New Job. New Blog.

To my dear friends who've honored me by reading this blog, I've started a new blog to chronicle this my first year as a full-time ESL teacher in the Memphis City Schools. It's at www.eslk5.wordpress.com. I hope to post here things that don't relate to this new, almost all-consuming endeavor, but for now all my energy is with ESL.

Blueberry Stained Fingertips

Lately I’ve been enthralled with my fingertips. Okay, I admit enthralled is a bit over-the-top. And it’s not that there’s anything special about my fingertips; they just happen to be the ones I notice the most, the ones I can move at will, the ones I’ve realized are the perfect meeting of nail and skin. So I encourage you to look at your own. Notice the shape, the color, the design, how sensitive, perceptive, even ageless they are. What they’ve done for you throughout the day. Turned the pages in a book, traced the outline of a face, tested the temperature of the water, shuffled a deck, wiped a tear, played a tune, signed a check, snapped a beat.

This morning mine were blueberry stained. I wish I had the words to describe the pure pleasure of seeing them so. We’d gone to pick blueberries in Nesbit, MS last night; five of us secretly competing to gather the most, saying little, admitting to feeling greedy, (their side has more!), totally absorbed in picking off one by one the perfectly round, tight, ashy-blue berries, popping the best into our mouths, filled with the contentment that comes only from working in a field that so generously yields up its fruit. Grateful for the shade, the comraderie of others, the sense of doing something worth doing, arguing over the best way to eat them. A pie. A cobbler. Muffins. Just as they are.

This would have been impossible without the fingertips. As would so much else that we depend on them for. If I were a poet, I’d write a sonnet: Ode to the Fingertips. Perhaps my friend Cindy will do it for me. If I were an artist, I’d paint a picture of purple- stained fingers holding the perfect berry. Maybe Mike or Sue will do that. Sarah Emily could write a song. All I can do is bring the topic up, ramble on, hint at something I can’t express, hope that you’ll just trust me and take just a few seconds to look for yourselves at your own, to be in awe, to say to God, “Thank you.”

The Eyes Can Say So Much

He was so eager. So appropriate. So respectful. Theologically correct. He dropped to his knees, called the teacher “good”. Then as all movers and shakers do, got right to the point.

“What do I do to inherit eternal life?”

Top me off, put a cherry on top, another coat of wax, the year-end bonus. All is good. You’re good. I’ve been good. I just need to know how to keep all this goodness coming.

Jesus parroted the man’s religion back to him. Don’t murder, steal, run-around with women, lie, slander, cheat, dishonor your parents.

“I’ve been good all my life,” he said as he straightened up tall, situated his robe, brushed off the dust from his former kneeling. His heart pumped with satisfaction and his face relaxed, returning to the assured and confident look of the well-heeled, the well-fed, the well-respected.

Mark was watching. What would Jesus say to this man in fancy clothes, a man who no doubt lived like royalty, asked for and got anything he wanted? The friends of Jesus had given up trying to guess how he’d respond to people. He’d commend swindlers and worthless beggars and call respectable leaders snakes. He’d tell some people to follow him, others to go home and not say a word. So, they just waited and watched. Closely.

That’s why Mark was able to say this: “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”

Camp here. Let this sink in, however it will. This is Mark’s account - Mark who narrates Jesus’ days in Palestine like an action-packed novel. Immediately. Straight away. This miracle. That one. Up the mountain. In a boat. Across the sea. Another village.

Mark was accustomed to watching Jesus’ face, was familiar with his facial expressions, looked for signs. Knew when a rebuke was coming; perhaps anticipated one this time. Instead, something in Jesus’ countenance, his eyes, his forehead, caused Mark to say, “And looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him.”

Linger here. Picture the scene. Don’t rush to the conclusion, dive into the debate about God’s view of riches. Just imagine this person, this moment, and Jesus’ response. "He looked at him hard in the eye, and loved him."

To Him for Whom Icecream is a Staple

Floating in that dreamy half-sleep, my pillow, the covers just right, the lights out, the house quiet. He bursts into the bedroom.

"Mm,mm." The sound of spoon on glass. Scrape. Scrape. Stir. "Mm." Chomp. Crunch. He's added those blasted chocolate chips. Smack. "Mm." He plops onto the bed. Mostly scraping now.

"Want some?" He asks cheerily, as if we're sitting next to each other on a park bench on some sunny afternoon.

"No. I just want to go to sleep," I whine. "Why do you eat ice cream just before going to sleep?" I snarl.

"Because I can't eat it while I'm sleeping."

Two Gods

On Sunday,Ronnie Stevens quoted someone who has said, "There are two Gods; the one you want - and the one who is there."

Perhaps due to the winter weather, I've been hibernating when it comes to phrases and sentences that catch my attention. For a couple of weeks it was this one, referring to Jesus in a sinking boat with the storm raging and his friends panicking...

"asleep on a cushion"

Several times a day I've thought about that. Chewed on it slowly as if it was all I knew. A man in a boat that was sinking

"asleep on a cushion"

In my reading of Mark, I'm seeing how often people try to tell Jesus what to do. And he doesn't do what they say or say what they expect. In the past I've imagined him center-stage, dispensing healing, gathering children in his arms, teaching on a hillside with throngs of people before him. I realize those images come from movies and flannelgraphs, not from honest reading of the gospels.

He had no halo, no aura, no supernatural authority that made people speechless, move out of his way, feel that nothing bad would happen to them if they were in his presence. Even those closest to him thought they could influence him, tell him where to go, what to do. Read the gospels with that in focus and see how often people tried to control him. Notice his responses.

The firm, "No, we're not staying here. That's not why I came."
The heartbreaking response to the news that his mother was outside, "Who is my mother?"
The scorching rebuke to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan!"

"asleep on a cushion" while his friends were frightened to death, frantically bailing water. They force him to wake up. He has no pity. Instead, after telling the sea to hush, he rebukes them. "Where is your faith?"

There are two Gods: The one we want (imagined, pretend, synthetic, flexible, comfortable, you fill in the adjectives).

and

The one who is there
Sleeping on a cushion in a sinking boat in a raging storm
Unperturbed

Ought To? Or Want To?

I’ve tried about as many Bible study methods as I have diets. Each one promised to be the answer; the first days were rewarding and I envisioned myself soaring to heights of spirituality…or wearing my shirt tucked in. But, inevitably, I would peter out, ultimately sinking back into the same old same old, though never giving up on the desire to know and love the scriptures, to have self-discipline, be a good steward of my body. At 52, with years of failures on my vitae, I still want to change. In particular, I want to somehow come to a place of loving to read and study the Bible, and yet for most of my Christian life, reading the Bible has remained in the category of “things I ought to do.”

Why has it been like that? Why don’t I “love” the scriptures the way others do, the way I feel that I would if only…..

The answer for me is three-fold. First, and probably most important, the endeavor is not unopposed. Pure and simple. My attempts to find God within the pages of this book are not carried out in a neutral zone. Oh, I like to think they are. I live as if my choices are just that, decisions among a vast array of options; some better than others, but most not really that important. But, in truth, the living out of my life, as hum-drum and predictable, or as chaotic and random as it might seem, is really not like that at all. Life on earth is life on a battlefield and to fail to realize that is to be asleep, if not putty in the enemy’s hands.

Secondly, I’m basically a rebel when it comes to discipline. The thought of having to do certain things a certain way, of planning, putting things on a Daytimer; all go against my bent. Discipline? I’m agin it. I’ve said it with pride, justifying it with, “No legalism here!” I confess it now with shame and in recent years have made my way back to incorporating disciplines, although I will probably always get distracted by the immediate and tend to desire the pleasurable over the best.

The third reason has to do with something I’m just now figuring out. It has to do with my approach to the scriptures and the methods I’ve tried. The failures may be due to reasons one and two; in fact, I’m sure they are in part. But I’m beginning to think that something else has been at work. Certainly my motives for reading the scripture vary, and I see nothing wrong with that. Sometimes I’m desperate for guidance, sometimes I want comfort, other times I really just want to find God.

Whatever my motivation, it seems that I’ve mostly approached the Bible from a practical, pragmatic mindset. That is: read something, then use it. Paste it onto a particular issue. Be comforted, encouraged, challenged, rebuked. I’ve seen the Bible as a handbook, a guide, a textbook, a hymnal. Something to use, to get something from.

But my heart wants something else. The Bible, until recently (and then still infrequently), has never managed to capture my imagination, and I think that’s possibly because of both the methods and my motivation. Underlining, circling, outlining, answering someone else’s questions – these all have their place, but somehow, for me, the dissecting of the scriptures was just that, picking apart something no longer alive. The "living" happened when I took it and applied it.

Several months ago I tried an experiment. I read a passage and then tried to rewrite the story from my imagination. I wrote about that blind man who the scribes badgered about who had healed him, whose parents turned coward, who had this breathtaking honesty and simplicity, “Whether he was a prophet I don’t know. All I know is that I was blind and now I see”, the one with the sharp tongue of a man who, long accustomed to the scorn of men, would dare to challenge his superiors with “You don’t want to be his disciples, too, do you?”

In my stories, I use my imagination. I make up things. I put words in people’s mouths, thoughts in their heads. I describe dusty streets, the sounds and smells as they might be perceived by a man blind from birth, who sat in the same place day after day, year upon year. And I’m finding that the scenes are sinking in, they’re becoming believable. I’m beginning to see and hear and taste and feel. Not enough, but definitely more than when I read the scriptures only looking for answers, for application.

With my writing, I’m simply trying to BE there, to see Jesus as someone there would have seen him, to be the woman at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, Peter’s wife wondering what’s happened to her man. To have my mind, heart, my imagination, engaged, enthralled with the story. I want depth. I want dimension. I want to believe that it all really and truly happened to sweaty, grimy, complaining, plotting, intelligent, blood and guts people, on a particular day, at a certain hour, with the sun blazing hot or the wind biting cold.

I'm not suggesting this as the newest, best approach or that anyone else take my lead. I know there are books published where people have done what I'm attempting and I've never wanted to read them, but I can say that for now, "reading my Bible" is inching away from "I ought to" and slowly towards "I want to."

Shepherd Story Explained

On reading my last blog post, which was the beginning of a Christmas story, Joanna said, "That's weird, Mom. Kind of depressing."

I explained that I wasn't finished, that I was planning to post again today and tomorrow, that it was meant to be depressing. The angelic visitation hasn't happened yet.

Then Emily just now called and said, "I can't stand that ending. I'm looking to read something nice and here you're writing about some man wanting to kill his wife. This is kind of dark."

"I never said he wanted to kill his wife...just slap her."

"You said he wanted to drop her dead body on the tax collector's desk."

"Not her. The ewe, honey."

Lest anyone else is wondering what kind of rum balls I've been making, let me explain. I've been thinking for several weeks now about the shepherds -not sure why - it's just where my mind has gone. I've just wanted to know about these men, to try and flesh out who they were, what it could have been like for them that night. Unfortunately, I've run out of time to "show" my story; hence, I now resort to "telling".

It's so easy to romanticize everyone in the Christmas story, to visualize the shepherds as gentle but strong men, men who sang to their sheep, worshiped God on the mountain. My nativity set has a shepherd with a lamb draped across his shoulders. So sweet, so benign. Even the title "shepherd" is pastoral.

But my guess is that these men had nothing to render them worthy of such an honor. Unlike Mary and Joseph, Anna, Simeon, Elizabeth, and Zacharias, there's no reason to think these men were righteous or good. No reason to think that they were chosen, out of all the people in the entire region, because they deserved it. The only reason is that we WANT to think that way.

So I imagined an unhappy man, a man full of bitterness and turmoil, angry at his wife, angry at life, ready for a fight. A man who works hard under harsh conditions, who is hungrier more often than he's full, who has lived his whole life aware that most in his society considered him no-account, dirty, stupid.

But, no, I hadn't gone so far as to make him out to be a wife-murderer. I had considered that he'd gone into town, gotten into a fight, then gone back to work with a full wine-flask - for the cold, of course.

Am I really considering that one of the shepherds was drunk? Why not? He certainly wouldn't have stayed drunk after seeing what he saw and hearing what he heard. Paul was murdering people left and right and he saw Jesus himself. We so want to sanitize everything, to make it sentimental and soft. We see a manger as a little crib lined with sweet-smelling hay. A manger is a feeding trough. Think dog bowl.

What I see in the angels giving those men the front-row seat at that night's explosion of joy is God's clear intent that His Son's birth be heralded, but not as humans would want, or expect. I like to think that the shepherds had nothing to commend them, but were given, as a pure and totally undeserved gift, the privilege of being the first to know, to see, to adore. And that the words, "Peace on earth, good will towards men" meant more to those men on the rocky, wind-swept hill than we could ever imagine.

Another thought has occurred to me in my musings about that night. Could it be that the reason there was no room in the inn for Mary and Joseph is that the sheep herders wouldn't have been welcome in such a place? Is it possible that God planned that detail not only to emphasize the lowliness of the birth, but to make a way for those men to be welcomed in? I like to think so.