"groaning creation"

Today at work I happened upon a snake.  Then its head caught my eye.  Huge and bulbous?  But no. It was a snake eating a small bullfrog.  Of course I learned in science class --yea, witnessed a python eating a rat-- how snakes can eat things so much bigger by unhinging their jaws.  Still, this was quite an ambitious stretch!

I showed it to other people.

Later it seemed not to have progressed all that much.  Nearing halfway, perhaps.  We were all grossed out but curious and left it be.  The grossest part was that the frog was alive--being eaten feet first.

Not to go into further detail.  The snake actually gave up on the frog--next time I walked by the snake was gone and the frog was lying there, looking rather normal, but dead.

Suddenly a memory unlocked with photographic clarity, seeing a snake eat a frog when I was four or five. My big brother had a garter snake, I think, and had caught a small frog for it.  Everyone treated it like a science project, or maybe a movie since we didn't get to watch many of those--we crowded around the terrarium in horrified fascination.  I too stared for some time before I'd had enough of the horror.

What I saw in the behavior of the snake and the frog led me to understand a horrific, sinister possibility about conflict:

The bad guy might not be cackling with glee, but in fact completely serious about his evil deed, even inconvenienced greatly by it.
The victim might bear the pain and totally accept the conscious slide toward death.

"It's nature...."

In seventh grade my teacher fed a rat to his boa constrictor.  He had a little clasping tool that held the rat by its tail, and lectured us for a couple minutes while the rat dangled there.  The rat clasped struggled and begged, clasping its hands together, most actively begging it seemed, to be freed.  In the cage, the deal was over quickly--the boa grabbed it and slammed it into the water dish or something brutal but swift.  But at any rate, this particular educational moment was gross, but not of a stomach-churning horror of a creature accepting its sacrifice.

But today, I saw again that slow motion killing of a frog, and it took me back.
Sick.
Sick that one should submit to such an evil.
Sick that I watched it as a little kid. (Just because things happen in nature doesn't mean they should be watched.)
I'm sure the frog is actually paralyzed, but still the appearance of compliance is so sick.

It made it a little bit worse even that the snake had chosen a prey too large to eat, but still killed it: in the process, my imagination accused, of trying to prove the amazing stories of how large of prey snakes can eat.


So then do I judge people who've been victimized as weak or compliant, because they don't "get away" or "say no"?
Shame on me if so.  What business have I.
If I ever see such a thing again, I don't care what "nature" says.  If the frog is still alive, I will fight to free it from that snake that dared to follow its natural course in front of a compassionate set of eyes.

Confused relationship idolatry

Since when has desire for a mate, even a passionate, weak-kneed desire, been renamed idolatry? The years of singleness stretch on as earnest young Christians, upon approaching matrimonial feelings, freeze in their tracks. 'They think all the time about this person!' 'They want this person!' 'Aaaa! Idolatry!'

Now, since when is thinking of, wanting, desiring, pursuing a specific, compatible person, idolatry? Idolatry is the building of false, lifeless icons that represent the Living God. Desiring a mate for earthly matrimony (though I will discuss its all important similarity to Christ and the Church) is not even in the same ball field as building a lifeless icon to receive the acclaim of Almightiness!

On the other hand, the Living God often relates to us in terms of--what do you know? The marriage relationship. He spends plenty of Scripture building this analogy. See Song of Solomon. If the Song is an analogy for relationship to God, don't forget an analogy can speak to both sides of the analogy. In other words, for those more familiar with the God-church side of the equation (Note, God-church, not God-individual relationship), they might do well to look at the man/woman side.

Now, for those thinking this elevates man to God-like status, think again. Thinking one's man is omnipotent, omnipresent, the Redeemer of mankind, that would be elevating man to godlike status, and it probably should be classified as idolatry. I don't know one single Christian woman who thinks that of men.

One problem: people equating marriage with the God~individual person relationship. That would immediately give men a wrongfully elevated status, but the God~individual relationship is represented as Father-child!

Regarding God~Church, look at the romance in Scripture! God takes care of Israel, He loves her, He woos her, He gets angry when she cheats on Him, He forgives her even after it's gone so far they had to be separated! And then it is written, "Men, love your wives even as Christ loved the church."

...Do you think this can't be what it's saying because it's license for a spouse to cheat? think again (it's Scripture, for those fervently submitting their love lives to The Word). Rather than a license to cheat, it's a call to reconcile. And to seek each other, serve each other, love each other so passionately they would die to be with each other!

"But I'm not God!"

"Well, nor am I the Church!"

...remember in that sense we both happen to be members of the church, like a lung and a kidney! Both halves of the analogy need brought into earthly terms. Both members of the earthly picture have to acknowledge their humanity, while leaning on Christ to go beyond their natural strength for each other!

It's an analogy. Of course the man doesn't have God's omni powers. Just as importantly and overlooked, of course the woman doesn't have all the church's powers and abilities!

Another way to see it is this. Would a devoted Christian man dare say, "I am the fulness of God?" No. In fact it's become a common complaint, from men, taking one terrified look at romantic commitment and sprinting the other way, saying "Aaaa! I'm not God! I'm not your savior!"

Well, duh. We women know that.

On the other hand, women tend to suffer in silence the expectation that, while man fails to be God, they are expected to be the church in their relationship to a husband. But women would be just a much in their rights to take one terrified look at commitment, and what is expected of them, sprint the other way, and scream "Help! I'm not your church! I don't have the sum of the abilities of the church to dedicate to you! I don't have the sum of the wisdom, the stability, or the strength to serve you like the church serves God!"

But bring both sides of the analogy to earth, and in the marriage picture is the closest to a license, or even command, to "worship" one other than God. (I heard a line once, "with this ring I thee worship," and the problem there was that, while shamelessly mocking his call to honor God in faithfully loving her, he still expected her to be the church.)

Only God is worthy of being called God. Only the Church can fulfill her duties and roles of the as the Church. But when did this rather obvious truth confuse mankind into thinking passionately loving and desiring to enter that similar (not identical) relationship, was idolatry?

(I think it was when people started looking at the God-to-individual relationship as a romance, which it is only as far as a Father-child relationship has an element of romance. Romance-romance in Biblical religion is Christ loving the Church.)

If men, running from commitment, think women see them as The Redeemer, they are simply blinded by their arrogance, failing entirely to know her heart and all the things she graciously overlooks in him (which he thinks he has hidden? lol. Meanwhile she also lets him see her flaws, and he assumes those flaws to be just the tip of the iceberg!). She graciously overlooks the ways he fails at the personal-protector side of the relationship, because it's in her nurturing nature to do so, to fill in the gaps in relationship.

Men need to stop decrying the protector role on the basis of not being The Almighty Protector. It's one thing to admit, "I think only God can do this particular thing, but perhaps in His strength I can..." compared to, "Expect nothing of me!! I'm not God!" Men need to give women a chance to accompany them in that role. And if men won't listen to (and seek out and pursue madly unto death!) women's heart-thoughts, they'll continue to run around thinking a woman's church-like, nurturing behavior is proof that she elevates him to the status of God!

And what about women who seem not to exhibit so much 'churchish' nurturing behavior anymore? They are of practicality being their own interim earthly protector. ...And that is not defemanization, it's exactly what women adapt to, have always done, naturally, when they are the pastor/head of their house. Let someone become the unto-death pastor/head of her house, and she will make a lower-case c 'church' for him. This is not idolatry of a spouse, it's the irreducibly complex center of community, created by God, for His own glory and worship.

P.S. Of course, passionate ambition towards marriage does not warrant irresponsible actions under the delusion of future commitment. But getting to know people and moving closer to each other isn't an irresponsible action. Also, as the family of Christ, there's every reason to cherish one's close friends whether marriage is in sight or not. So what if it doesn't lead to marriage, and so what if it does? To think, "I am not ready to be married," is quite right and natural if you're not in a relationship that has developed to readiness! The question is, are you ready to spend one more day learning one more thing you didn't know about your friend? Are you ready to be lit up by Christ and to encourage each other to glow brighter with His truth?

This is a happy day.

The sky was blue and now it's gray.

Oh, happy day.

The sun just came out and I have nothing simple to say.

I want a big yard and a border collie

without care.

What is care? What is worry?

It's the waiting.

Torn between crying for that other country but

blurring out so many simple beauties in this Creation.

I could make a list of the life I believe I "would" be living.

But know it's missing key elements.

Is this waiting (it's tangible, like thick clay) a biological signal I was designed for company?

Like rehearsing the Gospel

I forget to think about who I am--not the clay I'm stuck in.

The heart yearns for all things made right.

My soul knows I could be better than this.

If I could just forget.

(what?)

the waiting.

no, really, forget what?

Worry. Care.

I want to be as carefree as I was before--

before--

I was born.

Did our souls exist before bonded to a body?

I can't help but wonder, so deeply etched the conviction that I came from somewhere better.

What a tragedy it would be if angels in perfect obedience took on human nature and fell all the way.

I'd focus totally on music.

Or, or, or.

Self consciousness is a perpetual mirror burned on your eyelids.

If I could just know. If I could just know it's true.

If I could know that book was addressed to me.

If I could stop always being skeptical of the traditions.

Maybe I'm just waiting to get to the last page.

like a junkie looking for that last, that ultimate dose, the one that finally satisfies.

Cerebrally I know better.

Maybe I'll consider some graves of monsters I've beat in Christ's strength.

Literacy For Articulation

Articulation is like painting a picture. What brushes will you use? What colors? A master painter knows his brushes, colors, and canvas well. He judges one canvas, painted in primary colors, next to a similar painting with subtle, complex tones, and regardless of the student's pleas of doing it on purpose, he takes more pride in the student who controlled and tamed the colors. Nor does the master ever call a student's work "awesome." To do so would be in poor taste, leaving the beginner with no room to improve. When an artist has tamed the colors, he can legitimately claim to use primaries "on purpose."

The colors and the brushes are a means for sharing an idea. Now, imagine Leonardo painting the Mona Lisa with his fingers, or Monet only having charcoal for a medium. The result--not awesome. Not where the artists wanted to go.

But this isn't just for the masters. Try filling out your daily planner with a crayon, or playing Heart & Soul on your smart phone's piano app. The thing is, articulation is affected by the tools used. In any domain, blunt tools make obtuse details.

Likewise, articulation in speech or writing is a skill largely dependent on its medium. It's true, a separate discussion could be made about the necessary skills of the artist, (some students need never know Pthalo Blue exists), but face it--with Photoshop and about ten minutes training, anybody can compose a picture of "future baby," mixing facial features of themselves and a love interest. No Photoshop, only darkroom experts can do it. No darkrooms, and even the experts can't.

The tool for verbal communication is, of course, language. Our language, English, made up of words and structures we're familiar with, and some we're... not so familiar with.

Imagine descendents of fallen Rome: peasants, illiterate. Doing the natural thing, remolding the words and structure through baby talk, mumbling, and married-couple-silly-talk. It only takes one generation of illiteracy for a written language to be almost foreign. Immigration demonstrates this, as children who are never taught to read and write their mother tongue cannot do so even when literate in a second language. Nowadays, in the middle of our rush-rush, we need to remember the observable value of reading. Not reading enough to pass classes, but reading thoroughly and learning new words. Learn new words, chew on them. When people lean on adolescent and ambiguous vocabulary, it limits what teachers can teach, what students can learn.

Since few of us tuck dozens of classic works of literature into our noggins before high school, and high school teachers slash our papers with red-ink "run-on! run-on!" (don't blame the color of the ink), we're both unexposed to complex sentences and afraid to try forming them. We pick up a George Elliot and smirk like a vindictive teacher's aid over the long sentences, while our own writing suffers from the desire to blend phrases into a concept which five independent clauses back-to-back won't describe any more than blobs of primary color on a canvas will depict a shady ravine.

Now, why this increasing uncertainty of language use? It's our mother tongue, for crying out loud. * Note that I'm not saying unread equals stupid or incoherent, or that bookworms equal master communicators. In fact, I'm more concerned with vocabulary, of which literacy is a foundation like old fortunes paying for public greenways.

Language is born and raised in contexts. But the superpower is subtexts, where a word references much more than one or two words. Literacy and more literacy explodes the power of a single word. The more you've read, the more a single word or phrase means. It's like an inside joke: only, the more people share the knowledge (or, with due respect, watched the movie), the less private the joke is. Speaking to typical Americans, I could play safe and quote Disney movies. Discuss them? Meh, out of boredom maybe. Quote, yes. But I would hesitate to bring up The Happy Hollisters, because I am 99.9% sure that my peers will not have read them, so zero humor in commenting on the characters' series-long age freeze (don't bother clicking the link, it was just a kids' series from the 50's and 60's). Christian inculturation with references to the Bible still influences secular America, hit or miss. Yesterday, testing inculturation upon a nonChristian coworker, I teasingly told him I was "heaping coals of fire," thinking it was a known enough reference that he'd get it, but even his Christian compadre didn't get the reference. Fair enough; it was a gamble. But particularly among Christians, the Bible is a text held in common that hugely unifies communication and values.

Books and movies alike provide massive subtexts for quotes, actors, titles, authors, and famous characters, but rarely in a movie will you find the meaning of a particular word deepened. The written word has a unique solidarity, a reference point. The more someone reads it, the more they "just know" how the language works. The more they are the nerds in class who inform teachers they are wrong--or maybe the college student who doesn't need to do much proofreading on essays. There are rights and wrongs in every language, and internalizing those makes life easier in many subjects.

It's not that the rules of language were not handed out on a stone tablet. They were presumably stumbled or agreed upon. Somebody said so, and whether I wish I'd been in their shoes to say-so differently, here I am keeping it going for my own ends and everybody else's.

So, efficiently or clumsily, language was set it down. People discovered the freedom of communication that comes from commitment, even submission to, a standard which is written down and won't morph so giddily in a cultural salad as does spoken language, and standards make group education possible.

Slang and other changes in language can seem threatening at times, especially when one mumbler meets another. But time will test these growths as warts or new limbs. The threat to communication is not new words, but the falloff, the epic falloff, of existing vocabulary. <--read this. Unfortunately, many movies simply reflect how we currently speak, a relay race into the future of our language. But literature exposes to us many words we've never used, possibly demanding forays into dictionary land, and definitely beating back the atrophy of vocabulary-muscles. Often, I admit, I've composed words to fill in spots where I never learned the right word, because I'm more determined to voice an idea than to have it understood.

To think one achieves fluency and stops there is a mistake, a mistake exposed when speakers invent new words to fill a gap. Fluency, like the word fluid, speaks of grace and ease in a language, the ability to articulate accurately. Most people are "fluent" in English after two or three years, but don't doubt at that stage the need to learn more. But it doesn't stop at ten, or fifteen, or twenty-five. Sure, there is a leveling off; a 60-year-old bookworm probably has a marginally larger vocabulary than an equally dedicated bookworm of 50. But compare them to teenagers It's about words, and their meanings. Listen to an older, well-read person articulating ideas. They know how to spin long sentences patiently filling in the details of a lithographic idea. They have, as it were, a relationship with each word they use. Compare that to a coloring book sentence.

We speak in coloring book sentences, and our adjectives are about as specific as a small set of crayons. We took the cerulean of "Awesome!!" and color everything with it, forgetting there's a common blue for common enthusiasm. We greet people by saying "Greetings," which is a category or box waiting for the greeting itself. One might as well dialog thus: "Conversation!" "Response!" "One-up!" "Change of subject!" "Request for embellishment!" and so on.

Twilight, or the Age getting Darker?

On the upside, I feel a measure of joy when public speakers manhandle big words like a puppy practicing grownup barks. They're learning, reading, bolstering the foundation. I'm less worried about damage done to our language by that kind of public misuse, than by private neglect. Public misuse may parallel forward progress, but private neglect is where the massive falloff is happening. An occasional malopropism (which I just almost called anachronism, case in point), incurred by a belated but timely endeavor to read more books won't hinder the audience's knowledge of English NEARLY as much as the audience's time spent in books will help. Being perpetual students of our mother tongue, spilling malopropisms and being corrected--all refine the kind of articulation many are giving up on. Struggle on, or settle for coloring book English... which will you have?

*Who knew that "For crying out loud" was a minced oath? The knowledge is only a click away with the brilliant linking technology blogger pages afford. ...Who even needs to be well-read when you can link any uncertain words or phrases to an external source? Wotwotwot. It's very good therapy, I'm sure (wotwotwot...) for the A.D.D. epidemic.

Seize the day

Old yearbooks. You know each face so well--after all, you spend seven hours a day with them, every day, now in 6th grade, now in 9th--there in 10th grade you know you've only got two years to go--and that they will fly--and yet you are no closer to graduation than you were in 6th grade... your point in time is a location you cannot escape, and it's kind of humorous that we think tomorrow is closer than next year. It's not. The only touchable time is now, and tomorrow is just as far away as 6th grade...

.....where I tasted a cinnamon christmas ornament; the first time I walked into the cafeteria; when I compared my mechanical pencil to a deskmate's; finding our assigned seats in a yet darkened room; day after day for four years in high school, up the ramp, down the ramp, or the back stairs; knowing a building that was already a memory for older sisters; teachers and classrooms and lockers who all witnessed their share of drama and tragic deaths and pregnancies and United States history...

each spent day shall never be touched again. It goes into a toy crane vending machine, dropped on top of the pile, most accessible by a principle of sequence. You can use the crane to rummage around and arrange what memories are visible, but you'll never hold one-a bygone day- in your hand again.

I must stop being fooled by the equal clarity of my memories. Though I can riffle through a pile of stuffed animals for a really cute blue one, only to drop it in favor for one I'd already cast aside, I can never pick up a day again once it has fallen off. We are, in fact, bound to a sequence, moment upon moment, day upon day.

The old yearbook was not as old as others on the shelf, they are all equally bygone. Open any yearbook within a decade, and see the purpose served--faces speaking for the poor, the wealthy, the broken, the strong; gallantry, hope, isolation, ambition. Be all you can be if your parents make the way straight.

Worlds ago. Since grade school, five unique years of college. Then one decides to attend a class reunion. Like magnetic activity, the classmates fall into the old patterns, and as their conversation reflects adolescence, so their adult jobs, spouses, styles, are what seem out of place. After all, when 6th grade teachers asked us to write down where we wanted/expected to be in ten years, didn't we all know ten years into the future was as good as nonexistant?

So it is today we have, and not tomorrow. Today may cast shadows and lights on tomorrow, but tomorrow is never in hand like today. Today--yesterday--there it goes--gone.

Maybe I can learn

I wonder--

if I had believed in Santa Claus as a child--

really believed he was real,

hoped for him to come,

wondered if it was he I heard in the night before Christmas--

then when I learned otherwise,

maybe I would have learned that just believing something doesn't make it true.

That wishing with all my might doesn't make it more real.

That thinking the creaking house is the step is a jolly old benefactor wouldn't make it true.

That envisioning him climbing down the chimney doesn't mean he is climbing down the chimney

because

he does not even exist.

I would have learned that stories concocted in my mind have no bearing on reality. And that not all stories told by others are true.

Exposed lies can teach truth. Maybe I can learn the lesson right now, as an adult. "When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things." Thinking of myself as the person I wish to be doesn't make me that person. In fact, I have minimal control over how people see me. Wishing for something until I believe it could really happen does not change the quite different facts, and if I'd deal with life in more currency of reality I'd experience fewer disappointments, I suspect.

It sounds like the shattering of childhood style fantasy could lead to doubting God.

But that's a very shallow assumption, because concocted cultural icons are not the same as truths of ancient historical and present validation. A movie "The invention of lying" attempted to poke fun at faith, but undermined itself at every turn by its inability to present a world free of abstract truths, subtlety, and everything else the writers seemed to consider lies.

Letting go of fantasy logic does make for a more intellectual seeking of the invisible holy God.

"For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, as I am fully known. Now these three remain: faith, hoe, and love. But the greatest of these is love." I Cor 13:9-13 HCSV

More about the Winnebago

The day the electricity went out was the same day I finished paying for my 1985 Winnebago camper. This was quite an accomplishment for me and involved a diet of quesadillas and instant coffee.

“I told you we should have planted a garden this year,” I said to no one in particular, leaning toward the light of the window to pluck some hangnails. Abby gave me a weird look, but said nothing. It was the first of March.

What I really meant was that we should have planted one last year, though I hadn’t had the idea of planting one til this year. Sometimes that’s just how I talk.

Kenny slammed into the house and flicked a light switch. He flicked it again. He looked at us. Like Abby, he made no comment; we’d all known it was coming.

We had a good thaw a week later. During that week, I’d gone to the library and researched the conversion of a standard well to a manually-pumped well. It was just one of those things I thought of. We’d debated building a windmill, but didn’t have the materials. I had to hand it to Kenny; he searched online forums and junkyards, and came up with the hand pump. Meanwhile, our water came from an artesian well located forty-five minutes away.

But frankly, I lost interest in making it work there. I’d paid my share of rent and utilities. I had a very good attitude about it, I felt. But Kenny and Abby spent their money one food and entertainment they couldn’t really afford, and it was I who swore and skinned my knuckles and bloodied my knee in the process of trying, and failing, to replace the electric pump with a manual.

So I hopped into the Winnebago……