One More Time

This is not our first rodeo. We have traveled this road more times than I can count.

As I walked once again away from the ‘kissing corner,’ my mind replayed a thousand images of times spent watching her as they wheel her down the hall out of our presence while my heart cried out within. Hold it all together though for her sake. She needs all the strength she can muster to just make it through one more time.

One more time. Will you allow her that today, Lord? Will you allow us to come out of this day on the other side with her still by our side? Or is today the day?

I lost it hard yesterday. I have tried and tried to hold it all together but it just became too much. And as your divine details kept unfolding, I fell apart. I hope it was a beautiful mess; it really just felt like desperate chaos. 

So my mind keeps replaying all these images of times you have asked me to hold it all together as I had to hold her up. But if I am honest, it seems so unfair.

Why should a 16-year-old daughter have to wipe the puke off the floor after helping her mom clean off her feces and settle into the madness of her mind while she does her best to just lie still?  Why did you make me see her that night as she walked right into me and had no idea who I even was? Why did I spend countless hours taking care of her when I could barely take care of myself? 

That one night stole so much. I lost my mother much too young, only to spend more hours in a hospital or doctor’s office than most people do in a lifetime combined, and I am only 41. I know the drill all too well. The nurse will come in and ask a thousand questions, interrupted by the surgical nurse or the anaesthesiologist or the surgeon or labs. If I could cry a tear for every drop of blood I have watched them steal from her weakened soul, I would flood the hearts of too many. 

My heart feels the flood. Like I am holding up the dam by a measly whisk of breath and at any moment I know it will all come crashing down if I dare to even steal a whisper begging for mercy.

It leaked yesterday. For a few small moments as a dear friend held me close, I let some of it out. But how do I account for twenty-four years of dammed emotions because she couldn’t be my strength. I had to be hers.

I am trying my best today to be her strength, and to just hold tight. But, God, it is harder today than normal. For just a few moments, I need to be a kid again. A 16-year-old girl who is free to laugh and live and have a mom who will take care of it all. But I am not a kid anymore, and the innocence stolen will forever play on repeat in my mind every time I have to once again sit here in these forsaken waiting rooms. God, I have grown weary of waiting. When will you let it end? Or better yet, when will we get a new beginning?

I guess I could say I wish life had a reset, and we could start anew, back to the beginning. We could go back to the 1995 Lesa who was young and free without a care in the world. But then I wouldn’t have You. And as hard as today is, You really are enough. So I trust in you to be enough in me today. Because I need you. Oh, I need you. Every hour of every day. I need you to be enough in me. yae.

One more time.

Moving Mountains

One more time, one last time.

Time ticks tediously into the winds of insanity.  But all you really want is to hold it somehow still in your hands just long enough to feel it, to own it.  But it slips. Oh, how it slips away and away and away and yet you hold it, waterfalling cascades dancing around you as you turn this way and that to just hold on.

Just hold on.  You wonder why you even try.  But yet you do. The very thought of addiction benumbs your soul and yet out of embers and ashes you peer, wishing desperately to grasp one wisp of yellowed shine.  The dawn of a new day never knocks, or maybe it did and you just didn’t hear it.

Why are you addicted to the insanity of normal?

The demons of normality are beckoning to be your best ally.  Grasp hold of their sickening web and then you can break free to live an enchanted life, to unshackle the slave of your thoughts, break free, just be.  

But you sense you are less than enough.  So just this one time, just this one moment, you shall reject the heart’s earnest cry to move mountains and one more time, just this one more time, you shall remain.  Stay the course, hold your head high, be who they want you to be, who they need you to be.

Being for them breaks who you are.

You need more.

You need heights unsoared and valleys unkempt and struggles more real and yet more ensnaring than you can handle, but the chains of being what they expect are more wretched yet.

Maybe it’s time.  Maybe those demons are really just angels who need their own wings; they cannot fly if they cannot unlatch.  

They can’t control you anymore because . . .

Maybe it is time.

One last time for them, one more last time for you.

And as you fly, they shall also forever flight in the foreground because those who wonder are never really lost.

Those who fight and flight are dancing together on the face of their failures, and you can step in time, join the dance, be alive.  

Because how will you ever know what to believe if you don’t go just this one time.

Just this one time.

Even if you fail.  Even if you crash and burn.  It shall still be beautiful. . .

For you can only ever be a beautiful disaster.

Homeward Bound

It almost always hits somewhere in the Dakotas.  Driving hard to make the miles, time rolling slower than paint drying in the hot, humid summer air, and I enter a lengthy haze.  From inside, I am quiet. I have nothing to say. No words could begin to express what is happening in my heart. Nothing in me can muster the energy; all my reserve is pounding away against the flood of endless uncertainty and it is all I can do to just breathe.  Breathe in. Breathe out. Survive.

I would like to stay in the haze.  At least it is better than coming out on the other side ready to tackle another year in the hot hells of southern Illinois.  The endless tasks with little return of effort. Slaving away at work, farm, and home for the tidbits of recompense slowly dispersed like morsels as I eat away at the sticky, messy dough desperately eager for that next text message or email from the student who might reach out long enough to give me a sip of water in my dry desert.  They are always worth it, but could there be more?

A haven of rest awaits just round the corner.  I find it come July, but now it is August, and my heart yearns to return through that haze to the other side, to find my soul in the mountains of Montana where you will plant me.  Will you plant me? I want to grow, but it seems so hard here in the shadows of corn and pork-capital of the world. The capital of comfort lures me to buy into all the things I cannot afford, yet purchase after purchase finds me wasting away yet in this desert land.  The thick, humid air can be so very suffocating; I can hardly breathe.

Father, help me breathe.  Remind me as I replant yet again here in this wasteland that this is the plan You have for me.  Is this the only plan You have? My heart yearns for something more, but something more comes at such a cost, and I only want it if You would have it for me, for us.

Coming out from the haze is so damned difficult.  I stay there as long as I possibly can, heart revolting for the deemed departure that You demand.  By the time we hit Iowa, I have emerged, but with each passing time, it becomes more difficult to gather back up all the pieces of my heart.  I feel like humpty dumpty who cannot quite put myself back together again.

Father, put me back together.  Make me whole so I can tackle all You have in store for me here.  Bring peace and passion and purpose to this next year that lies ahead.  

And maybe if You would think it is okay, grant me a plane ticket come March-to teach, to breathe, to revive this heart of mine.

In all my wanderings and revolts, I really do just want what You want for me.  Show me Your way, and I promise to go where You go.

Trust and Obey.  There really is no other way.  

Trust that I AM

Some days I have it together.  Some days I do not.  And other days, like today, I am Jacob wrestling with God for all I am worth. 

Lunchtime.  I am sitting in my room, door locked, lights off, listening to Bethel Worship.  I play the song You Came.  Tears flowing, I am begging God to please come, pleading for him to whisk his breathe across my cheek, letting me feel His presence.  Speak to me...please........

Suppertime.  I am fixing soup, listening again to Bethel Worship.  With no choosing on my end, a different song plays, and this one reminds me that He is with me, even when I don't feel it. . . Mike drop-walk away.  Tears again.  I know He wasn't actually the one singing, but He was.  He spoke directly to my heart, reminding me that He is alive and well in my soul, so it can be well with my soul.

Trust Me.

I still feel like my hip is out of socket, but my heart can rest anew because He showed up, just like He always does, and spoke His Truth-I AM that I AM.

sHe

She was too young with a veiled clarity for the blackened white in the midst of swirling greys, but we probably shouldn’t blame her-a habit of youth. She blames herself enough already.

You came.  Soft, slow, seducing.  So she gave.  Every last ounce of her heart and soul, and then the final prized token of her unfailing devotion so you would finally know her love.  Her first and final hail mary.

She never was the same.

Times broken pieces to put humpty dumpty back together again, and just when she thought all was healed, you dropped in again.  

Why here of all places?  The teeter-totter of mind over emotion, knowing this is the exact place she wants you to be but your arrival seemingly caused the ground to fall away beneath her and she doesn’t quite know how to get back up.  The jekyl of wanting you to know Christ like you have never known him before but the hyde of wishing you would have chosen somewhere else to take your pursuing heart.  

Why would God do such a thing?

Yes, I know.  You have great plans for me.  Really, You do.  And it is crazy insane how You are doing a good thing in me through all the debased pits of my weeping heart.  So I do hear You.  Really, I do.

You know how I have struggled with this for some time now.  You know how I want so much for this to not be a big deal, but then within seconds it is erupting inside bigger than life and then I just don’t know how to breathe.  Spirit and flesh battling inside for the final victory over how I will go on with life now that his presence is in my midst.  

Life does go on and we live in the here and now.  I cannot recreate the past with all its veiled clarity, but I can use the vivid picture You have revealed today to move past this moment.  I am not defined by my past.  I must trust that You alone can show Him truth and think not of the me he knew, but choose instead to see the me You have made me to be.  But really, it is not me at all he needs to see; it is You we all need.  

I will choose in this moment to step out of my pit of pity, for pity really is the base for my wallowed pit.  And I will live in the spirit over the flesh, knowing You clothe me with righteousness and see not all the wretched shame of my past.  When I stand in Your fathomless glory, I fall to pieces inside because I am reminded of how very unworthy I am.  His presence reminds me of my guilt-choosing his hail mary over the bloodied sacrifice of my Jesus.  But I no longer live that life of lies, and though it haunts me still daily, I am not defined by the veiled past.  Satan would try to tell me differently, but as we sang today, when the lies speak louder than the truth, remind me I belong to you.  

I cried a lot today.  Weeping for the past that I cannot alter and for how much You love me in spite of me.  And if I am honest, weeping also for all the he’s whose hearts I played around with in my downspiralling implosion of youth.   I was a blackened mess.  But You pulled me from the muck and mire and gave me a new name, so I can either sink into the regret of the past or embrace the hope of a future You offer freely, a gift I can never earn but desperately need.

I will take your offering.  I will kneel at the altar of Your love because it is the only place I can be whole again, and I will gladly welcome him to do the same even if it is right beside me, because that is Your desire, and all I want is to have Your heart.

Victim of Love

I once had a student who wrote about her molester.  Raw, tender, beautiful young girl whose deacon touched her in bad places.  Told her not to tell.  My throat screams injustice as my stomach churns with the thought of the injustice she has endured.

She was a victim of child molestation.  But is she really a victim?

Racism breeds its hot hatred year after year, day after day.  Moment after moment we are bombarded with the clashing tension.  Blacks demanding a voice in a world that has historically oppressed and whites screaming back that we live only in the present and cannot be held accountable for the sins of our fathers.  Spouting ignorance about the realities of cultural degradation runs rampant in all of us.  We are all victims of our upbringings, buying into the abcs of our youth.  But are we really victims?

Daniel and I talked about this the other night.  Black, white, rich, poor-so few actually change from what they have known.  Stuck in the cycles of the familiar, we may venture a bit from the nucleus but fail to find implosion that launches us into brand new spheres of orbits.  

I guess I see it like this.  It is pretty easy for me to sit in my comfortable life and throw stones at someone else and tell them their poverty or their depravity is their own fault because if they would only work harder they would rise above their situation when the honest reality is even the richest white man rarely moves beyond his own situation in which he was raised to fill.  We often live impressed under the cultural norms of whatever life has looked like day in day out.  We fail to move beyond what we know because we are victims who lack courage and strength and perseverance to make a change.  But does it have to be like this?  Are we really victims?

As a Christian, my default is to take all questions to the context of how God would answer this question.  And as often happens, he points me to the cross.

Jesus was the ultimate victim.  Bruised and beaten for his perfection, outcast for belonging to God, rejected for refusing to follow the norm, he died for me to pay my price and set an example for me to fall hard into.  From every angle I look, Jesus was a victim.  But He would deny every ounce of that claim.  He says we are only victims if we choose the flesh.  When we choose the spirit, we are never a victim.  Through His Spirit, we step outside the flesh into a life where nothing that happens to our flesh can destroy what He has done in our Spirit, and it is then that all of us-black, white, rich, poor-move beyond victimization and into abundant life.  

Blacks and white alike, if they choose secular over spirit, are all victims and frustrate progression of life because living a victim leaves us unable to make a change, choosing instead to displace responsibility and live stagnantly blaming others with no hope of rising above our circumstances.

My student is no different.  Her flesh was victimized-cruel, heartless beast of a man who took advantage of her.  Every part of me cries sorrow for what has happened to her, but I would do her an injustice if I simply offered a tissue with no hope for something better, especially since I do have something better-hope for a life outside this flesh that draws us closer to death with every passing breath.  I can offer her life in the spirit that rises above all the hell of this world.  

It is only when we embrace the love Jesus offered us on that cross that we can be anything more than the filth of the life around us.  This same sweet promise applies to us all-from the privileged white man residing in a white house to the colored man kneeling on the grass.  We are all victims of the flesh who desperately need to choose to live life in the spirit and be a different kind of victim-a victim of love.

My Alabastard

Allah-bastard of my youth

Teenage angst of sorrow

Speak not love

Dream not of me

Traitor of my youth

Fallen angel from high divine

Mere Mortal, You fell

Hard upon my soul

Crowning you king

O’er my virgin Mother Mary

Perfumed sanctuary

Loves fertile soil

Remembrance of my youth

Times healing balms

Befuddled misplaced divinity

Claims my sin

Resurrected ashes of youth

We are not to blame

Freely take

My Alabaster Jar