One of My Favorite Places

Over Thanksgiving I got to go to one of my favorite places, McKay's bookstore in Chattanooga. It is a booklovers dream: a warehouse full of used inexpensive books! I only looked thoroughly in two main sections of the bookstore (Christianity & economics) before I called it quits. There were other parts of the store that I dabbled in, but left quickly for fear of the ill effects on my wallet.

Thanks K. for taking me! I like our McKay's tradition.

Pieces

I sit on a park bench watching the sunset over the lake near my school, and I say to myself, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." I walk back to my office and watch the ducks as I go. A couple of lines from an Ogden Nash poem come to my mind, "Behold the duck...it does not cluck...and for supper its bottoms up." I walk a little more and the glow of sunset makes me think of a line from Tennyson, "Sunset and evening star and let there be no mourning for me when I have crossed the bar."

I'm grateful for poetry, for the fragments that remain of all that I have read.

Lakes

I miss mountains, but I'm blessed by lakes. There are oodles and oodles of lakes in Florida. I live near a lake, I exercise near a lake, and I work next to a lake. I especially love the lake I work next to. The college I work at is actually on a peninsula between two small lakes. So I can see a lake on my left when I walk to class and then look at a different lake from my classroom. Sometimes if I can't think straight I'll go outside and look at lake W. Or sometimes (like today) when I have a bunch of grading to do, I'll go to the library and grade since (unlike my office) I can sit in the library and gaze at the lake.

Here are two pictures of my favorite lake from the library. The pictures I took are quite ordinary, but some days I can watch flocks of ducks, toy sailboats, or boaters on the lake.

Success

I prayed my student would forget her Monday morning appointment to see me. I pointed out to God that I could really use an extra hour to be ready for my 11:15 class but at 10:00 am she showed up ready to discuss commas and semicolons.

She sat beside my desk and must have sensed my stress because she said, "Are you okay?" "Yeah, I'm fine," I told her. I pulled out a worksheet, and started discussing such scintillating topics as prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, and independent clauses. When I was finished, I handed her a worksheet to correct for comma mistakes. She got each sentence right!

Success. I was so excited I stopped caring about how ready I would be for my 11:15 class, and I scheduled her to meet with me again on Friday.

For the rest of the day, I felt satisfied with my job. Sure, I will never be done grading papers, but one person learned one thing from me this week--even if it was how to use commas.

Yours

In the condensation on the wall from my shower, I scribbled the word, "yours". I had just been praying and musing. "Who do I want to be?" And the response came quickly, "yours." There is not much more than I can ask of God than to be securely his.

This simple scribbling on the wall, my morning's heart longing came partially from a mediation on the following words:

"While on earth, Jesus lived as one with the Father, with an infinitely secure attachment to him. Jesus was able to trust the Father with his life, even if that led to death. With that much confidence in his relationship with God, it is no wonder Jesus was so free of anxiety that he was able to do all that he did: heal, turn tables, speak with wisdom and conviction, calm stormy weather, withstand torture, and snuff out the sting of death through the power of his own death and resurrection.

But we, viewing the universe through the lenses of our insecure attachment, have a difficult time believing that God gives us absolute security as well....[We tend to] respond to him in ways that leave us disconnected from the life of joy Jesus describes in the Gospels.

How is it that despite our 'belief' in God's love for us, we don't experience that love transforming our inner lives or our relationships with our friends, parents, children, spouses or neighbors?" p. 139,140 Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson

My scribble is a prayer for the love of Christ to transform my heart and all my relationships. My heart and my relationships Lord are yours.

When Victory Makes Me Feel Weak

Funny. I was thinking about this paradox this morning: sometimes spiritual success makes me feel more weak than failure. The best example of this is appetite. If I'm eating, to say, not feel depressed, and I actually get my frontal lobe in gear and refuse to overeat--I've won a spiritual victory, but I still got the blues to deal with, and those blues might make me feel weak.

Right now, I'm experiencing a spiritual victory that is spilling weakness into my life. By refusing to commit a certain sin, I'm being confronted with why I run after that sin. I'd rather pretend that I'm perfect. I'd rather sin and repent and sin and repent than get to the root of my behavior. Cutting off the behavior means that all that drives that behavior has no where to go until I'm healed.

And this is why I serve an amazing God. My weakness drives me to Him. In fact, my weakness is a gift. Continued victory will only come out of throwing myself completely on Him. How blessed I am to know my own incapacity and His strength.

When I was a kid we used to sing a song that gave me courage it still gives me courage today. Here it is below:


He’s still working on me to make me what I really ought to be.
It took Him just a week to make the moon and stars,
The Sun and the Earth and Jupiter and Mars.
How loving and patient He must be, He’s still working on me.


There really ought to be a sign upon my heart,
‘Don’t Judge Me Yet There’s An Unfinished Part’.
But I’ll be perfect just according to his plan,
Fashioned by the Master’s loving hand.

Seasons

One of my students told me today that she might leave class early Friday because her family would be celebrating Diwali. My first thought was, "it's that time of year already?" While I never celebrated Diwali in Thailand, I did celebrate Loy Krathong (which is a related holiday). I have a happy memory of standing on a bridge at APIU watching the krathongs, candles ablaze, floating in the waters below.

It's my second year in America and I'm still adjusting to my new holiday schedule. It's no longer Loy Krathong, the King's Birthday and Songkran. It's Thanksgiving and Christmas, and spring break.

There's a certain melancholy in losing seasons,and maybe even more is a sadness in forgetting those same rhythms.