4/17/03 (Thursday) “We’re Having a Baby”
On Saturday, March 29th, I woke up to a restless, but smiling, bride, who seemed a bit more eager to cuddle me into the waking world than normal. Once she was sure I was quite conscious, she smiled larger still – her eyes and lips together – her nose close to mine, and said, “So I guess we’re having a baby.” To which I responded (after but a moment’s silence – to catch my breath and soul and all) with a merry laugh and much cuddling. How good it is!
4/24/03 (Thursday) “Brainwashed by a Cheeseburger”
Did youth group last night with Jesse Halvorson, Phil Nash, a dozen neighborhood kids, and a bag of cheeseburgers at a park on 84th. They cut church before worship, and we chased them down for “small groups.” Bargained for “60 seconds” of silence with a bag of McD’s, ended up with three minutes of relative chaos. Tried to convey truth on a billboard – came across to them as one of those 30-minute infomercials – left one kid thinking we were trying to brainwash them. Bright kid. Bitter insides.
Jesus would’ve bought them burgers, I’m convinced of that, but what about the pseudo-lecture? Granted, good intentions and all, the seed may’ve found soil in some (it was a nasty, ill-planned toss), but might I have ended up a hindrance to others by parading (shamelessly) an agenda alongside love? I found myself in the category of persons either raising voices or pressing points in a desperate presentation of the gospel (and only parts of it), less out of love and more out of an ego too proud not to be heard (and the gospel is not desperate).
Damage done, I feel. But I pray it’s not so, and I thank God for the lesson learned. What I’ve taught before in principle I’m now learning in reality. I pray to God tuition here be not the lost lives of kids I’ve failed to love while learning…
5/6/03 (Tuesday) “Miss Clare”
I read last night, in the pages of another MacDonald novel, of the lady Miss Clare. The simplicity of her devotion and of her deeds is of the kind for which I ache, and I believe, for which I was made. I’ve come to think certain aspects of my history have issued consequences that may forever keep me from fully and effectively influencing the masses; yet a life is never void of the opportunity to love one person at a time – to be Christ’s hands and eyes and lips in the lives of those who immediately surround you. It seems my upbringing (in the country) caters more to this anyhow. And so must I learn to live.
5/7/03 (Wednesday) “Beneath the Bleachers”
I remembered last night, while watching a softball game with Jenny and friends, the world beneath the bleachers. Paul and Kristie’s kids were walking in and out of the beams, with the bottoms of bigger people suspended above them by little but the beams. How unaware the bigger people were of the activities beneath them – how unaware they were even of that world! Yet from beneath, the entire world above seemed an enchanting reality, for the moment, just fine without the one whose eyes were gazing upward from beneath the bleachers…
I knew mystery then… I knew fantasy… how the haunting remains.
5/13/03 (Tuesday) “A Selfish Death”
Christ died the selfless death. The day closed, my wife asleep beside me, I bed down with a sore shoulder, tired wrists, and a sick stomach. It’s been a long day of fatigue. Tomorrow I can’t eat as I’m preparing for a procedure I’m to undergo Thursday. Being sick. Being weak. Sadly, a state of being I’ve not much minded ever before. Even the thought of dying has too often dawned as a welcome notion in the midst of such a broken world (as prevalent as the roses are).
Marriage, however, has come to expose fatalism as the naked ego it is. Death leaves lonely the other half of me here… that is a sad thing. Another sad thing is the fraction of my life here lived with Jen. Judging by the goodness of it all so far, married life ought to weigh thrice as much in years as my entire life prior…
Death while I was single – even engaged – seemed welcome. For then I would pass alone – the only tearing being the rending of friendships and the parting from family… a passing now would mean the tearing of flesh – one flesh, where the two have become one – and the rending of spirit, or at least, soul. She and I are one – as one as two people can be, and the loss felt especially by the one left would be borne in solitude… an end much more tragic than death itself…
What I’m saying is, I may not be that sick, but the willingness to die, in me, is far too available for the present. I’m both married and soon to be a dad: sorrow and suffering come to bring me depth, not death, and I’m wrong to assume the latter. Wrong. Dead wrong.
6/8/03 (Sunday) “Action/Reaction” (and electric candles)
Being one prone to extremes, it may be unfair of me to evaluate so much of society on the basis of my own personal experience, but it nevertheless seems to me that so much of history (specifically within the church) is little more than the steady swing of a pendulum from one extreme to another. All major reformations, all major revolts: an effort to correct one wrong by embracing another which, on account of its contrast, appears the right thing to do.
The applications of this right now, in my mind, are too broad and too many to detail here, but the specific occasion upon which the thought itself solidified can be mentioned… It’s an early summer, cool blue, overcast and breezy sort of Sunday. Jen and I went this afternoon to a baptism service for the newly born son of friends of ours – descendants of a strict strain of Lutheranism running right from the old State Church of Norway. I noticed electric candles on the altar. It was an awkward sort of service. The pastor was dressed in some sort of garb that somehow made him seem less human, and more “divine” (and somewhat less likeable too). He spoke doctrine and the congregation sang the same, while I just stared at the electric candles. Their sickly flicker captivated me, not for their presentation of beauty, but rather their obvious lack of it – where it would so naturally be were the candles merely allowed to be real. To burn…
Why do men seek to contain (and restrain) things God has already made as good? Just because we can? Or is it because our replacements are somehow less dangerous and more predictable? Religion is this – religion as prescribed by men – religious men, who’ve somehow quite successfully made themselves (or found themselves) more spiritual and less real, affirming doctrines and patterns of thought (Truth indeed matters) while stoically ignoring (or worse, merely lamenting) the very real needs of the lost world around them.
I was reminded of how that felt today. I was reminded of the smell of old church basements and musty altar rugs. Of thick walls between the congregation and its community. I was reminded of how easy it is to feel chosen within those walls, how easy it is to feel safe. How easy it is to find power and gain control – by bowing to the men with the doctrines… and I was reminded again of how wrong it all feels. How Jesus was real. How he spoke in stories and walked in sandals. How he touched to heal. How he died so young… how that death was what he came for… how that death, after just three short years of “hands-on ministry,” kick-started his game plan to save the world. And he’s doing it still…
Mark 8:33. I do not want my life to be a mere reaction. Will I forfeit whatever miracle of my life God might reveal, by refusing to respond to my circumstances out of some fear that I’ll die merely to be corrected by the next generation?
7/20/03 (Sunday) “The Generation Called X”
I come from the generation called X. My generation’s marked by a general contempt for anything institutionalized, a general mistrust for authority, and a consuming ache for anything genuine. This sounds to me more like a fitting description for anyone, in any time, between the ages of 13 and 19. I’m wondering if it wasn’t just the sociologists who came of age while it was my generation in the spotlight. WE DESIRE TO BE UNDERSTOOD, NOT CATEGORIZED. KNOWN AND LOVED, NOT USED.
8/3/03 (Sunday) “Willow Monarch”
Last night I had journal dreams. Now I sit with my bride on a blanket (blue with purple paisleys) near Lake Nokomis on a Sunday afternoon, hours after a morning service where again I sensed a church growing to be the church. Just watched a monarch butterfly arch open-winged through the swaying locks of a weeping willow. Orange on green. I just about cried.
Today is one of the coolest days we’ve had this summer. Comfortable in cords and kiddy ked socks. Jen’s in gray maternity pants and a white, long-sleeved, napkin blouse with lace around the cuffs and collar. Barefoot. Pregnant (and showing). She’s writing, too. Jets roar through our silence two or three at a time, then all’s quiet again.
We visited Joy and LeRoy last night in Ellsworth. After a (more than) satisfying meal of grilled steak and sweet corn, we drove through Wisconsin countryside in Joy’s Impala. LeRoy at the wheel, the girls (Lisa, too) in the back. The sunset… a beautiful evening.
At home before bed, I read. A smattering of pages from three journals – the three between the Jen-days that were and the Jen-days that are. Three years of raw bachelorhood. It may be obvious I’ve been thinking of those days lately. Recalling singleness much like I once recalled childhood – roses without thorns – the right way to remember, if merely reminiscent, but as soon as nostalgia stirs up discontent for the present, the past must be seen in the full scope of what it was, and not merely the good we recall.
Reading those journals last night was therapy for the present: I was single once. I was sometimes happy. I was sometimes free. But I wasn’t the person I am now. I see that today. Marriage is making me a man – the man I then wished I would one day be. The adventure is not gone, it’s just not quite so vague, nor is it any longer lived alone. Bringing life out of love as Jen and I are with this baby is plainly something neither of us has done before – and that’s no small adventure. I’m foolish to suppose she’s somehow “more ready” just because she’s carrying the baby…
And there is love still, it’s just not always new, and newness makes love easy just like spring makes things grow. As summer wears on, the reaction of noticing beauty must be replaced by the act of knowing beauty. Love is intentional in its essence. It really is. Not reactionary. Not a response. Not at its core. At its core, love begins. It starts. It creates. If we don’t get that, we don’t get love, and we’ll always and only respond to love, which is something like love, but not love itself. Not Love, Himself. And we are to be like Him. To become like Him. That is why we are. I do love my bride, and I struggle with her struggles. There are sacrifices to be made, but I will not write of them here. Not now. I must learn to live them first…
8/5/03 (Tuesday) “Love First”
“This is love, not that we loved God, but that He first loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” I John 4:10
We could not be fully like God if we had only God to love. Our love for God can only be a response. He has first loved us – any love from us to Him is therefore already a reaction – a continuation, not a beginning.
For us to truly live His image, we must first love, and we cannot first love without loving someone who by nature is not always lovable. Beauty (or lovability) that beckons love receives a love that is a response – an extension or a reflection of what the beauty already is. The unlovable (as we are) receive a love that is new – un beckoned, un bought – brand new. That is love, and that is the love God calls his people to. That is the love he has for us. That is the love that draws us to him and makes us like him…
Talking with Ben last night about worship – comparing the corporate and personal contexts – while riding in his car round Plymouth and Maple Grove… An edifying conversation, I think. In the course of which I brought to words a hierarchy of values I’ve been embracing now for some time, vaguely unaware…
If worship is indeed to be 24/7 (which I believe it is), then it is more (has to be more) than the words (or thoughts) that we sing, speak, or think to God. Worship HAS to be the way we live. The way we live becomes our expression of God’s worth. How we live communicates the value we place upon who He is. The way we live communicates what is of worth to us, and communicating God’s worth is worship.
So the hierarchy mentioned is this: I believe the personal context for worship – namely of myself being a good husband, a good friend, a good steward, etc… – is of far more value to God than the corporate context of a worship service. Yet even here there is balance to be had…
8/17/03 (Monday) “You did not have a Home”
Waking this morning to our first day of vacation on the farm. Finished our drive last night at 9:30 after stopping in to see the Holt’s in Fergus Falls. “It’s not always like this,” Jenn said to my Jen – referring to the activity of four young Holts in the hour. Left with hot tortillas filled with meat and cheese for the road. They’re expecting their fifth next April. Great family…
Back home, at the kitchen table, once we’d unloaded the car and Mom and Dad were sitting down for supper, Dad spoke three words in succession most farmers speak only in their dreams: “eighty bushel wheat.” Mom said yesterday that this has been the best harvest ever. Slow rounds. Wheat standing straight up. Hot, dry days. Sunny, blue skies. Beautiful… it’s good to be home. Home…
Read a little Garrison Keillor before bed last night. Closed my eyes around 11:30, then opened them again just after 3. Walked to the bathroom and glanced out the window, which was open, the screen being no hindrance to the sweet summer breeze wandering into our space. Cool and dry. The songs of crickets lighting on my ears. The fragrance of wheat chaff faintly hanging in the air. And the stars dimmed by the brilliance of the moon and her late summer counterpart, Mars. Brightest in the sky he’s been in years. I was hungry and couldn’t sleep. Walked downstairs and around the living room in an enchanting silence. I felt like a kid again, comforted by the sounds of a fan from my parent’s bedroom, and my Dad’s snore.
I quietly devoured a slice of Mom’s peach pie in the kitchen, eating right from the glass pie plate (cold from the fridge), drank two glasses of water and went back to bed. Laid down again beside my bride and our baby inside her, smiled at the thought of the tree toad on our windowsill just before bedtime, considered how much this felt like home, then understood my Jenny’s ache in a small way better than I had before.
While our home on 4th Avenue may be where we live, it still feels somewhat like an experiment in life. To me, here – the farm – feels like life tried and true. The way it was when I was a kid: HOME. Jen doesn’t have that. She’s told me our home doesn’t feel to her like home, and I think this is what she was trying to say, and now that I think I get it, I hurt with her. I’m not quite sure I’ve ever grasped this element of her sorrow: when the “center” you had as a child changes, or worse, disappears. The place, gone. The people, changed… remarried… moved. I don’t know what that’s like, I can’t know it like she does, but I understand now. And this is one side of Jenny’s struggle, her sorrow, these days.
8/23/03 (Saturday) “Casting Vision”
Spent a good part of nearly everyday at home preparing a sermon for this Sunday. I’m preaching at Emmaus - casting a vision - and I’m not sure it’s so clear to me what that vision is, so I wonder whether I’m ready to cast it. It’s not that there isn’t one, it just seems a bit misty, and I’ve heard it said if what you’re saying is a mist in the pulpit it’s a fog in the pews. I’ve served up too much fog in my life, and I really don’t want to do that anymore. Especially when the stakes are so high. If the church could share this vision – if the kids could get it – the church could be the church and people would see God. I’m sure of it.
8/25/03 (Monday) “Emperor’s Club”
“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be forever a child.”
10/10/03 (Friday) “This Broken World”
It is best to both live and write. But what about when life gets really hard to live? Is it okay then to just write? I am paralyzed and empowered by history. Empowered by the stories, the people… paralyzed by the fact that in 5,000 years so little has changed. The nations rage… We’re salt? What are we preserving? Rotting flesh? I don’t know where to start. What a year.
10/12/03 (Sunday) “Streets Covered With Fall”
I really don’t need to say it again, but there’s more to write than what can be written, and so I’m tempted not to write at all. But I must. I roller-bladed down 81st this afternoon – after Jen and I napped to a football game. The street has a new surface – really smooth. Someone with a yard on Clinton was burning a pile of leaves. The sun was sinking from its perch in the sky, and in my own sort of way, so was I.
Autumn comes like this: trees put forth their most inspiring display of beauty. But just for a moment, then they are compelled to release their ornaments and bare their branches – the hard, seemingly lifeless shape of their being – a reality so cold and still, the recent memory of their beauty is bound to seem as nothing more than a dream. That’s the fall. And here is life.
Winter comes. But not yet. What shall be the death of Summer? Summer’s gone. Then how about Autumn? The sun is in my eyes, and I like it. Everything sparkles. Everything sparkled. It’s gone now, too. Clouds. I itch. Rash and these pimples, all over my body. My body – much more of it I have than I had last winter. Weight (and a belly) lost and found. Three albums in the course of one year. That and Crohn’s, prednisone, and all this itching.
Then there’s school. Ben Franklin and the birth of a nation. Even now a young one next to the others I study: Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia. A flash in the pan, are we? I don’t think so, yet not nearly as significant as we think.
Confronted again with complexity. The ages acknowledge stratified societies. Stratus for the sake of sanity. I’ve always been annoyed by stratification. Always rebelled at its pretense. Then there are the masses, and I get it. I get why it is. Why we distinguish, and why those boundaries matter. I could go on here, but there are other things.
I don’t know how to live the Law and the Gospel as one person. I do not know how to define and enforce rules lovingly. I hurt for Jake. And I want comfort. And I want adventure, adventure without much risk. Adventure like T.V. Can turn it off when I want to. And I want church like a dinner date. Can go home when you’re done.
And I want life like Autumn – without the Fall – the leaves and their color adorning the trees forever. But that isn’t life. Not here. Here, this is life: Decay in Sustain. Seasons pass to prolong sustain. Without the seasons, decay would win. Nevertheless, I’m tired. And grateful. And sad. Sad that yesterday’s memories are so good. And today’s reality not yet memory. But were yesterday’s memories not so good, would hope come as easily as it does? Is this easy? The world is changing. Or is it me? (the sun is down, and now it’s cold. I still itch…)
10/13/03 (Monday) “Pipe Tobacco and Root Beer Barrels”
The world is so broken. It has been for thousands of years. We have more science now – more technology, more know-how – yet the human heart is still as wicked and as deceitful as ever. Dressed up sometimes in goodwill, disguised by progress, hidden beneath the mantras of “civilization,” it is still wicked and deceitful, prone to all kinds of destruction, all kinds of folly, and all kinds of sin… and when we die (in relation to this world), we die. Solomon was right: what can be done that has not been done already? What can be said? What can I give this world that this world has never had?
Me. The individual is the only unique newness in each “new” day. God’s redemptive work is found primarily in the person. All is vain and wearisome apart from Christ, and his work in the individual.
I’m tired. I’ve said it before. Difference is, now I’m soon to be a dad – bringing up in this broken world another unique newness. I am unsure of much. So much that I am again paralyzed by a parenthetical despair. In, among, a part of, but not necessary. So I wonder why. Then why bother? There are simple things to be enjoyed: like pipe tobacco and root beer barrels, airplanes, music, food, sleep, and amusement. But life isn’t about pleasure (it’s not “about” pain either), it’s about living. And living is essentially becoming while we die. So while we die, we become. We become more ourselves – more like God… more OUR image, or more HIS.
I never imagined how laziness can work its way from inactivity into the essence of a person. What in life does not take a certain amount of work? The pursuit of comfort looms near. Significance also. I want them to mesh – to lie along the same path. But my eyes are dim and I just don’t know. Can’t see beyond this philosophical misery. This misery giving meaning to things like tobacco smoke and candy, while robbing the same from the things that really matter. Cursed misery.
GOD IS MORE than I let him be to me.
God, be GOD to me.
1/13/4 (Tuesday) “Regress With Progress”
God is moving me forward. Life is, there’s no question about that. In the midst of the motion (random as it seems) I still believe God is moving me (even us) “forward.” Nonetheless, I am dismayed by several of my present circumstances compared with those of my past (such a common demise). Funny how precise my mind’s recollection falls in rhythm with the seasons, with the calendar. I often find myself dwelling on an event or a feeling that dates back in some monthly multiple of twelve.
Today I’ve drifted back to Cancun for our honeymoon, to the studio tracking FLY 2003, then tonight, a flashback to Tony’s apartment in Denver, January of 2000. In my mind I can be right there again; on the road in the Dakotas or Wyoming, snowboarding alone in the Rockies, sleeping on Tony’s couch… I covet what health and strength I had then. At least physically, I was about as strong as I’d ever been, and perhaps (quite likely) stronger than I’ll ever again be.
Then there’s that sense of calling I had back then. Not that it’s gone now, it’s just not as accessible. And what little there is I often scorn with contempt (and fear), or doubt in view of its slowness to move me. But I am the one who is slow – the call remains.