it was causing me huge anxiety. I talked to Noah about it, and to Raj. They both supported this effort, because they've both had significant relationships hit the dust, and wished their women would have tried harder. They also understood the flip side of the coin.
There were temptations in there, but I was resisting. The Dirty Mexican was working overtime. "You're like a volcano waiting to explode," he said, "and I want to be there when it happens..." Some days I considered. The "no" turned into a "maybe". It wasn't the full picture, though. His attraction was somewhat gratifying but only part of the picture, like Noah's platonic love and our affection for each other. Still I wanted to keep people out of the wake of my broken heart.

And then, the coin flipped. The string broke. It was a fragile marriage, under too much strain. C-r-a-c-k. It didn't end for the traumatic reasons, but for the minor ones in the end....but that's okay. All that time gave me a chance to work through the stages of grief, to process the relationship, so that when the end came, it was with the sigh of relief. Thank God that's over, now let's have some peace tonight....
And then the conversations started. People kept wanting to warn me about the rebound factor. Mostly, though, these were people who didn't know my history or my thinking process. My girlfriends never asked these questions, they knew I had been processing, and waiting.
Noah and I talked about the rebound factor. "See, the thing is, " he said, "Rebound is for people who haven't processed their old relationship, and who get involved without thinking things through. You've already done all that processing. You've been thinking this through the whole way, and examining all the aspects. It doesn't apply."
But still, the question sits there, so I take a look to see if it truly doesn't apply. I find this quiz, this silly quiz that was really more for people half my age, but here's my results:

Your score is 10. Congratulations! You're really ready to start something new with somebody new. Good for you! The danger zone has been crossed and you've made it to the other side a stronger person. You've learned from your mistakes and you've let go of a relationship that wasn't working in favor of finding something better. Well done! Life is to short to dwell on the past... welcome to your future!

Sometimes I talk to Raj during my lunch break on messenger chat. Last time we talked, he wanted to know, basically, if I had acted on my urges to find that validation outside myself. His surprised reaction was amusing. The thing is, though, once I came out on the other side, I realized I had found the validation inside myself, and it was that transformation that made me able to be comfortable with the idea of waiting for the right person, and the right time.
Everyone has their opinion, but nobody knows me more than I do. Alicia and I talk about this one day over a random beer in the feed room. She's seen me suffer and try to pull myself around, and she is cautioning me, in almost the same words as the fortune teller. Go slow...but go.....Alicia's thoughts run all jumbled and in no seeming semblance, but this day she tells me something profound that I listen to intently.

"You've been walking down this hallway, closing the windows, shutting the doors, walking in darkness. It's time to open them back up, let the light back in. You have to walk back down that hallway and open up all those parts of yourself that you shut down to keep the pain out. He can be a part of that, but not all of it. This is still your journey, this is for you, and I want it for you."
So do I, Alicia.

Some of us still bounce back.

LIKE A FISH OUT OF WATER

For some reason, I've been thinking about fish a lot lately. I have no idea where this has come from. I keep trying to think back to see what started that thought, but I can't remember. Vague recollections of conversations with my son, and an anatomy class at work. The images in my head were there before that, though. Even though I have no idea where it originated, some part of my mind is focused on it, this idea of fish swimming upstream, fish on a line, fish straining their gills against the bright sun.

And strangely, my "assistant" brought this up the other day. He is a very quiet person, but sometimes he starts telling me a story, or an opinion on something I shared with him, and his message is always simple and profound all at the same time.
This day he was telling me a "fish story", in a way. His story was about a fish caught on a line. The fish was pissed. He was thrusting and ducking against the reeling in, even though he knew he was caught. He described the struggle of the fish against his demise, "because the worst thing is to be a fish out of water."
That line struck me.

Then, last night, I was on the porch with my best friend and her husband, and he is giving me his opinion. This would make anyone who knows him laugh, because M is always giving his opinion. It's just that most of the time, we don't agree with it. Same thing last night. I thought he was off base, and he was giving me shit about it. All so typical it had us laughing about it.

Then he throws out some mental bait.

"The thing is, for so long you've been a fish out of water..."

**************************************************

My best girl and I set out down a dark country road, on a quest for grub and smokes. I am laughing and telling her some story, and she turns to me and says, "It's good to have you back."
She tells me she missed this girl, the fun and happy one. She talks to me as I drive into the blackness along lines very reminscent of my conversation with my old college roommate last night. The three of us girls have a history together. She tells me how hard it was on my friends to watch me, to struggle to support my decision in the past to stay in the marriage. We laugh about my line, about how it was either a testament to my loyalty, or a testament to my stupidity. She tells me how different I was during that decision, how the life was just sucked out of me.
"And now, you are coming up for air."