夢, a harp hung on a poplar

i’ve been told i am a bit wordy. i’ll admit it, and if you’ve read this blog at all, you’ll admit it too. i suppose make up for what i lack in precision with sheer volume. but, i think there is a middle ground where the power of the succinct and the beauty of detail can mesh into truth.

and, even though all this rings to be true; 1) the overabundance of detail is exhausting, boring and, generally, not helpful 2) the muddiness of so many ‘almost’ examples that partially convey an idea cannot by any measure make up for a precise statement.

yes, this is true, but i think there is a much more real and easily seen reason behind my lack of ability to convey and communicate clearly, effectively and in any exciting manner:

i don’t have anything to say.

i have spent so much, much time looking at other people and understanding them i have forgotten to cultivate the one garden that i should have cultivated: myself.

i am often unsure of what i think about something until i have someone to react to. only with a listening partner can i grasp my own ideas.

i need less reaction and more motivation.

and i’m going to be working on that.

He will do with you what He never did before His call came to you, and He will do with you what He is not doing with other people. Let Him have His way.

it’s the idea of living a surrendered life versus living a narcissistic one

we all struggle with dying to ourselves…

we struggle with throwing out our sinful desires…

we struggle with choosing spirit or flesh on a daily basis…

there are also desires that we have which we consider honorable or good…

and they are, but life is more complex and more simple than ‘good’ and ‘bad’

even our best desires must be surrendered…even our desires for God’s Kingdom must be surrendered…

Paul was called as an apostle to the Gentiles; he had an enormous compassion for his Jewish brethren…

as Paul did, we have to surrender even our best ideas to Jesus…

the dichotomy is not ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’

at this point, all that really matters is surrendered and not surrendered…

even in my best of plans with my best of intentions, if i haven’t surrendered it, i am still making it about myself…

i must choose, will i reign in hell? or serve in heaven?

its the idea of a surrendered life versus a narcissistic one

i found some truth:

“If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: “Can I believe it all again today?” No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter.”

“One summer day I lay upon the grass. I’d sinned, no matter how, and in sin’s wake there came a kind of drowsy peace so deep I hadn’t even will enough to loathe myself. I had no mind to pray. I scarcely had a mind at all, just eyes to see the greenwood overhead, just flesh to feel the sun.
A light breeze blew from Wear that tossed the trees, and as I lay there watching them, they formed a face of shadows and of leaves. It was a man’s green, leafy face. He gazed at me from high above. And as the branches nodded in the air, he opened up his mouth to speak. No sound came from his lips, but by their shape I knew it was my name.
His was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow him to the end of time, I would have gone. If he had bade me die for him, I would have died. When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior’s face itself I saw.”

“To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness – especially in the wilderness – you shall love him.”

-Frederick Buechner

i’m not quite sure what to call it…it is a synthesis, of a sort…but its combination is so perfect that it creates a new thing…something greater than all its parts and, in truth, it seems insulting to say that it is made up of something else…the synthesis is truer than the pieces that compose it…as if there is something that is inside it that is only found and reached after it has been created

adding that ingredient relenquishes control…

This is the first day of my life
I swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach

it may have begun as a smile…it may have begun last month…or possibly earlier today, most likely it was a year or so ago…but even that can’t be said to be true…even if i were to trace it back in every possible and conceivable manner to a single, solitary event, it would still be only a half-truth…there is a design in it, the circumstances, as wonderful as they are, are truly not enough to call for something such as this…i guess that is my main clue as to its true significance, which, i suppose, is beyond my comprehension…

again, i don’t know what to call it…tears pour and lips tense into smiles all at the same time that knees buckle in humility…eyes open and close because that’s all they can do…laughter and smiles trade places with quivering lips…all the while the control that we all are so used to seems to be a forgotten tradition…

so, whatever you call all of that, that is what happened today…it is to big to capture in my head and certainly to big to convey through words and pictures…

but, that said, its kind of like this:

and maybe a little like this…

and it is very, very certainly a LOT like this:

The place that God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the worlds deep hunger meet. - Fredrick Buechner

sometimes i forget how truly truly amazing, big, far, vast, infinite and utterly awful it all is…:)  and sometimes i’m reminded…i hope this reminds you…

And now, by some transition, which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity–only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern thereby disposed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also ( but the word “seeing” is now plainly inadequate)wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells–people, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences and the like–ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were the things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner more delicate cords were the beings that we call short lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things we think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours form beyond our spectrum were the lines of personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some of them were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: But afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole figure of there enamored and inter –inanimate circling was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and tat part of him which could reason and remember was dropped further and further behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of sky, and all simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into it’s own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of striping off encumbrances and awaking from a trance, and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him…

stop selling the world so short…the reason there is so much cynicism going around is because beauty really does exist…

and, just so people understand the title:

“The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”

thx jack…

our lives should be at least this amazing…

don’t give up because it hasn’t happened yet…

its coming…it just takes surrender