May17

Song in my head.

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Song in my head.

soulMy daughter told me there’s a mental condition where people hear songs in their head. Real, live-playing songs that exist only in their minds. I grew concerned, afraid that this was my own affliction.

What’s the difference, then, between earworms and hearing actual music in your head? Because I hear a song in my head all the time, even in the middle of the night when I wake up for no apparent reason. They’re there, first thing upon awakening too, like a trumpet call to my day.

This has made me selective in what I listen to. If you’re going to have to hear a song playing all day in your head, it should be one of your choosing, because certainly you would go mad otherwise.

Other times, when something disagreeable gets stuck in replay, I have learned how to change the channel. The unavoidable trips to the grocery store often tend to infect my head tunes with a melody and lyrics that doesn’t work.

What works are songs that settle somewhere in your soul and sing encouragement. I keep discovering more, and the songs keep pulling me forward, like a talisman in my pocket bidding me on with courage and hope.

In my posts you’ll frequently find embedded songs. This music is a channel for my sehnsucht, the deep, irrevocable longing for something more, reminding me that there is something more.

Without a song, I am a servant still. With a song, I am an instrument, fine-tuned to my Conductor, who calls to me from the Grand Symphony of the Spirit.

 

I’m linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker and the beautiful community of writers for her Five Minute Friday writing prompt. Click the button below to add your own thoughts on “Song”, or to read what it brought to mind for others.

Five Minute Friday

May16

Longing for something more.

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Longing for something more.

sehnsuchtWhen you yearn for something beyond your current experience, feel an indescribable longing, or miss someone or something with great intensity, you’re experiencing sehnsucht. Translated from German as seeing (sehn)  + addicted (sucht), it is a deep desire to see what is inevitably and agonizingly elusive.

It is a haunting and poignant longing – somehow nostalgic – for a fulfillment of joy. When fall arrives with its bittersweet pleasure in the silencing of foliage, we have nostalgia for the joy of what was once green and alive.

Sehnsucht carries this same stab of longing for something that’s just out of our reach. “Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is . . . the truest index of our real situation,” as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory.

Getting on the other side of this door is our underlying pull, like a magnet drawing us to our True North. Joy, then, leads us toward an ineffable destination, a joy-ward journey to a distant home.

Like distant music which you could choose to listen to or not, or a faint wind on your face that you could easily ignore, Lewis described joy as “this feathery, impalpable, tingling sensation.” Lurking around every corner, yet not to be clutched at, this joy is meant to be a beckoning signal.

Each time we choose to hear it or feel it, we get a foretaste of what we are heading for.

Books and music are often what beckon me onward, that stoke the fire of longing. Yet like Lewis reminds us, this beauty “will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”

What came through the stories and the songs is merely an echo of what’s to come, a whisper of a chapter yet to be read. Between the pages we search for meaning, in the lyrics we listen for consolation, and in our travels we seek and find fleeting significance to our lives.

Move farther along, come farther in, follow this joy into the unknown. Where joy is eternal, and where sehnsucht may at last place its scepter of wanderlust at the foot of the Throne of Grace.

Another song by Josh Garrels, whose lyrics and haunting tunes nourish my soul as I wander this dusty road in search of my heart’s home: “Sing Lord, come soon.”

Farther Along

Farther along we’ll know all about it
Farther along we’ll understand why
Cheer up my brothers, live in the sunshine
We’ll understand this, all by and by

Tempted and tried, I wondered why
The good man died, the bad man thrives
And Jesus cries because he loves em’ both
We’re all cast-aways in need of ropes
Hangin’ on by the last threads of our hope
In a house of mirrors full of smoke
Confusing illusions I’ve seen

Where did I go wrong, I sang along
To every chorus of the song
That the devil wrote like a piper at the gates
Leading mice and men down to their fates
But some will courageously escape
The seductive voice with a heart of faith
While walkin’ that line back home

So much more to life than we’ve been told
It’s full of beauty that will unfold
And shine like you struck gold my wayward son
That deadweight burden weighs a ton
Go down into the river and let it run
And wash away all the things you’ve done
Forgiveness alright

Chorus

Still I get hard pressed on every side
Between the rock and a compromise
Like the truth and pack of lies fightin’ for my soul
And I’ve got no place left go
Cause I got changed by what I’ve been shown
More glory than the world has known
Keeps me ramblin’ on

Skipping like a calf loosed from its stall
I’m free to love once and for all
And even when I fall I’ll get back up
For the joy that overflows my cup
Heaven filled me with more than enough
Broke down my levee and my bluff
Let the flood wash me

And one day when the sky rolls back on us
Some rejoice and the others fuss
Cause every knee must bow and tongue confess
That the son of God is forever blessed
His is the kingdom, we’re the guests
So put your voice up to the test
Sing Lord, come soon

Chorus

 

May10

Comfort in what you have now.

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Comfort in what you have now.

ComfortThe world slings advertisement after advertisement at us, all promising satisfaction. Happiness. Beauty. Success. Buy this, and you’ll be fulfilled. Do this, and you’ll be on top of the world.

None of it matters. Nothing we buy, try, or take home is going to give us one ounce of true satisfaction. It feels good for awhile. Until the new model comes out, or the latest vogue place opens, or the shinier version with more buttons that does so much more.

There’s no keeping up. This is a lost cause, because what you have now is exactly what you need. Everywhere I turn there are the most adorable cats, everyone of them with cuter ears, sleeker coats, and better manners. But I have the cat I need.

Well, okay, her coat is the sleekest of all.

So where’s my source of satisfaction? What is it that comforts me? Day in, day out, how is it that I even manage to swing my legs over the edge of my bed every morning?

What is the source of comfort in a world so hungry for more? More money, more power, more justice – is less more?

Apart from this world, there is no less. There is always more in this God who gives when you’re weak, lonely, frightened,  and hungry. My comfort is not of this world. And I am filled.

I’m linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker and the beautiful community of writers for her Five Minute Friday writing prompt. Click the button below to add your own thoughts on “Comfort”, or to read what it brought to mind for others.  

Five Minute Friday

May7

Balcony people.

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Balcony people.

angel wingsWe never forget the people who gave us a serving of grace, who extended a virtual life raft with words that transformed us, a gift of affirmation. Our Balcony people.

Cheering us on, standing in the upper room of our mind’s eye, leaning from the eaves to affirm us – where would we be without them?

The Affirmers in our life make an enormous difference at pivotal times in our lives. Their generosity, magnanimous and confounding as it is, is sadly too often overwhelmed by the Evaluators.

Evaluators drag us down, steal our joy, break our hearts. Their words cut, crush, and discourage us. Rather than try to justify, excuse, or understand the motives behind Evaluators, simply focus on your Balcony people, and leave the bankrupt behind in the basement. Remember, they chose to be there; you didn’t put them there.

Balcony people move in and out of the present, but their affirmation lives on to encourage us. The memory of a balcony person continues to buoy us up, even many years later. They’ve reserved a permanent seat in our balcony, lifetime tickets to a performance played by the concert of our soul.

My English teacher from high school, who saw my love for the written word and kindled that fire; my child’s teacher, who embraced me and my efforts to parent; my expat friends, who welcomed and ushered me forward in a foreign land.

Balcony people are the human beings in our lives that give us faith to believe again in ourselves. They’re the miracle  – selfless, trusting, and oh, so priceless – that sustains us and rejuvenates us.

You’ll recognize a Balcony person as someone who won’t let their own desires get in the way of rooting for you and your attempts to fly. They will put aside their jealousies and insecurities to offer you the boost you need to keep going. When you’re afraid, they might be afraid with you, but they will remind you how brave you are.

I have a sister who continues to point me in a direction of promise with her balcony perspective and insight, and a mother who knows me fully and loves me as I am – not an easy undertaking. I learn from them, and all my Balcony people, how to be a Balcony person to others.

Isn’t that how we pay it forward?

Ulysses

I’m holding on to the hope that one day this could be made right.
I’ve been shipwrecked, and left for dead, and I have seen the darkest sights.
Everyone I’ve loved seems like a stranger in the night
But Oh my heart still burns, tells me to return, and search the fading light.

I’m sailing home to you I won’t be long
By the light of moon I will press on
Until, I find, my love

Trouble has beset my ways, and wicked winds have blown
Sirens call my name, they say they’ll ease my pain, then break me on the stones
But true love is the burden that will carry me back home
Carry me with the, memories of the, beauty I have known

I’m sailing home to you I won’t be long
By the light of moon I will press on

So tie me to the mast of this old ship and point me home
Before I lose the one I love, before my chance is gone
I want to hold, her in, my arms.

This song and post is dedicated to my sailor man, the most valuable Balcony person in my life, on his birthday. And to my family: My children, my parents, and my sister, all lifetime Balcony people that helped make me what I am. 

Apr26

Friends like pearls.

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Friends like pearls.

My hands shake and my heart aches, writing this, for so many faces now in far away places. We bonded in a foreign land, seeking deep connection where our roots were torn from solid, familiar soil. We were expatriates in the land of the dragon, a communist country, a tongue so clipped in speech to our ears we couldn’t imagine ever speaking it.

But we did. We raced in dragon boats, our heads down to the wind, knees braced against the wood hull. We ate together, feasts of unknown foods and stranger names. We travelled in busses, finding streets and towns with pagodas that rose above the squat huts, learning to barter with our new words, new numbers, and new courage.

Duoshao qián? (How much money?)  Tai guì le! (Too expensive!) The phrase that sticks most in my memory, the ubiquitous Méi wèntí. (No problem.)

We walked through the orphanage doors together. Every abandoned baby held, every scanty diaper changed, every bottle given to hungry eyes staring at our own, we did with the courage of each other to bolster us.

Kitchen Street, Pet Street, Pearl Town, Pottery Town, and Bar Street. All names we tossed around like so many yuan, those days we passed through time like shipwrecked sailors with plenty of rum.

Every day we faced a new challenge – a new school for our kids, a new driver for the company car, a new struggle in communicating to our ayi. Together we found ourselves a new life, and we did more than survive. We thrived.

I miss all of you with an unrelenting twist of the heart, a sometimes sweet, sometimes sad, always poignant nostalgia. You are embedded in my psyche, my friends forever, forged by a shared, profound season in Suzhou, China.

Perpetually a part of me, these friends, like the luster of the pearls we saw harvested, like the grain of sand that gave it birth.

 

I’m linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker and the beautiful community of writers for her Five Minute Friday writing prompt. Click the button below to add your own thoughts on “Friend”, or to read what it brought to mind for others.  

Five Minute Friday

Apr21

How to be set free: A lament on your demons.

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How to be set free: A lament on your demons.

how to be set freeThis is what happens when we pursue riches designed not for our freedom but for enslaving us. A slow, relentless, and lethal eroding of our spirit.

So slow that you won’t realize it’s even happening. So relentless that to stop it requires herculean strength. So lethal that it will forever alter your psyche.

You will be dead to whom you were designed to be.

I first realized a particular demon of mine when a friend said, “The devil knows your heart and how to work to use it against you.”

Bingo! What she didn’t know was that this little heart of mine knew exactly the method of infiltration being exacted upon it. But before that moment, my heart believed it was only behaving like any heart would. You know, being all touchy-feely, sensitive, and solicitous. Even to people I probably shouldn’t be.

Damned if I was going to let anything – bad spirit or otherwise – navigate my heart and use it against me.

As defined by Dictionary.com, demon is either or both of these (you choose as you see fit; they’re all the same):

  1. an evil spirit; devil or fiend.
  2. an evil passion or influence.

In this case, twisting my compassionate nature into an unproductive focus was a way to deceive me into wrong emotions. Like the tempter demon in C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, old Wormwood, used his Patient, my demon was effectively tapping into a potential strength, but I allowed it to become a weakness.

This is how your demons annihilate your soul.

Gradually, unaware to any nefarious plot, you succumb to its twisted influence. That is, unless you wake up and smell the coffee.

When you do, it’s not going to be pleasant. That coffee you so adamantly adored before? It’s going to be a potent mass of toxic brew. I know, because I had to drink it for a long, long time.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (part of The Chronicles of Narnia), Eustace, a particularly irascible youth, is forced to recognize the toxic brew of his selfish nature after he morphs into a hideous dragon. The reflection Eustace sees as he gazes into the water is a dragon-scaled one, revealing the monster he had become, both inwardly and now outwardly.

Like all of us, once he recognized his demon, he is anxious to shed himself of his scales and return to humanity. There’s just one little problem, however. He can’t do it without help.

Some serious help. As in out-of-this-world, divine help.

As the song says, when you touch the water, you can be set free. When you allow yourself to be cleansed, your efforts to restore your spiritual treasures will be rewarded. When you ask for and accept the help you’ll require to negotiate the dark parts of your soul.

You’ll be set free of your demons.

brother, forgive me 
we both know I’m the one to blame 
when I saw my demons 
I knew them well and welcomed them 

but I’ll come around 
someday 

father, have mercy 
I know that I have gone astray 
when I saw my reflection 
it was a stranger beneath my face 

but I’ll come around 
someday 

when I touch the water 
they tell me I could be set free 

so I’ll come around 
someday

~The Oh Hellos, The Lament of Eustace Scrubb

Original Flickr photo by rumpleteaser

 

Apr16

What word do you live by?

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What word do you live by?

Because I was committed to baking cookies the evening of the Boston Marathon, I baked cookies. Because it was for the grief ministry, it felt incredibly and strangely comforting, as if my efforts would somehow soothe the loss and pain of greater tragedy.

I watched the news only briefly, and I focused on healing things, redemptive and hopeful things. I watched this. If you watch it too, perhaps you will understand my hope. Perhaps.

The belief carries me. “Out of this destructive thing and into this beautiful thing.” Out of the shadow and into something incomprehensibly alive.

To the last syllable of recorded time,
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more.
~Shakespeare, MacBeth

 

What word do you live by?

Apr13

A song about losing your treasure.

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A song about losing your treasure.

song by the Oh HellosWhile this is really a song about God, and not wishing to lose the treasure that He is, it made me think of losing someone you dearly love.

I thought of my nephew, who left this earth for those very treasures, how his wild arms will be flailing hello when we meet him again on the homeward road. And in the midst of it all, as we clamber up that dusty mountain, we’ll find something we’ve lost long ago.

We’ll rediscover the gift of our own worth.

Why is it so hard to realize the treasure that we are? Why must we beat ourselves up instead of realizing the value of our unique soul? Rather than finding fault in everyone and everything, and giving credence to all the “liar’s gold,” why can’t we work to measure the beauty that is readily available?

God, it’s hard. (He knows.) When everyone continually cries unfair, unjust, unequal. (He hears.) When the whole world seems about to lose its wellspring of beauty by dismissing the very existence of a Supreme Being. (He will never leave.)

There’s incomprehensible beauty waiting for each of us, should we choose it for our destiny. Each step along the way, we are choosing either beauty or its distortion. We are embracing our treasure, or we are shunning the gift that lies breathing and potent and alive within ourselves.

It’s often a fight to keep the truth of this treasure in my grasp. It can be like clutching at empty air, with nothing left to clasp between my desperate hands. Just more emptiness. As if I’ve spent it all, and now I’m broke with the knowledge of my despair.

And then the truth of what I hold dear is revealed to me again. Again I’ve had to climb a mountain of sorrow and unseemly wars of self to get back to what I always knew and always had.

“You are far too beautiful to love me,” yet you do. You do.

well, it’s a long way out to reach the sea
but I’m sure I’ll find you waiting there for me
and by the time I blink, I’ll see your wild arms swinging
just to meet me in the middle of the road
and you’ll hold me like you’ll never let me go
and beside the salty water, I could hold you close,
but you are far too beautiful to love me

it’s a long climb up the dusty mountain
to build a turret tall enough to keep you out
but when you wage your wars against the one who adores you,
then you’ll never know the treasure that you’re worth
but I’ve never been a wealthy one before
I’ve got holes in my pockets burned by liars’ gold,
and I think I’m far too poor for you to want me

it’s been a long road, losing all I’ve owned
and you don’t know what you’ve got until you’re gone
and it’s a nasty habit, spending all you have, but
when you’re doing all the leaving, then it’s never your love lost
and if you leave before the start, then there was never love at all
and heaven knows I’m prone to leave the only God I should have loved,
and yet you’re far too beautiful to leave me.

~The Oh Hellos, In Memoriam

We’ll be seeing you one day soon, at the end of the long road, oh sweet nephew of mine.

Apr8

When you meet a kindred spirit.

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When you meet a kindred spirit.

seamless garmentI met a soul not unlike me.

Following her car, we read her plethora of bumper stickers. Peace sign, love – not war, a Jesus quote, something about feminism. She reads like a hippie, and one who didn’t mind saying so to random drivers parked behind her bumper.

“She’s a feminist for life,” my daughter pointed out as we continued to follow her to a parking space.

“What?” I replied, my interest piqued. I know that organization. That’s a feminist for life, as in the lives of children and women. Who is this person, I wanted to know.

So naturally, I followed her into the parking garage and parked beside her. I tried to get a better look at her bumper stickers before she exited her car. She was too fast. She had dark wavy hair dyed bright purple on the ends of one side, wore wire rim glasses, was tall, slender, and a few years shy of me.

I fell into step with her. Getting right to the point, I remarked upon her bumper stickers, in particular the Feminists for Life.

“Oh, them. They really do piss people off.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. I told her that her bumper sticker messages expressed my own thoughts.

“It’s a seamless garment,” she said.

“A what?” I asked.

She explained how she doesn’t believe in the death penalty, abortion, war – anything that is about death. It’s a seamless garment, which is a consistent life ethic that all human life is sacred.

Oh. My. Gosh. I didn’t know my value system had a name. That it’s on Wikipedia, for crying out loud. I didn’t know there are people who sport super-cool hair who share my beliefs. I didn’t know I wasn’t alone in my crazy, peace-loving, life-affirming, holistic reverence for all life.

“I wish people would stop making life suck so much,” she said.

Whereas it’s a simple formula for me, something I seemed to just grow into, like a a pair of old trousers that you’ve discovered fit perfectly, it often appears to be far more complicated for others.

While I might not get it, I respect their thoughtful reasoning, and I don’t pass judgement, but I yearn for a way to pass on this seamless garment. Maybe others will find it to be as comfortable of a fit, without contradiction, and liberating to wear.

Maybe there already are countless seamless garment advocates and, like me, they don’t realize they’re not alone, that they have a name, that the love that overwhelms them is already a movement. A kindred spirit could be in the car in front of them.

I think I’m going to like being a hippie.

Heaven on Earth, we need it now
I'm sick of all of this hanging around
Sick of sorrow, sick of the pain
I'm sick of hearing again and again
That there's gonna be peace on Earth

Tell the ones who hear no sound
Whose sons are living in the ground
Peace on Earth

No whos or whys
No one cries like a mother cries
For peace on Earth 
~ U2, Peace on Earth 

Apr3

The weight of love.

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The weight of love.

love is fierce

Most days, the weight of love is a counterweight to life’s demands. Some days, however, it’s a noose, a deadweight tied to your heart, dragging you back with each step you attempt forward.

There’s no simple switch to flip off when it comes to caring for someone. There’s no easy way out of certain situations that you’re totally vested in.

But there’s always - always – a perspective from which you can choose to see your dilemma.

How you choose to see the love that threatens to bury you, or the calamity of a situation that is overwhelming you, will define you.

In I am second, people share their stories of struggle, how they chose to overcome the obstacles that they could’ve allowed to steer them on a self-destructive path. Instead, they chose something selfless, and this carries them into a realm they didn’t think possible.

What’s holding you back?

Will you allow love to buoy you up, or will you bear it as a burden? Love is dynamic, moving and changing, a force of its own. Would you risk it? Would you give yourself to it despite its danger?

This week I was given a name, a name I hadn’t before considered as an identity of mine: Crisis counselor. As a trained volunteer, I find myself giving and risking the safety of my heart. It’s often unbearable and filled with torment. But then it becomes something else.

It becomes the very thing that I wanted to hide from, that at times I fear. Love.

Love cannot help but be that talisman that will call you further up and further in. Out of the darkness, the despair, and the dread, and ultimately into the Light.