Accountability: a weekend to-do list

First of all, thank you so much to my first commenter– Your words have been more encouraging than you know.

For most, a to-do list is in itself enough accountability to prompt action. I hear tales of these people, whose enthusiasm for list-making is only second to their delight in checking completed items off their list. Maybe I was sick from school that day when a deep love for checklists was instilled. I wish it were the case, but I sadly can’t get too excited about writing down things I’d like to do, and then, one by one, crossing off what I wrote. It sounds more like the kind of drudgery that daily reminds me we live in a fallen, time-constrained world–drudgery like making the bed or washing the dishes (though I do get a strange high from a clear and shiny sink, however briefly it remains so).

There’s actually a lot I’d like to say about time and eternity, writing, doneness (yes, Firefox spell check, I’m making that one up, but thanks for the heads-up), and probably some other things I would think of as I was writing. But since I’ve been sick, and need to be up in the morning, and the whole point of using WordPress to post this was to just slap this to-do list out there quickly so I would know it was there in a visible place (you know, the dark, silvery expanse of the Internet) and be able to hold myself to it. So I will, and will leave it at that for now:

To-Do Mostly This Weekend, Though Possibly Also Next Week

• study out Psalm 51  (thanks to this song)
• draft Time Budget
• write article for my church’s women’s newsletter (…due July 20th! Thank God I do have some notes. This will be a fun one.)

There.

Silvery shores of cyberspace, I submit to you my to-do-ings for the weekend. God willing I will accomplish them, mostly on my laptop, lounging with water and toast as I finish recovering from tremendous, clearly divinely-ordained illness. I needed my heart broken, and my priorities adjusted. Thank you so much, Dad.

PS:  While I appreciate any and all encouragement, kudos, thumbs-up gestures and all of the above, I still appreciate criticism very much as well. That said, I am so happy to be able to state openly and honestly the following self-criticism:  I know this post is not very good, from a creative writing standpoint. It’s wordy, rambling and at times self-serving. Praise be to God, it can get better– everything I do is under His control, and He is the ultimate skilled craftsman. That is an awesome feeling, a grounding fact. I wish I’d realized this in school, but even that had its purpose. Again, thank you, Dad.

Jesu, Juva | Soli Deo Gloria

homemade gods

I’m never satisfied. So I have to make a lot of gods.

Imagine I’m a wheat farmer.

One day, I’m dying of hunger. There’s no rain to break the ground and give me frosted shredded wheat. So I pray to the rain god– Give me rain! Then the rain comes and I’m happy.

Another day, the rains fall and fall. The puddles fill up. Rivers tear through wheat fields, and I’m out of cereal again. So I pray to the sun god– Dry up the rain! Then the sun breaks through and I’m happy.

That afternoon, I get a sunburn. It could lead to cancer. It gave me a lobster-face. So I curse at the sun god, pray that the rain god stays away (water stings!) and urge the aloe god to grow me something that works by six; I have an important friend to impress. As typically unreliable is the aloe god, I ditch the healing idea and praise the makeup god for bringing me tinted moisturizer. The ice maker god, though faithful in churning out a fresh cold compress, slips my mind. Then my friend compliments my taste in music and I’m happy.

Father, when will I learn to stop splintering my view of you like a felled tree, and whittling you down into monstrous shapes, into my helpless idols? Help me lay down my disbelief like a sharpened axe, and my vain imaginations like a hardened carving knife. You’re not a dead lump of wood, but a tree that gives life. And I can’t possibly hold You in my hand like a doll. You hold me, as a branch, that you feed with your own life.

They’re idols of my own home recipe. You are my God.

Stop Holding the Presses!

I just remembered subtext. Oh snap.

Mankind, you are so good at giving names to God’s creation. Your first job may have been your best job. Well, second-to-first job, as I fumble to Genesis 2:15-20 in my grande-sized John MacArthur Study Bible (where o where has my slim faux-leather ESV gone?).

Theatrically, “Subtext is Content Underneath The Spoken Dialogue,” (thanks VCU! http://bit.ly/hIUtIV) and manifests the same in literature, though writing each of them are different tasks. Reading or viewing them, on the other hand, are always the same: 1. look at what’s happening, 2. consider what it means beyond or beneath what is visible.

I totally forgot this, or at least, I forgot the name. Nearly six years studying the human experience (through any channel, though mine have been literature and customer service) have conditioned me to watch subtext, to continually consider meanings. Now that I’ve internalized the process, and consider I AM the only one with an answer key to all this covert communicating, I don’t make myself crazy nearly as much as I used to! But, internalizing analysis after a year of academic un-use, did lead to forgetting that subtext is as easy as the difference between what a person says and what a person thinks.

Not that people are lying when their words do not encapsulate their thoughts or feelings. Sometimes words just can’t capture that– or the time hasn’t yet arrived for true feelings to emerge.

This idea gives me a huge relief. For people I trust– such as my friends, family, or God–who may not always fully or frankly express themselves, I know that their words, if I take in context, will allude to their deeper feelings, and I need not feel betrayed by their subtlety. Really, if a friend is mad at me, for example, I’d rather she frown slightly and say “That did really hurt me,” than blow like an overheated corn dog. In that moment I read the subtext clearly, and feel the sharp pain my sin caused.

Thank you, Jesus, for literature. There’s no way I could get what you do without a way to read it.

There may be more to say, but it’s past my bedtime. I didn’t expect this to be my return piece, but here it is!

Jesu Juva

Glad tidings of great joy

Celebrate with anyone, in any way. I pray that with the holiday comes joy and hope.  Those things are the lights that can’t resist cutting through darkness and pain.

That reminds me of a great quote I read in (or on? at? what is the appropriate preposition here?) The Rabbit Room, a writer’s haven on a similar plane of awesome as Senior Sem for Writing, only with Jesus at the head of the table:

“The Truth is a lion. Whoever heard of defending a lion? Just turn it loose, it will defend itself” (John Milton).

This Christmas I’m thankful to have many happy blessings, but my levity in contrast to so many people’s suffering and hardship leaves me feeling self-conscious and spoiled, like a child who’s finished off a tray of sweets intended for the whole party. As loss breaks off into void, leaving aspirations unfulfilled and dreams too short to be satisfying, there are likewise few words under my control that I’d deem worthy of soothing such stinging abrasion.

So I defer to better writers, who’ve seen more. This lion begs for a good run around the wilderness.

“‘Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?’ ‘A great shadow has departed,’ said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land…”

Another nail in another coffin
Arms that held you return to dust
Yet in our grief we know death must be a liar
For no goodbye is ever good enough
How could it be everything sad is coming untrue?
…
The winter can make us wonder
If spring was ever true
But every winter breaks upon
The Easter lily’s bloom
Could it be everything said is coming untrue?
Could you believe everything sad is coming untrue?

Broken hearts are being unbroken
Bitter words are being unspoken
The curse undone, the veil is parted
The garden gate will be left unguarded

Could it be everything sad is coming untrue?
Oh, I believe everything sad is coming untrue
In the hands of the One who is making all things new

What audacity!

These are Jason Gray’s lyrics to “Everything Sad is Coming Untrue, Part 2,” with an epigram from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

When I first heard this song, I liked simply that it was “real,” meaning it contained not only beautiful things, but also horrible things, and those things made the most sense to me. Hurt is easy to remember; ugliness stays in your mind. While everyone here in the USA is hard at work pursuing happiness, isn’t it happiness that runs the fastest, leaving you panting in the back with disappointment?

So as I continued to listen to Mr. Gray’s soothing tune as well as Part 1, I realized how bold he was to say that “everything sad is coming untrue.” He calls on more than wishful thinking–rather, “the hands of the One who is making all things new”–to bring about this change.

This post ends only halfway resolved it seems, but I have to get going. Thankfully, though my words run out, the Story never dies.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Jaclyn

Grateful to the last minute

Father, thank you for this particular moment,
to speak in this particular voice, with
the simple and peculiar instructions to
speak,               without hearing the sound,
as birds, who fly, and cannot see the wind.

Some seven months ago my last formal, written piece flopped into Dr. J’s mailbox, and I haven’t written one since. I only mention it because you aren’t here to see how thrilled I am to be writing this first entry. My heart is fluttering, yes, like a silly girl in love.

And I’m not one who typically connects her emotions to bodily reflexes. Usually I’m too dizzy from thinking in spirals to notice a crop of goosebumps on my arm to tell me I’m startled or in awe. How bizarre is it then that hammering away on this banana slug-slow computer is completing me. This odd discipline—speaking to you while I sit alone—un-contains me. It’s what the great Joy Himself crafted me to do.

So as I ask, weave, and dream, I won’t be creating a new gospel, but I pray that what you find, my dear reader, is Truth: divinely inspired, spoken freshly and full of love.

 

[where thanks are due]
-Mom, Dad, and C, for the best Thanksgiving yet
-my friend, for your patience and mercy with me during my disappearance
-Jason Gray, for talking so much about Jesus (“Joy Himself”) in your liner notes
-Downhere and Jars of Clay (aka, “Jabs of Day”), for crafting music I can wordsmith to

Jesus, for holding up your end of the deal, even when I forgot we had one.