Give me something pure.
Jan. 28th, 2006 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarflameI'm having a bit of an intense night. Finding myself wounded by every obscene and vulgar thing on tv, bruised inside from my own lack of self-control...Happy and at peace with my re-found connection to the Holy Spirit but wanting to go deeper. Talking to Don (pastor I'd like to do our ceremony) last night really made me remember how it was to regularly be in contact with people who saw the whole world from a Christlike perspective. The man is a walking vessel* and just hearing his voice effected me so much.
I sat outside on the sidewalk tonight, as I am wont to do, and talked to God for a long time about how scared I am of really going out on a limb and trusting Him the way I have before. I felt reassured by every breath of wind, and realized that I do a lot of very compulsive and questionable things to cope. I run to the internet, grab something to eat or start having fantasies of some kind at every point throughout the day that I get bored, sad, impatient, lonely, *insert other negative feelings here*. I've been very aware of these "opportunities" that I have right now - to walk through Lent one step at a time, to abstain until our wedding, those kinds of things. I know I will feel a deep sense of loss and dissapointment and a fresh swell of bitterness if I let them pass me by unused.
I also started thinking of how I hide behind Grant, from my own faith. I judge his actions and his state whenever I wish I were doing things the right way, I say "We should blah blah blah" and act as if I can't move forward or grow without him, because I'm scared of being apart, and I lean on him when it holds me back AND holds him down. And that's not good for either of us, or us.
I have a very deep desire to be cleansed, to start the rest of my life on the right foot. I want to be ready for marriage as a sacrament, and worthy of this incredibly, crazily important role of "Mother", and all of it...
I actually feel called to give up the computer for Lent. It's one of those tugs inside of me that I'd rather ignore because it makes me feel kind of queasy. Really, giving up the computer for Lent and abstaining (like, in thought and deed) until the wedding is a huge crazy deal, I feel like I will have a very hard time here and there but an amazing time and a lot of peace and like I could be transformed into a whole new creature at the end of it all. I want to grow again. I like Tina+Jesus, who happily teaches classes full of little kids and brings dying strangers fried chicken and paperbacks, not Tina-Jesus who hates everyone elses' kids and sees others as kind of a hassle.
So, yeah. Stepping out of my comfort zone, leaping from the cliff and keeping my eyes open on the freefall, all of that sort of thing. I forgot that "faith like a mustard seed" can REALLY FEEL like endless possibility, and change everything from the inside out.
When I went to this high school student camp deal my denomination did, one of several summers, there was this Don character. He had long hair and was pretty young for a minister - like maybe 30-33? He seemed always to be deeply tired and completely at peace. It was a known component of camp that there was not nearly enough sleep to be had, everybody was always tired because we got up all bright and early after staying up late every freaking day. Some of us joked that "They" were purposely depriving us of sleep to make us emotional (really they just let us keep the nightswim going or didn't make us stop having closing circle if people still wanted to talk, etc). One day in the breakfast line Don tells me, in his tired but peaceful way, that he hasn't slept this much in years and feels great. He was instantly surrounded by raised eyebrows. What could be wrong with anyone that they normall slept LESS than we all slept at camp? One day we were all gathered in the lounge and he got up front with something to talk to us about.
He told us how he got called by an anonymous person saying there was an abandoned baby in a shed on such and such street. This was during his first couple of months out of seminary, he was totally inexperienced, and childless, and when he started trying to find this place, it was a REALLY REALLY bad neighborhood. He literally walked behind a crackhouse to find this shed, and had to bust the lock on the door. He was thinking he was nuts and should have brought cops, but he was already there, and it felt urgent to him. Inside, across the room from him, it was smoldering hot and there was an emaciated baby with some kind of worms on it's head, he thought it was dead at first. Naked, a girl, filthy.
She turned out to be alive, and in his and his wife's care while the state tried to figure out who she was and once they determined she might live. They never found her mother. To make a long story short, Don and his wife gradually became known foster parents who were entrusted with dozens of crack babies over the years. It was exhausting because they don't sleep well, cry a LOT, sometimes die...and if not then you get attached and they move on to permanent homes once you've done the hard part. Of course the man thought the lack of sleep at camp was a cakewalk. He had a list of names of babies that had passed through their home, in case anyone was ever looking for him, or any of them were ever famous one day. And the first one, the one he found in the shed, they adopted and when he told us his story she was 6 years old and an A-B student. I met her a couple of years later when I visited his church,a nd went and hid in the bathroom so she wouldn't be confused about the weird girl sobbing everytime she looked at her. She was beautiful. Don told me he had to live with a certain amount of fear because something about changes in the pituitary gland and the level of addiction to this and that drug as a developing fetus and something about brain development meant that she could just up and die once she hit puberty. But he was nuts about her and they had a biological child by then, too.
Don sat up late outside the cabins with me during a weekend retreat and told me about the importance of spiritual disciplines, and he (as I've previously stated) walked through the rain in Cincinnatti with me when I confided in him that I was pregnant, and called me a mother and bought me a pizza and gave me his jacket. This guy was the first man after Aaron (my middle son's namesake, another minister who initially led me to God and kept in touch for years) who showed me that it wasn't AARON who was so amazing at all - it was Jesus, who could be in anyone, work through anyone, be seen in anyone.
So yeah, this guy, I call him to ask him to do my wedding and he calls me back and he tells me that he's 2 hours from here and wants to do a 6 session counseling run (coming to us) and that the place I want to get married is 4 hours north of him. That my original tentative date is spring break and he can't do that because he has to stay with his kids that week while they're out of school like he promised them, and he can't travel then or then because he's caring for his elderly father who's dying (this guy also has a congregation, remember) and he still has that same deeply tired and careworn and peaceful voice, and he never even HINTS that he won't or can't do it. It's just, let's work it out somehow - talk about this and this with Grant and pray about it and call me back. I would feel totally out of bounds asking anything at all of this man who is giving so much to so many, except that I know he's doing it by drawing on an endless wellspring. The same way I do, when I'm at my best. I want to throw myself headlong into service that way, I want to keep my ear inclined and never stop hearing that still small voice.
I sat outside on the sidewalk tonight, as I am wont to do, and talked to God for a long time about how scared I am of really going out on a limb and trusting Him the way I have before. I felt reassured by every breath of wind, and realized that I do a lot of very compulsive and questionable things to cope. I run to the internet, grab something to eat or start having fantasies of some kind at every point throughout the day that I get bored, sad, impatient, lonely, *insert other negative feelings here*. I've been very aware of these "opportunities" that I have right now - to walk through Lent one step at a time, to abstain until our wedding, those kinds of things. I know I will feel a deep sense of loss and dissapointment and a fresh swell of bitterness if I let them pass me by unused.
I also started thinking of how I hide behind Grant, from my own faith. I judge his actions and his state whenever I wish I were doing things the right way, I say "We should blah blah blah" and act as if I can't move forward or grow without him, because I'm scared of being apart, and I lean on him when it holds me back AND holds him down. And that's not good for either of us, or us.
I have a very deep desire to be cleansed, to start the rest of my life on the right foot. I want to be ready for marriage as a sacrament, and worthy of this incredibly, crazily important role of "Mother", and all of it...
I actually feel called to give up the computer for Lent. It's one of those tugs inside of me that I'd rather ignore because it makes me feel kind of queasy. Really, giving up the computer for Lent and abstaining (like, in thought and deed) until the wedding is a huge crazy deal, I feel like I will have a very hard time here and there but an amazing time and a lot of peace and like I could be transformed into a whole new creature at the end of it all. I want to grow again. I like Tina+Jesus, who happily teaches classes full of little kids and brings dying strangers fried chicken and paperbacks, not Tina-Jesus who hates everyone elses' kids and sees others as kind of a hassle.
So, yeah. Stepping out of my comfort zone, leaping from the cliff and keeping my eyes open on the freefall, all of that sort of thing. I forgot that "faith like a mustard seed" can REALLY FEEL like endless possibility, and change everything from the inside out.
When I went to this high school student camp deal my denomination did, one of several summers, there was this Don character. He had long hair and was pretty young for a minister - like maybe 30-33? He seemed always to be deeply tired and completely at peace. It was a known component of camp that there was not nearly enough sleep to be had, everybody was always tired because we got up all bright and early after staying up late every freaking day. Some of us joked that "They" were purposely depriving us of sleep to make us emotional (really they just let us keep the nightswim going or didn't make us stop having closing circle if people still wanted to talk, etc). One day in the breakfast line Don tells me, in his tired but peaceful way, that he hasn't slept this much in years and feels great. He was instantly surrounded by raised eyebrows. What could be wrong with anyone that they normall slept LESS than we all slept at camp? One day we were all gathered in the lounge and he got up front with something to talk to us about.
He told us how he got called by an anonymous person saying there was an abandoned baby in a shed on such and such street. This was during his first couple of months out of seminary, he was totally inexperienced, and childless, and when he started trying to find this place, it was a REALLY REALLY bad neighborhood. He literally walked behind a crackhouse to find this shed, and had to bust the lock on the door. He was thinking he was nuts and should have brought cops, but he was already there, and it felt urgent to him. Inside, across the room from him, it was smoldering hot and there was an emaciated baby with some kind of worms on it's head, he thought it was dead at first. Naked, a girl, filthy.
She turned out to be alive, and in his and his wife's care while the state tried to figure out who she was and once they determined she might live. They never found her mother. To make a long story short, Don and his wife gradually became known foster parents who were entrusted with dozens of crack babies over the years. It was exhausting because they don't sleep well, cry a LOT, sometimes die...and if not then you get attached and they move on to permanent homes once you've done the hard part. Of course the man thought the lack of sleep at camp was a cakewalk. He had a list of names of babies that had passed through their home, in case anyone was ever looking for him, or any of them were ever famous one day. And the first one, the one he found in the shed, they adopted and when he told us his story she was 6 years old and an A-B student. I met her a couple of years later when I visited his church,a nd went and hid in the bathroom so she wouldn't be confused about the weird girl sobbing everytime she looked at her. She was beautiful. Don told me he had to live with a certain amount of fear because something about changes in the pituitary gland and the level of addiction to this and that drug as a developing fetus and something about brain development meant that she could just up and die once she hit puberty. But he was nuts about her and they had a biological child by then, too.
Don sat up late outside the cabins with me during a weekend retreat and told me about the importance of spiritual disciplines, and he (as I've previously stated) walked through the rain in Cincinnatti with me when I confided in him that I was pregnant, and called me a mother and bought me a pizza and gave me his jacket. This guy was the first man after Aaron (my middle son's namesake, another minister who initially led me to God and kept in touch for years) who showed me that it wasn't AARON who was so amazing at all - it was Jesus, who could be in anyone, work through anyone, be seen in anyone.
So yeah, this guy, I call him to ask him to do my wedding and he calls me back and he tells me that he's 2 hours from here and wants to do a 6 session counseling run (coming to us) and that the place I want to get married is 4 hours north of him. That my original tentative date is spring break and he can't do that because he has to stay with his kids that week while they're out of school like he promised them, and he can't travel then or then because he's caring for his elderly father who's dying (this guy also has a congregation, remember) and he still has that same deeply tired and careworn and peaceful voice, and he never even HINTS that he won't or can't do it. It's just, let's work it out somehow - talk about this and this with Grant and pray about it and call me back. I would feel totally out of bounds asking anything at all of this man who is giving so much to so many, except that I know he's doing it by drawing on an endless wellspring. The same way I do, when I'm at my best. I want to throw myself headlong into service that way, I want to keep my ear inclined and never stop hearing that still small voice.
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Date: 2006-01-30 06:09 am (UTC)