green

I have no courage tonight as I face getting a few things down on blog. Frozen. Like a big piece of salted cod at the back of the freezer. I feel stuck and smelly and way too briney for good taste.

Mimesis is the word that keeps running through my brain. It usually means life imitates art sort of thing, but today I can’t get over the way the ironies of my insides – all that stuff I keep inside where no one sees or hears, except the Great Eavesdropper Himself, all nasty-ugly and broken and unresolved – keep appearing in my daily life. Mimetic Inversion maybe.

I should have run the mental checklist last night before I got out of my car and pushed the door firmly shut with my foot, my hands full. I suck at the linear thinking that would have helped me remember something so critical as keys. Normally my lack in this area manifests itself in other ways, but I was distracted and out-of-sync, and I forgot.

Hovering over my muddied windshield, trying to peer past the steering column into the dark interiors of my vehicle, I caught a glint of light. And there I stood, on the frozen street outside the meeting place of a church homegroup I had never gone to before, my Bible and bag in hand, peering into the frontier...a place I could not now go without help. No keys, no car, no going home. I immediately knew this would make a great impression on a group of people I had never met, especially when I would have to roust them out on a cold night to help me, please. As gifted as I might be at mechanics and putting things together (such as a DIY Ikea loft bed that nearly cost me my friendship with my flat mate), I couldn’t quite make out how I was going to fish my door open with a clothes hanger. I laughed.

Most of the homegroup time went by before I again remembered to mention my little problem; all worry or thought of it had left me somewhere between the street and the doorway of the home where our meeting was to take place. As I shivered in the cold, a guy summoned from the group made unsuccessful attempts to get the door open, and I grew impatient with myself, realising it was going to take some doing to solve this problem. A phonecall to a dear friend at 22:15 hours, a night in a guest bedroom, two trips across town and another lift back to my car with the spare key, and I finally got my trusty Spirit back on the road today.

Last night I laughed but today I feel entirely defeated. This is how I feel in life. Outside of. Shut out. Locked out. Somehow out of my own ineptitude or lack of ability to do life, I feel unable to move across some invisible boundary where Blessing is. I do not have the key. I have been told many times by many well-meaning people that Jesus is The Key. But I “have” Jesus and have known Him for a while now (more than 20 years) and I’ve made a lifetime of very tough choices based on these two facts, and my life is shit right now. Could you please explain this to me?

How well do we do without all those desireables – those ways in which we define ourselves?

I am so and so...I am the __________ (wife/husband) of ________ (fill in a nice name),
and I am the ___________(mother/father) of ______________________ .(fill in 2-4 nice names)

I am a ________________(fill in a meaningful profession or title), because I graduated from ______________ (fill in a well-known university).

I earn ____________(fill in a very comfortable amount of money), and I drive a ___________________ (fill in a car manufactured in the last 10 years).

I live in a home that I ________ (fill in the words “own and do not share with assorted ‘others’ ”) where I can __________ (the words, “put my stuff and decorate how I damn well please” go nicely here)

....well you get it, right? I could go on. But the point: strip these away from yourself, and what do you have?

I am not past this. I cannot complete any item on this chart, not one. Probably not even if it were the Minus Hyperbole version. I want to be someone’s wife and mom and do something meaningful that I enjoy and finish a master’s degree and make enough money to actually not feel guilty about buying things like orange juice and avocados and live in a home where someone loves me, where I can hang my Georgia O’Keefe lilies and Degas ballerinas, and listen to the Marriage of Figaro without someone laughing at me.

It’s green and it’s jealous and it’s a monster, and I need Jesus, not to be my Key, but my Saviour. You see, I may hold out for all the above particulars to somehow fall into the blessing slots of my life, but God may keep holding up the same sign I’ve got my nose pressed to right now; it reads: There are NO guarantees. Promises, yes. Guarantees, no. And I am spitting mad, angry that I cannot make Him do things my way. How will I resolve this if He completely and utterly disappoints my every dream or desire? How will He still be good?