Slow Communication

I love letters, so it was great the other day to get a real letter. I want to write back my friend who wrote me, but I'm waiting until I have a good chunk of time to write a thoughtful response. Letter writing is a slower form of communication on several fronts: it will take me longer to find the time to write, it will take me longer to write the letter, and the letter could take several days to arrive.

Today I was thinking about how when it comes writing a letter the sender must trust the receiver's silence. That is that instead of getting feedback in a day or even an hour, it could be several days to even several weeks before my friend will get a response. We're not used to this extended form of communication anymore, and I think we've lost something for it.

Sometimes the last thing we need is instant communication. Sometimes a good day or two of sitting on a thought is wisdom. "My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry" (James 1:19).

Not only is it wisdom to deliberate over some of what we communicate, but slowing down communication teaches us to trust the silences--to allow a certain space in every relationship for quietness, to respect even our closest friends' privacy.

Giving room for privacy brings me to another point. America is a very public world. Telling everyone our secrets on TV or in a memoir is not only acceptable, but lauded as healthy--good therapy. While there are some secrets that are dangerous if kept, there are other secrets that should remain just that, knowledge privy to just a few or even one.

Emoticon Problems

The other night I got a text with what I thought was a smiley face. It was nice to get the smiley face, but I didn't respond to it as I was occupied when the text came in. Later I was talking to the person who had texted me and asking her how her week was. She said she'd had a rough Thursday, and wondered if I'd gotten her distressed emoticon text. "No," I told her, "My phone must have dropped that text." I went back and looked through her texts and found :S. She had texted me! I need to increase my emoticon EQ.

Talking or Listening

I recently told a friend that I had made some poor choices in spring by not making choices at all. I simply allowed a couple of negative circumstances to get me down. I ran across the following quote from a blog I've been reading of late (www.challies.com). The quote struck as the heart of my problem.
(The original source for the quote is Martyn Lloyd-Jones' Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure.)

*******

The main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self. Am I just trying to be deliberately paradoxical? Far from it. This is the very essence of wisdom in this matter. Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment was this; instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself, ‘Why art thou cast down, O my soul?’ he asks. His soul had been repressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says: ‘Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you’. Do you know what I mean? If you do not, you have but little experience.

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself. You must say to your soul: ‘Why art thou cast down’-what business have you to be disquieted? You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself: ‘Hope thou in God’-instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way. And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: ‘I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God’.

Devotions & Dinosaurs

I adore my niece, but I find it almost impossible to have devotions when she is around. Whenever I'm at my sister's house, I lock my bedroom door until I'm done so she won't interrupt me. Last Christmas, I had done the usual locking-of-the-door, but my niece caught onto the fact that I was awake and pounded so persistently on the door that I couldn't help but let her in.

I told her she could come in on the condition that she stay quiet. She was very very good. She didn't say a word, not a sound came from her. She pulled out her toy dinasaours and proceeded to play with them on my Bible. Gotta love the girl. The pictures are below.






The picture she took of me.

Up, Up, and Away

I'm updating the pictures on this blog slowly (these pictures are from February). This is the last launch of of the space shuttle Discovery.

I ended up watching the launch quite by accident. I had offhandly told a colleague that I would spend a day at the beach just for fun. He responded with, "Don't you know that the shuttle is launching tomorrow?" So I ended up driving to Titusville, FL, which sits across the bay from Cape Canaveral to watch the launch. I got there at 11:00 am (the launch was planned for the late afternoon), and struggled to find parking. I finally parked in an empty lot near a vacant restaurant; it was one of those shady on the fly parking spots where you're not sure if the person you are giving your money to is actually the owner of the parking lot or just some crook making good on the absence of parking.

I parked, gathered my stuff and walked across the road to the "beach". It was more like a marina. I claimed my spot with a good view of the launch pad (okay, I imagined it was a good view of the launch pad). I had several hours to wait for the launch and nothing to do but read and eat strawberries (such is the difficult life I live!).
Those hours would have been perfect if I could have just subtracted the sun and a chain smoker upwind from me. (I would have moved away from her, but the place was crowded, and I feared losing my prime shuttle-watching real estate.)

Of course, I should have known that I had actually chosen the wrong place to sit since as the time of the launch grew closer a boat launch in front of me got so crowded with people that I couldn't see a thing. Hmph. I ended up wading out into the water and watching from there.

The shuttle launch was amazing. I loved standing out in the water with everyone else who waded out there too. I loved the sense of shared expectation and wonder. After constantly wondering when the big moment would arrive, I finally was able to see this little speck of light and then the plume of smoke growing underneath that light. As I watched the shuttle go up, I got goosebumps. I felt this mixture of awe, delight, and pride. What an amazing thing it was to see!

Then I was forced quickly back to reality when I got back to my car by the fact that it seemed like the whole state of Florida and half the country had come to the beach.
After traveling a whole three miles in one hour (it was so slow people were throwing footballs in the median while their friends inched by), I decided to stop somewhere to eat to wait out the traffic jam. I felt quite proud of this decision; well, that was until I had to go the opposite way of traffic to find a place to eat, and ended up backtracking those precious three miles that I had just gone.

I found a Japanese restaurant and ate there while watching the traffic move slower than a person could walk. I ate then whiled away the time calling my mom until my phone died, and then I had nothing better to do than go home. It took me another hour to retrace the three miles I had lost. After what seemed like eternity, I broke free from the pack and found a freeway free of traffic. I got home at 11 pm (6 hours after the launch). I was grateful for the 60 seconds of awe, grateful to have seen one of the last launches of the shuttles, grateful for a day off, and positive that the experience would not be repeated.

Passport

My passport has been relegated to file in my closet. This is a very very sad place for my passport to be. I've traveled (actually a lot this year): two trips to Georgia, a trip to Tennessee as well as a trip to Michigan, Maryland, and California, and now (maybe) a trip to Arizona. But it doesn't feel like traveling. I haven't left the country (gasp) in two years! I need stamp soon!

My Neighbor

I'm not fond of one of my upstairs neighbors, maybe it is because he yells an awful lot, or maybe it is because he's always loitering outside of his apartment on the phone. The other day I was coming home and had to walk right under where he usually sits on his front porch. He (shockingly) wasn't on the phone, and he said, "hello." I tipped my head back and said hello back. I asked him, "What's your name?" He said, "Jesus."

I had to laugh when he said his name, so Jesus lives upstairs. I hope I never forget that.

Walls

I don't like walls, emotional walls that is. I don't like feeling left out of a friend's life if that person is important to me. But recently, I heard something powerful about walls that gave me pause.

I heard an author (it was an audiobook) say, "Respect a person's wall. It is often there for a reason."* The author then explained how a person will put up a wall if he doesn't feel safe. My job is not to tear down a wall or to demand that someone let down his wall, but simply to show by my actions that I'm a safe person. In time, if I can show myself trustworthy the wall may come down.

The nice thing about this thought is it gives me something to do when I feel anxious about a friend's wall. I can direct my energy and prayers toward creating a safe environment. One of the simplest things I'm working on to create this environment is watching what I say. Every time I gossip or complain about someone, I create a wall between the person I gossip to and myself. How can a person trust me if I'm not in control of my own tongue?

Today I was struck with another thought about walls. I realized that I need to respect my own walls. I need to not feel obligated to trust a person right away. I can take my time in any relationship to observe a person before I trust her. Respecting my own walls but still remaining open to people stabilizes my relationships. Strangely enough, it is a form of trust. I trust a person to give me the leeway and time I need to let down my own walls.

The book I was listening to is called The DNA of Relationships.

A Day Off With God

I took Friday off this week. I decided to spend the day with God. For my day off with God, I focused on reading spiritual books, and I did a fruit fast (which was more like a fruit feast-- tons of lychees and mangoes!).



I had a very pleasant day. Much of time was spent reading on my bed. I have a fairly decent view from my room, so I felt a certain happiness reading and looking out my window. It rained part of the day which only added to the comfort and sweetness of my day.



I read two books: Wrestling with Angels: in the Grip of Jacob's God by Larry Lichtenwalter and Abide in Me: Our Lord's Supreme Invitation to the Believer by N.A. Woychuk. The first book gave me courage as I read about how God worked through Jacob's failures and weaknesses. The second book was a-hike-up into-a-mountain or jump-in-a-cold-lake-kind of book. The more I read it, the more refreshed and clear minded I felt.

Here are some quotes from it:

"Abide in Christ beloved, and let his words abide in you. Cling to Him. Strike fast to Him. Live the life of intimate fellowship with Him. Get closer and closer to Him. Roll every care and every burden upon Him" (9).

"To abide in Christ means to enjoy Him, to delight in Him, to love Him and to worship Him. To abide in Christ means to trust Him in every situation and to keep the mind and heart ever open before Him, and to have His word abiding in us. It involves walking in the light as He is in the light, and having a joyful readiness to do his will" (pgs.8,9).

"And now the Lord invites every believer to this celestial, sublime fellowhship with Himself personally: Abide in me and I in you! Life in such a communion with the Son of God disallows the presence of sin" (p.2).

"'Christians will abide in Christ' said Puritan John Brown, 'just in the degree in which they let Christ abide in them.' The abiding of His words in us is largely the means of His abiding in us. We have learned that 'I in you' is the same as 'my My Words in you.' This obviously means a great deal more than an intellectual acceptance of His word. It is something very different from reading a verse or two in the morning and forgetting all bout it the rest of the day, it is something far superior to coming in contact with the Bible truth on [Sabbath], and taking a little of it home with us. Having the word itself actually in our mind and heart, and our desires, our affections, our understanding, our will our whole being steeped in these great truths, so they hold sovereign sway in our life and control all our thoughts and all our movements (p.20).

"It is an unbroken stream of grace from justification through the various stages of sanctification to everlasting life, every new wave taking the place of an overwhelming work though not superseding or destroying the other. The Lord, the true vine has in Himself, as Teacher and Redeemer, all that we need. He means to teach us that He Himself, in His divine-human personality is the middle and the end of our spiritual life and fruit bearing" (Schaff qtd in Woychuk, p. 25,26).

"It is not enough that I turn away from myself with disgust, I must turn to Christ with delight" (p.28).

"This infinite love which permeates heaven now fills the life of the Christian who lives in communion with Christ" (p.29).

Las Vegas Sunset

These pictures are from December. I was traveling to California to visit my family for Christmas when I took them.