…his hands were bigger than mine wrapped around the steering wheel making the car shake just because it embarrassed me he had the cheekiest smile always avoided returning it don’t like to give too much away but the butterflies in my stomach made me do it meanwhile it’s pretty warm here but the people seem nice don’t know that it’s normal to think about you this much but they take flight again because your hands were bigger than mine…
The most wonderful thing just happened.
An older man walked past me over an hour ago.
Seeing me with my head burried in books he commented as he went by that it was a nice place to work (the esplanade near my parent’s place is dotted with picnic tables- I was sitting at one facing the ocean). I looked up, smiled at him, and agreed.
He passed me again on his way back. This time, seeing me looking out at the water and day dreaming, he stopped to talk to me.
“It’s easy to get caught up dreaming here, isn’t it?” Said he to me. I smiled in agreement and took out my headphones. He walked up to the table, inquiring if it were a dictionary I were reading.
No, no. My bible. So it’s okay for me to dream a little- I added with a chuckle. He admitted he’d never read it. I encouraged him to- given how much I’d been getting out of it in the hour I’d been sitting there.
Somehow this lead us into a half hour conversation about Australian politics. I liked the way he spoke- I guess you’d say it was measured and intelligent. I let him speak. He came to the end of his exploring politics, thought for a minute, and concluded that he’d ‘better finish with something ‘religious’ before he left me to it’.
I told him that wasn’t necessary.
I guess I should read it (he said)- the people I know who have all tell me it’s worth doing.
I grinned and added myself to that bunch.
Any particular translation I should look for?
Na, my only advice is that you start half way- at the New Testament- you’ll only understand the first half when you’ve read the second.
Alright then.
He then told me about an academic friend of his who’d spent some time researching and comparing the texts of the monotheistic religions. Apparently he didn’t have much to say about the bible.
There are a couple of things in it that would have gutted me had I not been able to seek God for their real (contextual and eternal) meaning… I nodded and told him I believed that if you seek the truth, you’ll find it.
Well, I’ve always considered myself a truth-seeker.
I believe that.
I stood up and shook his hand before he went away.
—
The thing is, there’s this scripture in which Jesus heals 10 lepars.
But he doesn’t do it immediately- he just instructs them to go to the priest (it was customary to be inspected and declared ‘clean’). They started off on their way, and as they went they were healed.
When I read it, it really stuck out to me. Because I’m not totally healed yet, I’m on my way. And sometimes I feel like I can’t step out too much for my weaknesses. So I was wrestling with God about this point the very morning the man came and spoke to me. Surely I should stay behind the fringes for a while (that mission trip is beyond me, this ministry opportunity needs someone raised in the church).
The tension between wanting to adequately represent a God who is perfection and love from within the utterly defective shell of a woman.
When is anyone good enough to serve God?
After the man left the scripture popped into my head again. And I realised that this lepar had been used by God. As I was on my way.
’twas awesome.
I’ve forgotten to be thankful for a few things, and something happened today in my political theory class which jogged my memory.
Well, if I start at the beginning, often at university, when I’m sticking my hand up to offer responses to value based questions; that most everyone would think me a hopeless idealist. In first year, back in one of our legal theory classes, looking at the ideas behind justice and this inexplicable ubiquitous sense of what is right that seems common to man, I stuck my hand up- admitted that I was a Christian and suggested a reason. In what was one of the greatest moments of that semester, a Canadian by the name of Dave stuck his hand up and agreed. And there I was, an embarrassed minority as I had been a number of times. But an embarrassed minority of two. Somebody else in the class understood.
A couple of weeks ago in my political theory class, we were discussing again this normative sense of justice and human value that seem to have haunted every political theorist we’ve studied, when Nick, the well spoken gentleman who sits over to the right, stuck his hand up and suggested it was what C.S. Lewis (a marvelous theologian and Christian writer) described “the soul”. I grinned from ear to ear. These two aren’t idealists, they’re not naïve. They are men who can hold their own in class discussions and we’re on the same team. Beautiful.
So. You’ll never guess what happened today. There’s this girl in my class who’s captured my attention a number of times, Elspeth. Mostly because she is the picture of humility, but also because I like her natural, practical style. It was her turn to present material and facilitate discussion in our seminar class this afternoon. She spoke well, if not a little nervously, and when the class had finished its discussion, the tutor did his customary probing and one of the questions addressed to her was “what do you think the ‘Hobbesian’ response to the questions of justice and equality- but without reference to religion- might be”. She cleared her throat and said something to the affect that she didn’t think they could exist separately, qualifying this with her faith in God. She was singularly the most beautiful creature I’d seen all week. Blushing in front of room of self described realist-atheist-evolutionist-rationalist-children-of their-creator-none-the-less, proclaiming a faith in the irrational, the unseen. I don’t know if she saw me, sitting at the back of the room, grinning like a maniac and praising God quietly under my breath but I was there, again, the proud member of a minority of two.
And so now the ‘I can do this’ affirmation I think over in my head when struggling at uni has become ‘we can do this’.
It’s fabulous.
Praise God.
buggerbuggerbugger.
-I have three days- wait, nay, two days- to find a new home and move into it.
-Very few real estate agents are open between Christmas and Newyear.
-Of these, almost all would appear to be in other states.
-I have overspent this Christmas season
-I have overeaten this Christmas season
-I haven’t been reading my bible or talking to God and so don’t have any peace in my spirit
-I get shy and don’t perform so well at work.
-I have a birthday party to organise
-Oh my God I’m going to be 22 in a few weeks.
-Holy crapolla, I’m old.
-Everyone over the age of 22 is going to come after me for writing that.
-I got out a personal loan. This is the most financially freaky (irresponsible?) thing I have done. Ever.
- Even elle thinks it wasn’t an intelligent move. and she spends her entire salary on shoes and alcohol.
-My fingers hurt and look ugly from practicing all the new tabs she wants me to learn.
-I’m still just as piffley on guitar as I was before my finger tips became hard and wierd looking.
-Elle’s gonna be pissed.
-My dad doesn’t like me.
-My dad doesn’t like my brother
-My brother doesn’t like my dad
-Somehow I know I’m going to get blamed for the above three.
- Over the past few weeks I have been persued by a perfectly attractive, intelligent, datable man and did my thing where I retreat because the whole relationship/boy thing scared me.
-I’m an idiot
-My posture is atrocious. When I try and straighten up my spine creaks audibly.
-I have bitten all of my nails off. Compounded with my finger tip corns I look like Golem from the wrists down.
okay. okay. breathe.
There has to be a job out there for an undergrad uni student
that’s better than retail?
Why do i ask questions of an inanimate white page?
I just did it again.
buggerbuggerbugger
I have this friend that i met when i was five. Our older brothers played for the same football team. When we were little we would swing around and play acrobats on the bars that marked the edge of the footy field. The canteen sold chocolate drops for 5 cents each. A dollar would buy you twenty in a little white paper bag and we would climb to the top of the corrogated iron ’sin-bin’ and eat them together. Watching the families cheer on their kids, pretending to be sports tv commentators.
Shes one of those types of people I know I will always love, despite the differences that came when we got older- because of those earlier shared experiences.
When we were in our final year at highschool she fell pregnant. It was 18 months after I had moved from the city to a private catholic school up north. We were seventeen. Her boyfriend was one of those dark, mysterious muso types. She terminated the pregnancy just after the end of the first trimester. That was four years ago now. We never really spoke about it. It’s one of those things that I wouldn’t want to ask about, half because i got the feeling it was sacred in a way, and half because i figured once she had gone through the motions, that was it and she didn’t really give it that much thought.
But people are infinately complex, soulful things. I’m rarely ever right about them.
Last night I was at her place, fiddling around on her guitar, listening to some live accoustic sets on cd. Out of nowhere, in the middle of The Band’s ‘the weight’ she told me that she’d been drinking pretty heavily for a while.
I got the feeling more was comming so i stopped playing and looked up at her, listening.
She had begun to remember details of- and lead up to- the procedure and was guilt striken. She told me that she felt like part of her had been ripped out and that she felt as though she deserved to suffer for what she had done. She believes that when she is ready to have children and love them, that it wont happen, and that it will serve her right.
I always have trouble thinking about what to say. especially in these types of situations. you cant, as a christian seperate your values and advice from theology but you can’t preach too much to your mates either. I got to talk to her a bit about grace. And how, from my perspective, the blood she feels is on her hands and the retribution she deserves was nailed to a tree 2000 years ago, so that she might live in freedom.
I stayed there until the early morning, we chatted about other stuff. When i left she seemed okay. I hugged her and told her i loved her.
I did my thing where I take a 40 km detour on the way home and think.
It just hit home for me how fragile human reason and knowledge is.
We weren’t engineered for mortality. We were never meant to have the power to choose life or sanction death. It just shouldn’t be. I think we’re too punny to make these types of decisions and to understand them for what they are.
When I was 15, Dad decided he wanted to move to Cairns.
The fact that my little brother Matty lived with mum meant that when we moved, there’d be 1700 of distance between the little guy and I.
I think I still resent dad a little for that. Not so much that I couldn’t be there for him, but that he was able to move so far away from his own son.
But thats not the point. When we got there I didn’t know anyone. My mates at home had thrown me a going away picnic in a beautiful park in the city. I didn’t want to leave them for a small touristy town up the north coast. By the time the new year started at school I was sixteen and insecurity laden. To be honest I was (and still am a bit of) a pretty messed up little girl.
So when a guy by the name of John started to pay attention to me I had no idea why. I reasoned that he was crazy. Possibly blind. Anyway he would probably come to his senses and realise what a train wreck I was, or get up close and see my ugliness and give up, so I just kinda kept my head down and ignored it. I was way to insecure to muster the confidence to even look at him let alone go on a date with him.
But he didn’t give up. Eventually he got my phone number off one of the girls I sat with at lunch and phoned me on a sunday morning to ask me to the movies. So we went on that date. And the weekend after that we went on another date. And I was so scared by this whole foreign dating thing and of what he thought of me that I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything for the first five or so dates. I mean I’m sure I would have said ‘no thankyou I would not like a choc top’ and ‘why yes, tomb raider does look like a good movie” but aside from that I was silent. He still didn’t give up. He walked me 6kms home from school in the afternoons, carrying my books while I stared at our shoes. After a couple of months I got to feel comfortable around him. Although for a long time I secretly believed him to be too good for me and was quietly aware that he would break up with me sooner or later. But even that feeling eventually went away. We dated for over four years. He didn’t give up on me. I learned later that that first phone call John had made to see if I would come to the movies was very strategically timed, he phoned at 10 to see whether I would be at church or not. By divine appointment the first man to fall in love with me despite all of my baggage was a man who knew Jesus. When we did eventually break up it was because I was wanted to move back to Brisbane and study there and start again and go after God properly. We remained friends, he would fly down a couple of times a year and I would fly up a couple of times a year. He would phone me almost every night to see how my day had been. I left for Brisbane nearly three years ago now. And I’m writing because for the first time in a very long while we haven’t spoken at all this week. And it’s not because he’s on his mates property gold-panning again or I’m in the middle of exams. We’re just growing apart.
Last night I was in my bed, talking to the Creator of the universe (:D).
I appealed to Him regarding a muslim lady. I don’t really know much about her save for the fact she teaches Islam and has cancer which has spread to her pancreas and onto most of her body. She is also the mother of G.- my good friend Anisha’s boyfriend. I didn’t really know what to pray for her, except for her salvation and for God to take her into His care when she passes from this world. I acknowledged that I know the scripture tells us that Jesus is the Truth and the only way to the Father. But I also know that He’s a wonderful, loving God, and that in the book of Revelation we are told that not only will justice be done; but that every mouth will be stopped- we will all walk away knowing and understanding that justice has been done.
And all I could think was that it really, really sucks that people who are good (at least in a worldly understanding of the word)* should perish out of ignorance. I don’t know much about the interface between Islam and Christianity but it’s my undestanding that they acknowledge Moses and his covenant with the Lord, and even Jesus, although only as a healer and prophet (is that a valid acknowledgement considering His true glory??)
And i fell asleep with my tiny human brain trying to rationalise God’s version of justice, so that it might include, generally, the ‘lost who are otherwise pretty good people’.
So my day today (priase Him for bothering to share Himself with me, God really is love) has been filled with little bits of understanding and revelation on the topic, and I think I get it now (at least so far as I will while I’m down here).
Part of that revelation has been to stumble onto an article that deals directly with the topic: http://www.radiantmag.com/2008/11/choose-this-day/
The website’s a pretty mad one in general so poke around if you’ve got a mo.
*as I typed this the Holy Spirit reminded me that “only God is good”
He is my God and I will worship Him.
I often begin to write with the word ‘I ‘.
It’s a reflection of the way I think and position from which I understand things.
Often if I just put a single line through the word and make myself reflect on God and what He sees, begining again with ‘He’ I find clarity.
