nerve

When I first started skiing at age 5, I remember having only one great concern, how fast could I get from the top of the slope to the bottom and back up again. Repeat. Getting to the bottom of the short slope was a straightforward, two-step process, point ski tips in a downward direction and push off. Only other skiers or natural obstacles hindered me.

I can never remember a time when I did not know how to ski. This may be partly due to the fact that I never once believed I did not know how to ski. My mother fondly recalls her exasperation with this attitude. She would confer with my Austrian ski instructor at the end of our day on the slopes of Sharktooth, and she would look quizically at my mom and say “Ellen, who?”

Why go to all the trouble of lessons when you already know what you’re doing? Of course, this reckless attitude meant many painful faceplants and chaotic dispersions of my gear on the snow and once plowing head-on into Ulli, my ski instructor, and her current charge. I took them both out and vaguely remember feeling sheepish and listening to some sort of chastisement from Ulli. But, I say vaguely. All manner of negative outcome seemed to have little or no effect. I was undeterred.

I had a load of nerve in those days, misguided though it may have been, I had it. And now, I am asking myself these days – Nerve, where have you got to? Writing blogs and taking the risk to speak my mind, and thinking about being creative again, picking up my paints, restringing my guitar – dear, Lord it makes my knees wobbly. Am I up to this? And for what? Do I really believe the creative process matters...regardless of results?

And I keep looking at Jesus. Nerve of another caliber is He. I am blown away. A Creator of universes who unwaveringly faced the destruction of his earthly body and reputation, pain and humiliation heightened by the reality of who He is/was. My diminutive battles to find my nerve again pale in comparison, but they take on more meaning in the light of Him. To become is to be ever more conformed to His image. Being fashioned into His likeness, as I remember – like waking from a dream remember – who I am, who I was made to be, means fire will touch me. To burn away perverse self-protectiveness and timidity and the vacuous lies that keep me from being

united with him in his death and resurrection.

of bb's and michelin men

Lo, sons are an heritage from the Lord. Psalm 127:3

My sister must have this verse posted in her house somewhere. Maybe more than once. With five sons, she's got a lot of heritage floating around. In fact, I am just off the phone with her, and she has informed me that her heritage have taken over the backyard with bb guns and sabres.

The one agreement she has with them about these bb guns and their flying steel is: goggles. You wanna play...you gotta wear the ski goggles. Sure enough, they are content to look absurd and bug-like so long as they get to shoot at one another with real bb's. No kiddie snap caps for these'uns; it's real artillery, boys.

And the goggles inspire. The boys don headgear, sweatshirts, puffy jackets, Thinsulate gloves, and probably some duct tape, too. My sister's little band of Michelin Men. In the twilight, flashlights attached to the barrels of their guns, they throw themselves around in a mad whorl of energy, giggles, and shouting.

For my sister, this game of cat and mouse seems a mild improvement on her brood's other go's at backyard fun: attempting human flight from the rooftop onto the trampoline, creating and launching homemade pyrotechnics (Mom, it's just gun powder! insisted her 16-year old inventor-son), and building fires in the barbecue grill with leaves, sticks, and lots of lighter fluid: more fluid=higher flames.

I'm sure there's some sort of message in here about violence among children and the great need for cautious parenting in this day and age, but I have no desire to find it. My nephews, I am afraid, are terribly un-PC. They break all the rules about wearing helmets and looking both ways and using power tools. Thank God. They live raw. They taste the life around them, complete with stitches, broken bones, and lots and lots of bandaids.

So this is all to say that I am thinking lately about how God parents us and what freedoms He gives us and what prohibitions He insists on while He is raising us. Does He warn us every time we go out the door that the world we live in is precarious, a dangerous place, and that we ought to take care with every step, not talk to strangers? Somehow, I don't think so. In fact, I think I hear the opposite. I hear, not the hard and ruthless man that the unfaithful servant imagined in his master (Matthew 25), exacting, harsh and fearful of the future, but rather the heroic Aragorn who says that to live bravely is to live into what you cannot yet see....and that takes thumbing your nose at critics and self-doubt and then stepping into the fray.

That, the voice of Jesus our Prophet, Priest, and King, is the one I recognise each day when I muddle through difficulty and worry, self-doubt and unbelief. And that's the voice I'll obey when I am afraid and want to live in the mire of caution and safety. Goggles on! when I'm told, but bb's popping, fireworks exploding, and fires a'stoking I will go!

passenger in transit

I've travelled to probably 30 different countries in the last 20 years or so, and the inevitable experience of being "transit" is one I always dread: confined in one country in order to get to another. Security gates are closed and no visa, no amount of finagling, no pleading looks directed at the passport control officer will manage you an escape from the airport and the tedium which is about to ensue. It's just you, the contents of your carry on (which you should have paid more attention to making interesting before you left!) and the enticing eats and drinks of Duty Free...oh, and don't forget the nice toilets. For hour upon hour of riveting fun.

I liken it to the experience I seem to be having with God of late. He's got me hog-tied and in a head lock, firmly "in transit." I hate this. I hate it when I am in an airport, but metaphysical transit, oh God, help me, is another deal altogether.

I long to understand how it is I have arrived at this place in life, and I throw up a lot of questions, well...demands, to that effect and yet He devastates me with silence and protracted pauses. The one question that permeates my thinking is: is it safe to be in the hands of this God, who cuts my rope when I seem to be hanging beyond the precipice -- in thin air.

And the answer I keep coming back to, though not easily so, is yes. Somehow, as I am dangling in the void and silence, suspended only by his goodness, I feel the surge of His breath, a rushing violence of love and compassion and holiness. And, my soul and, ever so slowly, my mind believe that the love of God chooses the void and silence, pain and ache, the loss and grief -- for a time -- for my eternal blessing.

"Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning."

on going to a new church

I met a woman after church today for whom the whole experience of trying to find a new place to worship seemed daunting. A widow, 74 years old, and her former church was dying a slow death. She decided to make a break for it. I don't blame her.

I, too, am in that awful (and I do mean awful) position of having to do the same. Since moving to Denver, I have tried to get "plugged in" and "engaged" in some sort of "dialogue" with others at a local church. But, tell me, precisely how does one do said "dialogue" when said church is approximately 1,000 (?) members?

Church in America is a weird deal, and I was not ready for it. After six years of hearing the church bell in my village at 11am and 6pm each Sunday, just a block away, calling people to worship, I found myself faced with a 10 mile suburban drive to get to a warehouse-sized building and a car park at the church the size of two city blocks by two city blocks. A coffee bar loomed inside, larger than any I have ever seen in Glasgow. A book and music store. Amazing A/V equipment and a worship band that records CD's. How can this be? Is this still church? And how do I find The Church?

In my still (it's been 15 months I've been back in the States)confounded state, I wonder about Jesus' Body, His Church, His Holy Bride: do we look into one another's eyes to behold the face of our Lord Jesus as He says He thirsts...for friendship, for eyes that listen, a smile that says a holy "YES!", for a hand to hold, and much, much more (maybe even a pot roast thrown in there for good measure)?

Today I was looking at His face in Shirley, the elderly woman I shared a conversation with after church. We, both of us, on only our second or third go at visiting this new church. And we both feeling the gnaw of loneliness and the pain of having no place where we are known. How different our places in life and yet how similar we are.

I will keep going back to this church. I will choose to be amongst God's people--fringe bene's or none --getting what I want or not --finding what I am looking for or not-- Jesus promises me that He lives with us, His Church, His Bride; He will presence her gathering. And that is what I am holding out for.

a bloggy day

How do I resist the temptation to write something here, post it, read it in its entirety, and then bin it? I'm not good at this blogging thing. Perhaps that's why I seem to have some compelling and strange need to start doing it -- putting my words down somewhere and then letting others read them. Scary, really. Part of me doesn't like the risk; another part does cartwheels.

I attempted this before--starting a blog--but I had a hard time conceptualising what sort of "space" the blogosphere was: was it infinite licence to say whatever I wanted? a place where there would be "listeners", i.e. those who would want to hear my voice? a place to track and journal the quotidian?

I've gone over a few blogs out there and can recognise the goodness of giving people such an open forum for expression and of providing the opportunity to exchange ideas with the likeminded (or be challenged by the very contrary-minded!). On the other hand, I can see its downside.....lots and lots and lots of words, noise, if you will and few substantive "a ha's" being passed on. Guess you have to pick and choose which ones to read and participate in.

Please, if you're a reader of my wee blog, engage in my blether if you fancy doing so. I need 'readers' in my life right now; ones with open ears and hearts and mouths. I love to hear you, so comment, opine, let me know if anything I bring up on these pages matters to you.

Today, let the conversation begin....