Mary Anne

It’s stifling. She feels so confined inside her own home, among her own people. And it isn’t because they don’t love her. It’s because their love is greater than their ability to correctly show it. The scale is imbalanced. Love is equated as pressure. Pressure to make good grades and maintain good behavior so that she can keep being in honors classes and become captain of the cheer team, become captain of the BETA club, become the yearbook coordinator – and that was just Middle School. More recently it was the same schtick, but with added pressure. Make good grades and maintain good behavior so that you can become homecoming queen and valedictorian and most likely to succeed, so that you can get a full ride and go to college and get your bachelor’s and go back to college so you can get your master’s and start a career making $80,000 a year with benefits and a great retirement plan and meet a nice boy and get engaged and get married and buy a big house and have a kid and go to church and have another kid and buy a minivan and have another kid and mow the lawn do the dishes go to work change the diapers cook the meals make him happy and feed the kids and walk the dog and take out the trash and maybe have another kid and buy a bigger house bigger van get promoted make more money maybe have one more kid before you get too old and your ovaries kick the bucket and send the kids to preschool elementary school middle school high school college so they can make good grades maintain good behavior and do something meaningful with their lives like you did didn’t you of course you did or is that what you tell yourself because the alternative is crying yourself to sleep at night because he doesn’t touch you anymore and you never wanted to take that job anyway and the old house felt more like home even if it was smaller and mom and dad are getting too old to take care of themselves anymore and its up to you isn’t everything up to you to take care of them and keep them alive for as long as possible just like you want to be kept alive don’t you or do you you did once but now its hard to tell because all your life you’ve been working towards a goal that you still haven’t reached and now as you lean toward the end of it all you wonder if it was even possible to reach the goal or if it was just some big stick and carrot game God was playing you just for laughs and so you give up get old and die a decade before your body decides to die too. So you run. Run now from the pressure and maybe, just maybe, it’ll never catch you. You meet a nice boy now, rather than later. He’s attractive enough. Probably not what you would pick if you were going to marry someone, but this isn’t about marriage; this is just for fun. He wants to take you places that don’t fit into your parents plan so you go with him. He wants to do things with you that your parents wouldn’t want you to do, so you do them. The whole time he’s distracting you in the back seat of his car, you’re waiting for the universe on your shoulders to just go away and leave you in peace hoping praying even that this might bring peace and relief. But it doesn’t. Instead the universe laughs and grows heavier. The universe laughs and reaches down inside your belly and grows heavier. A month goes by. No blood. Two months. Heavier. Three months. The universe isn’t laughing now. It’s shaking and terrified. Shaking and terrified – and heavier.  

Flint

    Those who remember will know that, at the start of the new year, I tentatively resolved to write, publish a photo or artwork, or basically produce and share something creative every day. Well, true to form, I have not done that. But, the reason I haven't done much writing about life is because I've been too busy living it, and I feel like that is a forgivable sin. 

     My social media project for the summer, #livelovecreate2016, was, in my own estimation, successful. I had determined at the start of summer to set up my sails, creatively and relationally, and let the Holy Spirit be my guide. And He was. Artistically, I was able to develop a few skills that had begun to grow stale, and learn a few that I had never tried before. Relationally, He led me, and is still leading me, in the process of laying foundations for future avenues of joy, encouragement, and love. 

    Yet now, ironically, as teaching work has started back and the demands on my time are significantly greater, I feel the need to slow down and write well up inside of me. This summer was for living. Now is the time for reflection - a steadied look back that will, I hope, lend perspective to the present, and give hope to the future. 

     Today is Monday, and with it I feel the full weight of the weeks and months ahead - all of the lessons I need to create, the parents I need to call, the papers I need to grade, the meetings I need to attend, the kids I need to fill with inspiration, and confidence, and knowledge, and hope, and love. I feel this every Monday. I feel this every day. And I feel overwhelmed by it all, incapable, insufficient for the task at hand. Alone, I constantly feel so - not enough. Yet, even though I feel this way constantly, and the myriad versions of my own voice reverberate in the maze of my mind, I always hear a voice - quiet, with calm authority: "Who are you?"

     "Are you not who I say you are - redeemed, holy, guiltless before the Father, without condemnation, full of Holy Spirit power, adopted and a co-inheritor with Christ of God's glory?"

     "Do you not have what I say you have - everything - all grace, knowledge, and power necessary for living a Godly life?"

     "Can you not do what I say you can do - forgive when it's hard, help till it hurts, give hope in the dark, serve when you're exhausted, and love through your brokenness?"

     In those thousand moments a day, God graciously reminds me with assurance of who He is and, thereto, who I am in HIm. 

     So yeah, I'm exhausted. I'm attacked by anxiety every day. I'm fighting back fear every day. I do battle with despair every day - but, by the grace of God, I will not be deterred. Like the prophet Isaiah wrote thousands of years ago, "I have set my face like flint, and I will not be moved." This is my calling - to love the people God has placed in my life - family, friends, my girlfriend, co-workers, employers, my students - and to be a man of integrity, even if no one else will. 

The House - Part II

                He was going back to a place he’d hoped he would never see again. Necessity – deep, dire, desperate necessity drove him there. It was the only thing that could, anything less would not have been enough.

                Stepping out of the car, he inhaled sharply, his subconscious uneasy, his chest tight, his body exuding the knowledge that his mind knew – this place was hell, and he was walking in through the front door. John reached for the doorknob, but his hand froze millimeters from the surface of the cold, dead brass tarnished by time and tears. Fight or flight racked his body, coursing through the channels of his veins. Adrenaline drove his heart hard like a freight train – the rhythm a reminder that this was a track he could never escape, a course he would always be connected to, no matter the miles he covered in his mad dash to be free. Surrendering to the only solution, John grasped the brass, closed his eyes, and pushed open the white wooden door. He stepped inside tentatively and stood in the entrance, staring into the silence. Immediately he understood the false sense of security that doors give. The way we use them to shut out the world, to keep things out – to keep things in. He wondered how doors gained that power; how an inch and a half of wood and metal is a gate – a gap between the universe within and without. How an inch and a half of metal and wood protect privacy and possessions and people’s lives and how, he wondered – how doors are accomplices to the things that happen on their watch, partners in the choices of their wards. Partners in the loves. Partners in the crimes.