Harmony in miscellany

Erika took me to Starbucks today, and I was so encouraged by her as usual. Why is it, I thought later, that we are so drawn to people who are just like us? Are we that enamored of ourselves, or just accustomed to be timid in the face of unfamiliarity? I know we all must relate on at least some fronts, but I want to figure this out a little more. It is at the heart of the way different races, genders, ages, the socially arranged – people of the world – relate to eachother. I have a small picture of what it all looks like as God perhaps will again make it.

California has been flavored by Mexican culture since before it was officially a part of the United States, and there is much that we learn from one another. I love what California is because of its strong Mexican heritage, and living on the East Coast for the past seven months has brought into even sharper focus how much I love it. Yet I have always had this concern for my lack of experience in living life among a group of people who are truly unlike me, because I when I think about heaven, I know that it will not be a giant white chapel filled with endless rows of white Protestants and Hispanic Catholics. Humanity has been designed in such a rainbow of culture, color, voice, and spirit so that something in me is uncomfortable only knowing two of the rings.

Going into Lynn last semester for a service project among middle school girls put this on my mind even more often. Elizabeth had just come to America from Africa less than a year before, Salina had lived in New York since she was a baby, and Mikayla was from Arizona. When there wasn’t much official volunteering for me to do, I was always content to just sit and listen to them laughing and talking with each other, admiring how beautiful they all were. I would pick up on a quiet hint in a lighthearted conversation that showed one of them was hurting. Sometimes a joke meant to make everyone else laugh wasn’t entirely a joke, and my heart would crack a little for her. Seeing a circle of girls all create something unique from the same box of beads, or hearing them make up stories together where each one contributed something completely distinct from the others, brought a strange kind of joy and pleasure that I can only associate with goodness.

The world is broken, and everyone living here knows it. This life infected with pain, suffering, cruelty and injustice can be like the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent” that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of during those dark years of segregated America, and we all await the “invigorating autumn” that will restore us to life as it should be, the good life. I know the good life is life as God sees it. He filled the world with people that are a different colors: ebony, cinnamon brown, pale white. People who sing, dance, yell, whisper. Right now many of us who don’t look like each other, or who don’t do the same things, stand apart and tragically judge or condemn or scratch the backs of our necks in awkward uncertainty as a response to what the King takes such enjoyment in. But one day, all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics who have realized the truth of Christ, will be able to join hands and sing: Free at last! Free at Last!

"To be a responsible person is to find one's role in the building of shalom, the re-webbing of God, humanity and all creation in justice, harmony, fulfillment and delight. To be a responsible person is to find one's own role and then, funded by the grace of God, to fill this role and to delight in it." - Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

By the way, Megan is making me laugh so hard and I cannot even attempt homework.

She is different from me. And I think I love her more every day with every little difference I notice.

Prayer

Oh I am never as good as think I am, God my Father, thank you for your constant and patient overlookings. I do wrong almost as often as I breath, I am the farthest thing from the angel that I sometimes think I am. But even when I am unaware of truly how low I am among all other creatures that roam the earth, you build and break up all about me that must be fixed and freshened. Thank you for the white houses on green slopes of grass, the vineyards and the mountain peaks and the lamplit evenings for reading – despite the woman that I am, you bless me like I am an angel, fit for the heavenly river banks where I am resting and breathing deep of your sun-warmed oxygen. When you call me up to my feet again, force me to climb higher, to push deeper into the undergrowth, and not to turn the places of rest you give me into the end of my work and journey. That yearning which wearies and saddens me – why is there no one who holds and can look into my heart here? - do not let me resent it. Let me treasure the empty part that eats at my mind and spirit, and let me be round with thanks for the vapor that my time is, because it will always draw me to you. It will always remind me that I have only taken a spoon to my digging of mystery from the Universe. One day I will join You where you are dwelling outside of time, and because I know this, I can glory even more in the blink of Your eye that I am. If this sliver of a second is as beautiful and blessed as it is, if it fills me up and leaves me content on the river bank, how much more will I dwell in peace at the oceanside of Your palace? My God, you are so good to me. Even just the rainfall is such a full kiss on my lips!

Achtemeier,

I underline it with pencil:

God has enclosed all people in disobedience, in order to have mercy on all.
?
It is going to take a very long time to begin working through what that means.

P.S.

!

Madison McKenzie May

My baby sister. How much I love her! I came across a poem in my book this morning that she wrote a while ago, and it made me smile so I thought I should put that smile out into the world for everyone else.

The marvelous sky
So dark and deep
Changes her clothes
When we fall asleep.

From the pale dress of blue
With soft white lines
To velvety gown
That sparkles and shines.

Each glittering sphere
Was handmade and placed
By the loving hands
That created each race

These wonderful marvels
That she wears for hours
Are what this world calls
Stars.

History class cancelled,

"Justice is not optional," Dr. Strauss said, because justice is the symphony of God's created things given the space to be what they were made to be, with each peculiarity contributing to the sound that pleases those who hear it.

After watching the arraignment of Robert Gulla yesterday, the young man who murdered Megan’s friend Allison, and hearing the details of how he abused and so purposefully mutilated her body to the point that her life couldn’t stay inside it any longer – and after hearing Dr. Strauss mention the afternoon where he had to be the voice (in translation) for the man confessing to the details of how he tortured one of Dr. Strauss’ youth group friends, I am reminded of just how ruined this earth really is.

What is death?

At what point can the spirit no longer remain in the body? How is it tied there?

Does it leave like we think it does? Where?

How can someone break another person so brutally that they die?

Your Kingdom come here to earth.

Adam and Eve were never bored in the garden, I know they had business to attend to. I used to imagine that they would work with gold dust and lumps of silver, polishing stones into clear jewels and stringing the trees with what they made, so that when God came to walk with them in the cool of the evenings He would find the pathways of their garden lined by their baubles, put there to catch the amber light for Him.

The resurrection of Christ has ushered in the New Creation, as Dr. Hunt said again today. I don't think that this world is a waiting room that we are trying to coax all non-believers into so at the return of Christ, we will take them with us when this planet is abandoned for a city in the clouds. I don't know where Heaven will be - maybe a city in the clouds, maybe the exact same earth we have just restored by new Words from the mouth of the one who first made it - but I do know that we as a church may have slipped into idleness like the Galatians. Not an idleness that keeps us from spreading our news of salvation, but we cannot stop our cultivation of the earth just because we have come to think that it will be destroyed at the second coming. Paul chastised the Christians in Galatia for this kind of attitude – and besides, isn’t sleep the sweetest, food most satisfying, leisure most precious and love most understandable when we are occupied with something good, that matters and is bettering?
"I would live in Your love."
If I am seeing love dimly through glass, and if that dim sight is as beautiful as it is, we are going to explode with the clear sight that will come.

I think I understand some of why we can't look at the face of God as we are now.

The thought of life as it is set right, sopping with the clear water of fresh youth...that is not something I really want to wait around for.


I would live in your love as the sea-grasses live in the sea
Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that
recedes;

I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul
as it leads.


I am sorry I keep repeating poets, but how beautiful is that? So much of Sara Teasdale's work is written to me like a Psalm that I want to capture and hum inside myself, for the God whom I love to hear - even as He is not the one she meant.
It reminds me even more of the responsibility that I have been charged with, to be the devoted culture maker that Calvin Seerveld exhorts us all as people of faith to be. My pretty friend Tala let me borrow a book of his, and each page is so laden with wisdom that it feels like putting apple marzipan in your mouth; it tastes delightful but the richness forces you to put it away for awhile until your tongue has taken in the sweet and let it settle. I have to reread at least twice to keep from letting it all walk right back out the front door of my memory.

That itch I have spoken of before, that discontent which won't allow me to resign my passion for obedient, love-driven art into simply decorating the walls of a church or painting an illustration of David and his flock, has begun to show its purpose. Reading Rainbows for the Fallen World by Seerveld and Walking on Water by L'Engle has watered the root growing in me, so that the green tips of a baby life-mission have started pushing up.
The thing that ultimately made me want to study Fine Arts at Gordon was a paragraph in the department's policy on undraped models. "Christians ought to reclaim cultural territory surrendered to their secular counterparts and to redeem this territory for Christ's glory. ... Great artists of the past have used the human figure. Contemporary Christians should reclaim it for God and His purposes as a means to leaven popular culture. "
This is exactly what Seerveld talks about when he challenges older Christians who scorn the novels, films and song lyrics which saturate every modern minute with godlessness, but yet who are not encouraging the aesthetic work of their younger believers – and so the artistry of secularism reigns. As he says, “Such evocative human activity as art is must be sanctified, and must be sanctified by believers who are not dabbling but who are given christian training to know what they are doing. And that is a mission which marks a grown-up body of Christ.”

I remember once my Dad and I listening to the resplendent, haunting voice of Sarah McLachlan, and as she lifted it into a soaring high note he said, "If that can be so beautiful on earth, imagine what heaven will be like?"
I am so saddened that such artistic voice, lips and fingers like Sarah's are absolutely glimmering in the image of our Musician and yet might not join in with the generations of eternity. I am saddenned she is not singing for Him right now.

I wish we didn’t have to turn on christian radio stations for the ‘message,’ but any other for good music. I wish the garish advertisements that aggravate everything we touch and look at would be injected with some integrity. I wish the New York Times best seller’s list was chock full of masterful literature by proficient writers, who make a living by their service under God’s restoration agenda. Is the world really any different because of Grace? Do they know we are Christians because we, together, look like heaven on earth?