Repeat (Repeat, Repeat)

It's 11:05, and I'm up again.

These past months have been full of dichotomies that are difficult to wrap my head around. Days have been threaded through with grieving and with yearning for what is impossible to have, but they have also been tinged with a hope so deep that it shakes me, a promise that has nestled itself so far inside that there's no pulling it back out.

I feel a combination of largeness and smallness, of glory from knowing that God's image somehow rests on my weakness and makes it more than what it is to utter humility at being so unequal to living this life well without help from my Father.

What I can say, and will say, and must say now--to look back on when the days seem heavy and the nights dark--is that God is enough. I am known.

We are known.

The bonds of human affection are tenuous, gossamer blown about compared to the cords that bind us to our Maker. This is a mystery.

I've written of it before and will again, but I'm transfixed by the thought of how one soul can meet another and somehow each can search the other out. How do we know each other? Each tentative look into Another is an unnamed miracle. And God watches over it all, this shadow of me knowing you, friend, and of you knowing me.

As He watches, I think perhaps He smiles, waiting for the day when we will finally understand what Knowing is.

Until then, may we have the courage to seek each other out, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, friends. May our shadows become more like the Light which casts them.

I Have To Get Up At 5:00 Tomorrow...

...and I have a tidy list of things to do before I sleep. 

But somehow I just needed to come here for a moment. My heart is so full. Full of the good and the breaking and the true and the beautiful and the difficult to understand. 

Right now I'd like to take the whole world in my arms. 

But I can't, and I know that God's already got that covered. 

So instead, I'll leave you with this.

I love you all something fierce. 

You are precious.

And I am grateful for you.

Yep. 

You.

Homeless Man

I watched a short documentary about a man named Rich Mullins a couple of days ago. I'm still thinking about it.

Here's a very small sampling of his music (he isn't the one singing the last song--he wrote it and it was recorded after he died in a car accident).

Hold Me Jesus

Creed

Step By Step

My Deliverer Is Coming

It isn't that I put him on a pedestal; I don't. I don't idealize him or make a hero of him. I appreciate his reality, though, his trueness, his honesty, his heart. I want to want Jesus like that. I want to love people like that.

I wish I could have met you, Rich Mullins.

Perhaps I will one day.

Thank you for pointing up.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must 

take care of what has been 

given. Brush her hair, help her

into her little coat, hold her hand,

especially when crossing a street.

[...] 

She is strange, mute, difficult, 

sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.

And amazing things can happen. And you may see, 

as the two of you go 

walking together in the morning light, how 

little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;

she begins to grow.

-- Mary Oliver, Red Bird

Tonight I find that I don't know how to do this. And I don't like doing it Here rather than There. Perhaps I ought to love Sorrow, but her strangeness, muteness, difficulty, unmanageableness are difficult to get to know.

I miss being fretted over. I miss the phone calls to make sure I hadn't died while I was walking in the park, to make sure I hadn't fallen asleep during my dark drive on the highway from Binghamton to Bainbridge. 

There are so many things I miss that I fear to start naming them. 

I just re-read some of the many cards that I had hung on the doorframes and archways in my apartment after Dad died to help fend off the dark with their bits of light. So many words, so many beautiful friends. It does help to have ink and paper in my hands again, to remember the words.

I don't know what it is about tonight. I can't stop replaying those days of disbelief, the hours spent in the hospital desperately trying to know this father God gave me as deep as I could before he left. Remembering the big, crinkly hands that didn't work to feed himself. I was happy to use mine instead. A barrage of stills, snippets of memory playing again and again. 

It still doesn't seem real.

And Psalm 23 strikes a part of me it hadn't touched before.

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. 

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: 
He leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: 
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:

for Thou art with me;

Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: 

Thou anointest my head with oil;

my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.