Coming at it slant: lessons from the llama, the 97-year-old man, and the writers conference

When I took my dog to the vet at Pet Smart for a vaccination booster, I fully expected to encounter the usual sort of household pets—other pups, cats or the occasional guinea pig. But I never anticipated walking in the door with a llama.

A llama that calmly donned hats and glasses for all the photo ops that promptly ensued. Customers, groomers, sales people, vets and assistants abandoned their posts and gathered round to pet (only the neck, please, his owner warned) and pose.

My dog took full advantage of the chaos to try to escape, entangling herself around the end display and me. After we were finally settled in our assigned room, I reflected on how special it was to find myself in just the right place at just the right moment for an encounter with the unexpected.

That’s often the way it is—even for the most diligent of planners among us—the best things sometimes come at us slant, not head-on. As they did at the writers conference I recently attended.

Not having any work in progress to pitch to my agent or an editor, I went expecting to learn about forms I don’t usually do, like poetry and flash fiction. Craft techniques.

And although I did indeed learn much about writing in those workshops, it was the unexpected tidbits about life, delivered from hallways, classrooms, and podiums that ended up latching onto me.

I applied them to the stuck place of my writing, but I suspect they fit anywhere. I leave you with these bits of wisdom. Let me know what you think:

1.     Alton Gansky on not daring to try, or overcoming the fear of rejection: “No one ever hit a homerun from the dugout.” #Stepuptotheplate.

2.     Michelle Medlock Adams on too much self-editing: “Let God define who you are.”

3.     John W., 97 years old: On living life to the fullest: “Don’t act like you are dead until God says you are.”

In the joy of the Lord,

Marcia

Standing with her who is standing firm

I have friends who say they don’t watch the news because it fills them with anger and despair. I have to agree. My reactions to many of the stories surfacing—especially those outrages aimed at Christians—frustrate me no end and recall to mind some of the psalmist’s pleas to God to deal with his enemies: “Let them be like grass upon the housetops, which withers before it grows up,” (a more mild example).

Too aware of my own shortcomings, I usually leave the eye-plucking to God and pray for the evil sent out to return on the one who sent it. But as far as despairing and losing hope, I don’t.

The one weapon I have that is more powerful than uranium in a madman’s hands is prayer. Prayer to THE Living God. THE all-powerful, almighty one. THE one with whom nothing is impossible. Nothing.

But I am sitting here in my warm, lovely home with a refrigerator full of food and a closet of clean clothes. My children are well and none lacks. It’s easy for me to keep confidence.  

I am acutely aware that despair and faltering hope prey on suffering, suffering that involves not only one’s self, but that of having to watch loved ones. These are the ones who need me and you to stand in faith when theirs weakens; when rats run over their child having to share a filthy jail cell and the hangman’s noose swings outside the cell in anticipation of their neck as soon as the child in their womb is born.

I am thinking today of Meriam Ibrahim, jailed for apostasy  (being a Christian married to a Christian man). According to new reports, her 20-month old son is with her in jail because the courts won’t recognize her husband.

Meriam has stood firm for her faith. Please stand with me in prayer for her. For her young son. For the child in her womb. And for the husband and father who has lost his family.

Evil surrounds and may at times seem to walk off victorious, but we appeal to you Lord. We pray for strength, for grace, for your very presence to fill that cell room, to protect this woman and children, to cause your face to shine upon her and hold her pain and suffering.

Prison cells are nothing for you. Jesus, we lift her to you.

  ***

 Really wanted to leave on a cheery note, as I go off to Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference this week, but I have had a heavy heart for Meriam, as well as for the kidnapped girls in Nigeria. And so, I ask you to wield that weapon of faith and power with me as you go about your day and I mine.

Until next time--

Blessings,

Marcai

My Alice Doesn't Have Lice

Her daughter’s name was Alice. Alice was a grade-school classmate, who, as I recall, had long, mousey blonde hair that camouflaged the withdrawn demeanor that marks one wounded or weak. One easily made fun of.

Maybe Alice was just shy. Or maybe she had had the fight smothered out of her, but one thing was certain—her mom sure hadn’t.

No, even though she lived in a run-down affair off what we called the Dump Road, and was married to a man who went to jail (I suspected it was for doing things we didn’t talk much about back then, like exposing himself to my sister as she walked home from school one day) Alice’s mom had pride. And she had fight.

And if there was one thing she’d fight for, it was her daughter.

Back then (I don’t know if schools still do this) the nurse would come around periodically and do a lice check by running a pencil through our heads. After one such inspection, for some mean reason, I whispered it around that Alice had lice.

At home, later that day, my mom told me someone wanted to see me. I didn’t see a car in the driveway, but when I stepped outside, there, standing in the hot afternoon sunlight were Alice and her mom. Apparently they had trudged the miles down Dump Road, along Falls Road, and up our road, stopping at my front door.

“Come here,” Alice’s mom commanded in a voice reserved for mothers and generals. One that left no room for argument and melted the cockiness right out of me. She lifted a hunk of Alice’s blonde stringy hair and waited until I edged near. “Look. Look. Alice says you’re saying she has lice. Do you see any lice?”

Properly mortified, I peered at Alice’s pink scalp. No, no I didn’t see any lice. No, no I hadn’t seen the nurse find any either. Yes, yes I had spread those rumors. Yes, yes I was sorry (I hope I truly was, and not just trying to get out of my own uncomfortable mess.)

Satisfied her daughter’s reputation was vindicated, Alice’s mom straightened her shoulders, took her daughter’s arm and marched backed down the driveway.

My mom taught me much about faith, and perseverance, and love of learning, which I’ve shared before, but today, in thinking about moms and daughters—all these decades later, I see Alice’s mom standing there in my driveway, defying a punk kid to mock her daughter.

I salute you Alice’s mom. And Alice, I truly am sorry.

Oh Those Tangled Things We Weave

                                     “Crave God and run your guts out.”—Jennie Allen

I once bought a vacuum cleaner that boasted a tangle-proof cord, a claim I promptly disproved. There is no flexible thing longer than two feet that I can’t have in a knot within minutes. I wrap my hair dryer cord carefully around its handle and tuck it gently in the drawer, but it must be doing some knotty things at night because every morning there it is— all tangled up with the flat iron cord. (I heard that groan!)

And I’ve mentioned before how, as a kid, I got my hair in a wad by putting a wound up wind-up car next to my ear so I could listen to the whine. It took about one second for my hair to wrap around the spinning wheels. I walked around with a car hanging from my head until my mother cut the whole thing free.

Knots and tangles. I was thinking there wasn’t a good thing to say about them but then I remembered a time back in my crafty days when I learned how to macramé and my house was filled with knotted plant holders suspended in front of every window.

So I’m thinking about those yards of beautifully patterned knots, and how so many of the poignant bits of life stories that emerged during a creative nonfiction workshop I led this weekend had beginnings in life-knots—circumstances that were difficult to see the pattern in at the time—and I’m beginning to appreciate the hidden beauty of knots.

Then, one thing led to another as one thing so often does: I picked up Jennie Allen’s book and Bible study, Restless: Because You were Made For More, and read, “Just as we see the threads of God’s purpose weaving through Joseph’s life, our goal is to lay out the threads running through our own [lives.]”

Finding purpose and patterns in tangled threads. “When we see how they weave together, we better understand ourselves.”-Allen

So since Allen so seamlessly wove herself into my morning musings, it seems a good time to brag on her Bible study (which I delayed reviewing because of my father-in-law’s death).

Through each of the eight video-based units, using the life of Joseph as a backdrop, Allen prods us to realize the people, places, circumstances and even sufferings in our lives are all material God uses to weave his purpose in us.

The older we get, the easier it is to see that the course of our life was not/is not random, but I appreciate how Jennie Allen chases after God’s purpose, how she challenges us to remember we already matter, that we’ve been given gifts for the

purpose of helping others. So let’s make our days count for the time we have been born to.

Her prayer for us is “that God and eternity would get bigger and more real in our lives, and as they do, we would feel more compelled to live for eternity and Jesus Christ than this short life.”

Yes and Amen! to that.

Previously I used Allen’s study Chase with a group of women meeting in a local café. That study was well received because its design encouraged deep reflection and conversation. Although I am in between group studies right now, I have read the book Restless (can be purchased separately) and have reviewed these Bible study materials, which once again are beautiful, probing, and challenging.

They are designed for participation and personal application, and at the same time are anchored in Scripture. Check them out.

“Something deep inside us is made to live for a story bigger than ourselves—the story of the one who made us.”—Jennie Allen, Restless

As we sneeze (here in the land of blossoming things) or snow-shovel (for those of you dear ones still sloshing through—I hate to even say it—snow—Blessings of abundant joy!

Marcia

The Pillar of Creation

They are called the Pillars of Creation, these spectacular gas formations so far away that by the time their light reaches us, they are thousands of years older. (Or maybe not even there at all.)

 Pictures from the Herschel Space Observatory must drive the most obstinate atheist crazy with wonder. 

One of the pillars is reportedly four light years tall. How tall is that? Try this from the NASA Glenn Learning site:

"The light-year is a measure of distance, not time. It is the total distance that a beam of light, moving in a straight line, travels in one year. To obtain an idea of the size of a light-year, take the circumference of the earth (24,900 miles), lay it out in a straight line, multiply the length of the line by 7.5 (the corresponding distance is one light-second), then place 31.6 million similar lines end to end. The resulting distance is almost 6 trillion (6,000,000,000,000) miles!"--That's one light year!                                                               

The other night as my husband and I watched a show on these and other breath-taking marvels—like the planet, Wasp 12b, whose clouds are filled with corundum, the stuff of sapphires (imagine a world where it rains sapphires!)—I  wondered why God would create such magnificent, word-defying, incomprehensible beauty that no one gets to see. 

Well, he certainly does, and maybe once he let his God-creativity loose, he just couldn't help but make mind-boggling beauty. And maybe, we will get to see it all one day. I have to confess that I've taken biblical references to "foundations of sapphires, and "streets of gold" rather metaphorically, but I'm beginning to realize that if the Hubble telescope's sojourn through space is giving us such God-awe-inspiring glimpses of majesty, how unimaginable, how incomprehensible is the beauty of his presence and place that he tells us our eyes have not seen, ears have not heard and minds can not imagine!

But lest I stay worshiping him out in the marvels of the universe, this same Creator, transcends light-year time travel and meets me in my early morning devotion with one of my favorite reminders of how much he cares about even one:

John 20

Mary gets up early and goes in the dark—by herself—to the tomb where Jesus was. What did she expect to see? Probably not an empty tomb. After she runs to get the other disciples and they discover the cloths lying there sans body, they go home. But Mary waits, and when she looks in the tomb, she sees angels. And then, a man, who when he speaks her name, "Mary," she recognizes as Jesus. 

A few minutes earlier she had run to tell Peter that Jesus was taken away, gone. Now she runs to tell him, "I have seen the Lord." What a difference a moment makes.

Why Mary? Why did she see angels and Jesus but Peter and John didn't?

I don't know, but it touches me deep. And I pause to marvel that the One who made those stunning Pillars of Creation didn't hide himself out there, unseen, unknown, but met a young woman outside the cave that was supposed to trap him, and called her by name. Just as he calls me by mine—and you by yours. 

How marvelous is that.

Blessings abundant, friends. Thank you for stopping by. I pray this year, this April, he will meet you at that place where you are hoping to find him, where you are seeking comfort in knowing that he is indeed not gone, but very present with you.

Marcia

A modern day drink offering

Sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine some of the Bible stories. I have no trouble with a world-wide flood and a man loading an ark with a bunch of animals, but for some reason the account in Judges about Samson catching three hundred foxes and tying their tails together and lighting them with firebrands, well, I just have to take it on faith.

You just don’t see that kind of thing today.

And then there’s the story about David holed up in a cave and having a peculiar desire for water from a well near Bethlehem, which was occupied by Philistines. When three of his mighty men heard this indulgent muse from their king, they risked their lives to break through enemy lines and bring him his desire.

When I read this the first time, I anticipated the story to continue along the line of David’s profuse thanks and reward, but wait—instead, he poured the precious gift out on the ground before the LORD!

 I know this speaks of loyalty and really honoring the risk the men took. It also speaks of offering these precious gifts to God.

The other Sunday, one man in our church felt that the Lord told him to give some money to another man, who, it was known, was in a situation of need. The first man obeyed and gave the second a bill, and then watched, astounded, as he put the money in the offering box.

“I gave that money to you,” the giver said.

“Yes, and now I have something to give the Lord,” the recipient replied.

Right before my eyes, I saw David pouring out his precious drink gift.

May I hold the gifts in my hand so loosely.

Marcia