All Together

Tags

adult, change, college, friends, friendship, graduation, group, growth, Jesus, marriage, Michigan, youth

The last time we were all together was when one of us, the only one of us, got married.

Kristin's Getting Married!

There’s been some redemption since. Some efforts towards healthy interaction, yes. But mostly there’s been destruction and chasm. And one of us is gone entirely, as far as anyone can tell. She doesn’t mind being so far, but everyone always makes comment about her absence. It’s the saddest sort of equation.

You see, years ago I gave a name to this crew of friends I had. No one agreed with me. Even these friends though I was silly for being so semiformal and so I stood alone. I thought I was being intentional, thought I was drawing us closer together and facilitating the relationships we were building. I see now that it may have been a bit much. It’s possible, I suppose, that I grew somewhat overzealous about creating us this little team of friend-making. But there we were, willing or otherwise, a group of gals with a label.

In keeping with the fact that I thought the idea, the people, the plan were all fabulous, when I referred to the crew, I called them the Fab Five. There were five of us, of course. We all lived in Michigan at the time, in various parts of the state. We had met years before through a youth camp where we all served as young adult staff members. We had Jesus in common at the most basic level, a love for Him, surely. Beyond that, we had visions and dreams of all kinds yet we still dared to dream together. We dreamed big dreams, too. Dreams that knew no boundaries. Dreams which didn’t consider destruction.

Now with college there’s graduation and with growing up, parting ways. With moving up, moving on and so forth. So, pretty soon Michigan had lost the core of this crew. The easy answers are in the telephone calls as the day winds down, the emails with pictures attached, even the hand-written letters and the packages bursting at the corners, waiting to be torn open and indulged. But when the weeks go by with conversations only between one party and the voicemail and nary voice to voice, the phone calls start to space out. When the emails and the letters go out, but space and silence are sent back, no postage necessary, the incentive grows dim. The cords between us grew thin as time passed by.

And eventually, I started to see the spaces in the world we’d built together. We hadn’t quite considered the pull that change would have, we didn’t commit like I thought we had. And still, of the five of us, only I ever use the label that I gave us. We’ve been living apart for years now, our dreams abandoned in limbo, empty, uninhabited. The last time we were all together might have been the last time we’ll ever all be together.

Plus the Bride makes Fab Five

We Try

Tags

Chicago, dining out, disciple-making, downtown, entertainment, food, industry, retaurant, server, service, waiter, waiting tables, Waitress

We wait tables, asleep in these no-slip soles. Slinging schnitzels in front of folks expecting too much, pouring floats for children with clumsy fingers. We linger, we rush. We sit for just a spell. They yell. We hide behind slow-drip coffee and our souls slowly drip, coffee. In this industry, we go crazy. We get angry. We laugh at jokes we’d never make, live comfortably in a world we didn’t create. Disappointment sucks us dry. But yet we try. We follow and lead, then we only follow and forget to lead. It’s not easy, you see, but we try.

Blend

Tags

background, blend, cards, coffeehouse, dad, daughter, divorce, euchre, family, father, marriage, medication, music, musician, open mic, sickness, songs, songwriter

In the background, there’s a young woman, playing originals on a humble stage at a coffeehouse open mic night.  In the foreground, there’s a table housing a game of Euchre, cards, a few young ladies and an older man playing out a hand.

That musician, she’s a friend.

The man, he’s her dad.  You’d never know.  He doesn’t father her.  She doesn’t live with him in a messy house on an island near a city.  Her dad is sick, but in his heart he loves her with an overwhelming love.  Sometimes, he blames his medication.  Always, he offers to carry her things.

The song she sings, it’s about a time when friends were friends in another way.  Things are different now.  They’ve pushed for change and it’s not the same.  It’s not the same.

When her dad was still married to her mom, they used to play cards, this game, even.  Maybe he was well then.  Maybe they were happy and he didn’t call hearts out of turn, just to keep the action going.  So Euchre plays on, while his daughter sings songs in a suburban-urban coffeeshop.  She’s tired, so she’ll only sing three songs.  Then, sit near at the table with the cards, drinking coffee with French vanilla creamer.  Drinking French vanilla creamer with coffee.

In the background, in the foreground.

Writing Space

Tags

relaxation, retreat, solitude, writing, writing space

If I had a space, this is one way I might wish it to look:

Writing Space: Minimalist

Soiled Bare Feet

Tags

chores, cutting the grass, feet, grass, lawn, lawnmower, mowing, philosophy, shame, shoes, sin, stain, summer, thought, yard

I’m mowing the lawn in my bare feet this afternoon. If my mother knows, she’ll do nothing short of strangle me with the laces from the shoes I’m not wearing. But she’ll have to find them first; I can’t seem to.

The grass is long and the tips of the blades prick the soft bottoms of my feet. I can feel the ends bend inside my arches, where the calluses haven’t spread to cover. It doesn’t hurt; the blades are weak to the weight of my feet. But, I feel the crushing motion when I step. It feels like I’m destroying something.

The grass is long. I waited an extra day, waited for the lawn to dry after yesterday’s morning rain. So, I raise the blade before starting and the grass clumps in loose piles at the end of every row anyhow. The piles don’t cling tightly together, wet and stubborn like summer snowballs, so I kick them with my toes as I walk with the mower. Up one row, down the next, spraying grass in little bursts with the swing of my bare foot. The grass makes light and dark passes, a little bit like a golf course fairway. I miss a few blades because I’m careless and daydreaming. I step into a puddle in the corner of the yard, where the soil dips low and retains water. It squishes between and over my toes; the moist earth feels foreign to my foot and I draw it away, wiping it on the freshly trimmed blades of grass. It dries and I mow on.

When I’m finished, I store the lawnmower away in the shed and throw the tennis ball in the air so Toby can fetch it and run in circles around me. When I stand at the sliding door to go inside, I stop and finally see the condition of my feet. They are marred beyond recognition from my journey through this green-giving lawn. The calluses are fighting hard to retain their fleshy tone and only glow with a faint jaundice. But the soft arches are fighting a losing battle to the inky residue released from the bleeding blades of grass; they’re patchy and growing green, the color creeps up the sides of each foot, threatening to take over the lower half of both legs. And the most alarming stain is on the front end of all ten toes. The green of the grass has built up so densely, green on green on green, that the skin which wraps around my toes is completely black with the soot of this freshly mowed lawn. Such a good thing, such a fresh summer scent, a refreshing exhibition of new growth – it all clings so lifelessly, so dark like soot to my bare, diseased feet.

And while washing my blackened toes doesn’t lighten the stain, erase the dark mark of my rebellion, return my feet to their fleshy, pink color of clean, I wonder still, as I have been this week, about how any good thing can be ruined by these scars of sin.

Sin is always a distortion of something good.

Tags

creation, cross, evil, fall, good, grace, healing, Jesus, redemption, salvation, Satan, shame, sin

Donovan L. Graham says, in the book I’m reading (Teaching Redemptively) in order to be considered a trustworthy and legitimate teacher in the near future:

“It’s extremely important to realize that while sin distorted the creation, it did not destroy it or turn it into something evil. Sin neither abolishes nor becomes identified with creation. Sin is of a different order. It lives as a parasite on creation, able to exist only as an agent that twists what is good. Satan, a renegade, has no legitimate kingdom and lives under God’s rule. The only thing he has to work with is God’s good creation, and his so-called kingdom could not even exist without creation. Therefore, we must see that prostitution and promiscuity do not make sex bad. They can only exist as a distortion of human sexuality, God’s good creation. Hatred is only a distortion of the human emotion of love, another of God’s good creations. Every sinful, distorted image embodies a good image created by God. A hurtful relationship is still a relationship, a godless school is still a school, a corrupt government is still a government, idol worship is still worship. Thus sin must not be seen as something that has an existence of its own. If it did not attach itself to the good of God’s creation, it could not exist.”

And so I’m left thinking about how we are not inherently good, like so many naively believe.  No.  But, neither are we altogether wired up for evil, like we sometimes mistakenly assume.  We are made to be good; we are called good by the Creator before we fall.  It is just that we have been turned away from that goodness towards evil, sin, and shame.  And, though provided with a Savior and called righteous even when we are not, we are still diseased by the heaviness of that shame.

Sin cannot create.  It is handicapped and unable to produce ex nihilo.  It can only twist and ruin things that already are.  Things that, at their core, are good.

Creativity

Tags

art, artist, choice, creation, creativity, Creator, God, human, ideas, mankind, music, talent, thoughts

Maybe you only sometimes call yourself an artist but you think artist-thoughts regularly.  These thoughts are for you. Artists are a strange group, a weird, off-beat clique, most of whom don’t make any money and probably smoke something borderline illegal seven days a week.  Or so you think.  Most “creatives” who haven’t chosen to pursue a freelance or otherwise artsy profession probably don’t consider themselves artists in any capacity.  Even the word is a little too edgy for us “normal” folk.  It implies a great deal of risk, I reckon.  Too much, maybe?

Here’s the thing about art & creativity, though.  From the perspective that an all-loving God created the universe and everything in it, paying special attention to the wiring up of human beings and how they interact with one another and with their Creator, this whole idea of art & creativity adopts a new platform.  From this vantage point, it’s not just an off-beat subculture for young hipsters that’s rising up to overtake Chicago neighborhoods like Wicker Park or entire cities like San Antonio.  It’s a passion within this Creator God and is birthed directly from His character.

Now, if we can hold loosely that perspective for a minute and suppose that we, all of mankind, whether we truly adopt this set of beliefs about the Bible sort of God or not, were created as image-bearers of an all-loving and all-powerful Creator, then the whole thing starts to make sense.  If, in the spark of our coming to exist, there was creativity, then we have reason to be creative beings.  There was this series of ideas and then us, the culmination of those ideas into reality–creativity!  Without the mindset of an artist, we wouldn’t be the complex, unique figures of philosophic and theoretical thought as we very obviously are.  We are the product of an Artist.  We are living proof that creativity, when executed, can make something magnificent.  Something beyond basic.  We bear the image of our Creator, the original Artist.

Okay…so what that we have imbedded in us creativity and ideas worth sharing? It matters because we believe a lie from somewhere that unless we come from the ripped-skinny-jeans, paintbrush-in-the-pocket crowd, we have nothing creative to offer this world.  We have no ideas to offer one another.  No gifts to give of ourselves.  This simply isn’t true.  I once knew a man who was wired up on the inside by beautiful melodies.  The man was truly made of music notes.  He carried baggage heavier than I could imagine, the remedies he’d tried over the years trailed behind him as he pressed on.  Decades of defeat.  He harbored questions about this Creator God but hid behind a stubbornness that handicapped him from healing, from ever truly meeting his Savior.  But as far as his creativity was concerned, none of that mattered.  He was suppressing a desire to create, which was keeping him from a true artist nature, which I believe all of us have. 

This man was sitting back behind the crowd, content with mediocrity and middle of the road.  But I could see that he was wired for beauty and for freedom.  He was capable of crafting gorgeous works of art and processing life through music, but for years he would only talk about how he hoped… and how he wished that one day…

Until the day he walked into his voice lesson.  Or the day he sat in that music composition course.  Maybe it was the day he scribbled deeply personal lyrics on the pages of his composition notebook that matched the riff he’d been humming in his head all day long.  Was he a musician yet when he held his first demo cd in his hand, with his name on the front and a photo of his elation the day we saw a double rainbow?  Or did he still hesitate until he drove East from this city, to a bigger, more “Hollywood” version of this where he would find a band and record his original jams with names from the Billboard Top 40 in a real studio, sound technicians equalizing his voice and queuing backup singers to croon the words he wrote on a train from downtown Chicago?

Whenever the moment, whichever morning he woke up and began to live fully in his creativity, this man became an artist not by connection or networking.  He became an artist not by schooling or upbringing.  He already was an artist.  He was an artist because he was created by an Artist to bear the image of Himself, to be an artist, a creator. 

The creativity in him was finally awakened and he stepped into the realm of what it is to create.  He put together ideas already swimming around in his alive and vibrant mind.  He bent and twisted them until they sounded beautiful.  He had an ear for that kind of sound.  His fingers could caress the neck of any guitar, reproducing those sounds that echoed in his head.  He wasn’t looking to become an artist.  He didn’t fit the stereotype.  But inside of him he had the ability to create.  He didn’t want to give up everything to follow Christ; didn’t want to count the cost of discipleship to seek the One who created everything he knows and loves, but he still grabbed hold of his responsibility as an image-bearer of that Creator.  He grasped the responsibility of being human; of being.  And he chose to create.

What do you do with all of those artist-thoughts that pop in and out of your mind while you go about your regular day-to-day?  There’s no formula that will erase them.  There’s no activity, no special prayer, no other religion that will cover up or drown out the ideas that you formulate because you were meant to create.  You don’t have to call yourself an artist; don’t make that kind of commitment.  But create space in your day to be the image-bearer you were made to be and find the time to create, as you were created.