A letter to me (a know-it-all)

Not knowing everything makes me uncomfortable. 

I always want all the answers. Decisive, simple, black and white answers. I want to be able to point to something and say "this is bad" or "this is good." I want to know the right direction to go, and the right advice to give, always and everywhere, from now until the end of time.

As a mother and a writer especially, there's always a looming sense of responsibility over everything I do, and everything I learn. If I don't know it, I can't teach it, right? Can I presume to teach anyone out of the little I do know? What is my real responsibility, separate from my perception? To what degree is each of us accountable for what we accept as truth?

These are the questions that swirl around my head most days. It's pretty unfortunate, then, that I'm a fallible and shortsighted human who barely knows how old she is on any given day. Because of course, though the ultimate universal truth of everything is what I desire, I cannot contain all of it in this limited body.

There are a few things I know about this:

1) It is good to seek answers. 

In Matthew 7:7, Jesus says, "Ask and it will be given unto you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened unto you."

The deeper I go in my search for God, the more I wrestle with His vastness and my own inability to comprehend it. At times this brings me to doubt what I know. But do I give up when my questions feel too big for me? No. I keep asking, I keep seeking, I keep knocking. Doubt is a natural part of the Christian life, but in my doubt I must have faith--faith that although I may never run out of questions, God will never run out of answers. 

2) It is impossible to know everything.

Isaiah 43:10 says, "You have been chosen to know me, believe in me, and understand that I alone am God."

Plan and simple, I'm not God--but I believe in a God who is, and that is the ultimate comfort. He understands everything I do not, He knows the inner workings of every heart, and He alone is just in judgement. 

3) It is more productive to follow God's lead in each individual moment than to painstakingly work out solutions to every possible future situation. 

The salvation of others concerns me. The future of my child concerns me. How my faith interacts with the issues that accompany being alive concerns me, as I strive to walk with God, to share the truth He's given me, and to reflect Christ in all things. But all of these grand questions are secondary to what should always be my main concern: living with God in the present moment, trusting His Spirit to do the work in me that He purposes to do. 

Ezekiel 3:10-11 says "Son of man, let all my words sink deep into your own heart first. Listen to them carefully for yourself. Then go to your people in exile and say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign Lord says!'"

I am not God. It's not my job to judge rightly, to determine the state of every person's heart, to understand the precise workings of grace, sanctification, and judgement in everyone's life. It is incumbent upon me to trust the Holy Spirit to lead me well, to learn and accept the truth of God's word, to love correction, and lastly (and least importantly) to help others learn to recognize the truth when they see it. 

God help me, I'd never presume to teach where I have no knowledge and no Spiritual insight, but I believe God gives us truth when we need it, and desires for us to live it out boldly. 

If there's anything I know, it's that whatever I know, I know it because God has given me to know it. Life, wisdom, and discipleship may seem at times to be a tightrope walk between confidence and humility--but my confidence, my faith, is in God's leading, not my ability to follow. I know He is faithful to guide me, and I must be faithful in my humble desire for His guidance. Every word He gives me is like a precious seed that grows in His sunlight when planted. 

In this way life becomes simple: as each moment arrives, I am to humbly follow, and do the right thing on God's authority, not my own. 

I'm tired of expecting the worst from people

I've always been a fighter. Ever since elementary school, I considered it my duty to stick up for kids who got picked on, and to admonish my own friends to become better people. For some reason, the radio antenna of my heart has always been tuned in to truth and justice (with a brief exception in middle school, when I thought it would be cool to be cool). 

This is not a self-brag. I honestly can claim no credit for that goodness-loving quality, though I suspect my parents are to blame, and certainly God had a hand in it. 

Along with this passion in me came a big mouth, which I spent many long years learning how to master. And oddly enough, coexistent in me was a desire to keep others happy and avoid conflict. When I think about it, it does not make any sense, but here I still am, so I suppose I must be real. 

I think this conflict-averse tendency is born out of a real love for people--but also, there's a big fear component to it. In my quiet narcissism I fear that I am the only sane person left on earth, and that there's no point in reaching out for common ground in a world of monsters. 

After high school, my conflict aversion led me to avoid knowing too much about worldly matters. It was impossible for me not to have an opinion at every opportunity, so I didn't even read the news in college, because I didn't want to be angry all the time and I didn't want to fight with people I loved. And I fully expected to be angry all the time once I got back on Twitter a few months ago, angry and tired because no one is reasonable and I am alone in the universe. 

How selfish is that? 

I would rather hide than take the light I've been given into what can be the darkest of places--the scrambling crowd of social media. I'd rather sit in the shadowed corner, thinking my own thoughts, avoiding the discomfort of being heard--or worse yet, that of hearing some truth I've been ignoring, clear enough that I can no longer run from it. I'd rather assume, in judgmental cynicism, that no one else feels as I do, and that everyone who thinks differently than I must want me dead. 

But you know what, that cynicism still made me tired. Tired of expecting the worst from people, and suppressing the best in myself. 

Life and truth and conversation are indeed burdens, as Jesus said they would be. We are burdened with the responsibility, in this age of social media, of having more information available to us than any other generation of people ever living. Burdened we are, yet what a beautiful gift we've been given.

It is a gift, whether we see it as one or not. At this moment we have the ability to connect with people we may never meet in person, but with whom we share many unexpected things. We have the chance to learn so much, and grow so much, if only we don't shy away from the challenge. And most exciting, we have been given a voice to spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, to any who will hear and believe. And they will. 

I don't believe we are meant to neglect this opportunity.

I believe we are meant to take it and run--to run toward truth, and take as many people with us as we can. To invite our fellow humans, fearful and cowardly though we are, to leap boldly into the fray with us, as we stand up shakily and try to be better than that which we hate. To hold ourselves, and each other--even the ones who should be our enemies--to a higher standard. To encourage each other to try again when we inevitably fail to meet it. 

To say boldly to those who don't yet know the truth, and may even be hostile to it: you are worth this conflict. 

Because in the end, if our cause is God's, our fight is for them too. 

The end of the world

I never saw the movie 2012. But maybe I took the trailers a little too seriously...

Noah's Neighbor

I seem to have developed a phobia
of rainstorms.
Kind of like the Benjamin Button’s disease 
of childish fears,
which somehow skipped me over
in the blur of primary colors
and rational tick- and murderer-phobias
that was gradeschool
and landed instead on the adult me,
burrowing into my meticulously tick-free head

There is no repellent for rainstorms.

Not even that nursery rhyme,

the one we learned to play on recorders in music class,

has any real magical influence

over such things as thunder clouds.

Adult me knows this

and it no longer helps to pretend

so I’m stuck in the real world

where rain is sometimes so real

it even trickles down into the basement

so real it doesn’t feel like pretending 

to imagine a pool rising around my ankles

as the wind tears the flesh from my house’s bones,

peels off the roof like an orange rind.

Would the cats survive,

riding, perhaps, on a buoyant mattress

to find a new home downriver

like fluffy waterlogged hobos?

Would my family be among the lucky ones

who got out

before our yard became a lakebed?

Would I live on

to rebuild my library

from scratch

What I've learned about my son

I keep waking up feeling like my brain has been left on all night.

A lot of people will say that as a new mom, my increased concern for the state of the world was pretty predictable. Thinking about the world your children will inherit and all that.

That may be true. I've found myself shot through with reckless bravery in some ways lately, the result of looking outside my living room bubble and constantly asking, "what am I supposed to do with these moments?" I don't want to live in a world where hope hides itself and the people of God are resigned to mediocrity. I want my son to live under the power of God, bold and steadfast. Maybe motherhood has actually shifted that into clearer focus for me.

There are a lot of things I've been told about motherhood that haven't fit my experience--like the horror stories of sleep deprivation and utter exhaustion--and some that have been spot on accurate. 

Like how normal it feels. Pregnancy and childbirth are two of the weirdest things we think are normal as humans. Those nine months carrying my little guy around inside me feel almost like a dream now, but the transition from having a preborn baby incubating in my womb to holding my newborn was like stepping through a tiny waterfall. The experience of giving birth was the event. Everything after that just makes sense in the most bizarre way. 

We stepped through the waterfall and now we're on the other side of it. Nothing else could possibly be true.

And so here we are. About five months of life this side of the womb, and Salem is almost unrecognizable--but somehow there's a glimmer inside of the same something that was there from the beginning. His soul is like a marble I found in the dirt behind my house, and time is slowly washing off the dust so I can begin to make out all the tiny details inside the glass. 

Just like I know that marble is the same one that I picked up outside, I know my son is the same little boy who inhabited the space below my ribs for the better part of a year. Only now I'm getting a clearer picture of who he is than I did from the fuzzy black-and-white sonogram screen. 

He emerges more and more each day. Eyes that were once deep blue, like the waters of Lake Superior, sparkle now with ripples of hazel. The smile that once crept across his face unknowingly as he dreamed now comes into the light when he sees the faces of people he loves. Tiny hands that used to flail like two confused birds now reach out for new adventures, like the soft fur of a curled-up cat, or the shiny rim of my glasses, or the clickety-clacking joysticks of my husband's Gamecube controller. 

The boy is curious and critical. He's generous with his smile, eager in laughter, always searching and studying and sucking his thumb, reminding me of photos of his dad. He bounces back from tears easily, as if he'd rather be happy than anything else. Like me, he always seems to have something to say.

As I watch him grow, Salem is experiencing everything for the first time. In a way I am too. 

"Babies really are amazing creatures. You can learn all there is to know about their ways in two weeks, and then after another week, they can still surprise you." -adapted from Gandalf