Job 1:21

About a year ago, Julie was praying for me. It was one of those times when we were praying about the direction of our lives in the long view, and one of the things she prayed was that I would marry someone about whom, at the end of my life, I could look back at it all and say, "God, what an honor it has been to spend my life with this man."

Of all the advice I've gotten (welcome and unwelcome) about marriage, somehow that is what I find I think about most, what seems like the best and most authentic test for me. I guess I know it's a good test in part because--if I'm really honest with myself--a couple of relationships that seemed powerfully attractive at the time wouldn't have passed it. It's not that the people in question weren't good potential husbands for somebody else, but in each case, what one of us had to offer wasn't what the other could most easily give. It wasn't safe to offer everything because, somehow, you knew a good bit of yourself would simply be spilled out onto the earth instead of the altar.

Finding someone that you feel safe to give to is, I think, like happening upon a pearl of great price. For me, safety doesn't mean that the other person grabs the baseball bat when there's a noise in the night, or even takes care of telemarketers or the retirement planning (though hey, all those things are nice). It's not safety in the face of outward threat--it's safety to offer your truest self and know that the person to whom you offer it will be blessed by it. When it's sweetest, what you open yourself to give is what the other person most deeply needs. And when that works both ways, it's like being saved; it's like picking up a rusty key from a gutter and finding that it opens the lovely house you've walked past and always assumed belonged to somebody else.

And whether you remain there for a heartbeat or a lifetime, how can you not honor the eternal love shown you in that kind of grace?

Great Meals of My Life (short list)

This post is titled for Jason. The meals appear in no particular order and do not represent their entire category.

My mother's Christmas dinner--any year, but especially when we had the bread with the dipping sauce.

Clare's Murder Mystery dinner party, Halloween 2003. Pork tenderloin in blackberry mustard sauce, parmesan potatoes, cake with chocolate leaves, Mexican hot chocolate, tomato confit appetizers, and a million other goodies.

Joan's birthday dinner, August 2004. Shrimp and bacon-wrapped filet, grilled by Frank. Also dinner on my visit to North Carolina in July 2006: steak, ginger-infused crab, blueberry lemon sorbet with dark chocolate. And that unforgettable meal at the Duck & Dumpling in Raleigh, July 2005.

Elliott's in Seattle, 4th of July weekend 1999. Fresh salmon, garlic mashed potatoes, asparagus.

Creativity

I've always admired creative people, but then sometimes they're hard to be friends with. The imaginative types can be a little flaky, a little irresponsible. They're always late to meet you because, oh, the leaves were falling in this amazing pattern! Or they stopped to talk to the most fascinating man who sculpts found metal and styrofoam cups! And then you feel like sort of a drag saying, "Okay, but we missed the bus."

And so I really appreciate those couple of friends of mine who are both astonishingly creative and rock-solid as far as friendship and life responsibilities are concerned--like my friend Clare. Besides being reliable and genuine and all those other things that make a person trustworthy, Clare has dinner parties that people still talk about years later (a few of the Great Meals of My Life have been served at her table) because the food was so yummy and inventive. And she's gifted at all kinds of visual things: I'm not a person who knows much about fashion, but Clare dresses like a work of art, a treat to behold--it isn't about impressing people or showing off, but about creating something beautiful. She simply makes everything lovely; in her apartment is a framed photograph of a church pew with light flooding down on it from above--light so dazzling that it looks like matter spilling onto the wooden surface. Of course, she took it herself. I love being around her for lots of reasons, but one is that being around Clare means being around the beauty she creates all the time and everywhere.

As for me, I'd been pretty much just getting by on the creativity front, until recently, figuring (lamely) that churning out literary interpretations and lesson plans was enough. But working on the little video projects for church has made me realize how integral it is to my happiness to have a creative outlet. I am not sure why doing the videos is more fun than just photography, but I've got a ton of photos that I haven't gotten around to sliding into albums in many months, whereas I look forward to the video stuff as soon as I've finished my work for the day. I've even been thinking it would be kind of neat to integrate little movies into teaching.

I think it's working with the combination of language, photography, and music that appeals to me . . . and the way a project involves depicting a truth as beautiful or compelling or funny. Obviously, I like to write. Plus I've always loved photography, the way an image can almost narrate a whole story. And while I don't know much about music, I often find myself trying to track down the music playing in the background of TV shows and movies because its evocation of mood is so intense and memorable for me. Plus, the timing is right--with the freedom and support and encouragement I feel at church (and school), and the peace and healthfulness of my life in general, I feel like I'm capable of creativity in a way that I simply couldn't be with the anxiety of grad school hanging over me. It feels to me like a kind of worship that maybe I was dying a little without.

Very Reverend

I still remember walking into my church for the first time. I had walked from home, and because it was mid-July and the church is pretty much entirely uphill from where I live, it was rather hot. So I was a little sweaty, a little self-conscious, and a little curious--full of that tentative hopefulness and guardedness that one feels at a new church: "please don't do anything weird because I really want to like you guys."

Ed cheerfully greeted me from his stool by the entrance in the lobby. (Is he always perched there? Apparently last week I walked by the church and he saw me because he was sitting there, by the door, in greeting position. It was a Thursday morning, for crying out loud!)

But I like this picture of Ed, one that I have in my mind from that morning and dozens afterward, week after week, the same smile and the same eagerness to welcome--an interesting eagerness because it's entirely about the other person; a bright-eyed, earnest alertness to how he might help and care. I like this picture not only because it has become so familiar to me, nor even because it signifies the beginning of the church services I have come so to love . . . but also because it also seems like an image of Ed and Jodi's faithfulness.

I've written before about how they seem to me like the parents of prodigal sons and daughters, waiting with endless steadfastness for the return of "the least, the last, the lost." I love how in that parable, the father was waiting and looking down the road for his son: he had not been healthy, let go, gone back inside. He was maybe a little codependent. At our church, it feels like even if you were to show up on a Thursday morning or ten years later, there would be someone waiting for you. Even if you were the meter man for whom Ed was waiting last week, Ed and Jodi would have a kind word for you, often one discerned from God to encourage you.

Our church is so different from others I've attended, even within the Vineyard. My last church was astonishingly healthy. It reminded me of an exchange student from Finland I once met--tall, trim, with apple cheeks, sun-streaked hair, and glowing skin. A single glimpse of her and you wanted to drink glacier-melted water and eat only herring.

My church now, I think, is more like the little kid with rickets and maybe a few head lice that nobody wants to sit next to. It's homely to begin with. And then it has poor hygiene and a few bad habits, like perhaps an affinity for narcotics or matches, or a tendency to pick up wallets left lying around in people's pockets. It's a little below grade-level and it's definitely hyperactive.

Ed and Jodi could have stayed with the Finnish girl (or her sister), grooming her and adding depth to her loveliness, polishing the signs of grace so evident all around her . . . even preparing her to go out and do something glorious for God someday. God loves her--can't you see His favor upon her, and His pleasure in her wholesomeness? Can't you see what a stable family life you could have, doing the work of the kingdom with all the resources the world has to offer? Can't you see how your children would grow up richly blessed by the love of all these others joyfully serving God alongside you?

But instead, they chose to plant and pastor our church. They are like my friend Clare, who chooses not the cutest pet, but the cat with no tail and the dog with bladder issues, whom she fears no one else will want. They are, I think, like the soldiers who gave up their deferments and went to war in spite of all the good reasons--prior service, age, children--they could have invoked. Or the rescuers who ran into the Twin Towers as everyone else was running out.

Their heritage to their children and grandchildren, both natural and spiritual, may not be one of an easy walk in faith. I think that in some respects this must be difficult for them; who wouldn't want their children's way in the world smoothed by a sweet and easy faith? But instead of ease, they've chosen all the hardships that bring knowledge of Christ as redeemer, of God as the maker of all things new: experience with sacrifice and suffering and transformation, and with all the ways in which the Kingdom is different from the world. Instead of an untested wholeness, they bequeathe an eye for need, a taste for service, a love of mercy.

Adjudication

Thou shalt not take my name in vain, quoth B_b H_dges.

Got it, B_b.

In settlement of this case H_dges v. Blogger, this blogger will buy B_b H_dges a cup of Cattail Coffee at VCoW on Sunday, paying any and all charges associated therewith. In return B_b H_dges will cease and desist from his public harrassment of the blogger, from breaking and entering the blogger's consciousness, and from disturbing the peace. Should B_b H_dges breach this contract, B_b H_dges should expect future copyright violation, which may include commensurate retaliatory public humiliation.

The Assistant Director's Cut

You know how sometimes DVDs are released in an improved "director's cut" format? The idea is that the movie theater version had to be shortened or censored or something, but if you rent the DVD you can see the best version.

This is the opposite--this is an early version of a video (for our church's building campaign) that was later taken apart and integrated into one made by somebody who actually knew what he was doing. But it was my first attempt at this kind of thing, and it was really fun to do. :)

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The stuff at the end is just me messing around with the MC.

Bob Hedges

Bob Hedges desperately wanted his name, BOB HEDGES, to appear on this blog. Or so Bob Hedges said. I suspect Bob Hedges may have been poking around the old blog for something else known only to himself, but Bob Hedges will find nothing of what Bob Hedges is looking for here. Bob Hedges will have to pursue other avenues, which may be better suited to Bob Hedges' efforts. Are you happy now, Bob Hedges? ;)

Absent-Minded Professor, Part II

Some of you may have been waiting for this sequel to an earlier episode (2/16/2006). I'm sure all of you knew it was coming.

My pastor (and dear friend) Jodi was here on Sunday afternoon, and I played a bit for her from Eva Cassidy's exquisite Songbird album. Jodi is herself a gifted musician--one of those people whose soul and way of interacting with the world is musical--and she liked the album, so I wanted to give her the CD. This morning, I tied a little ribbon around the case and attached an old-fashioned paper tag (you know, so it would be a charming little gift) and dropped it off at her house. Except that I didn't actually include the CD.

I've done this twice in my life. The last time I did it was a few months ago, the last time I returned a CD . . . to Jodi.

Yikes. But--yay. When I first started going to my Bible study, one evening I said something about all my little anxieties, and Jodi said, "We just don't see it!" And I remember realizing that they didn't know me--yet. As Julie said in her comments the other day, nobody expects me to be quite as easily distracted as I am. That is because I was raised by two of the most focused and grounded people on earth, and much like someone who nimbly gets about on a prosthetic leg, I have developed a number of inconspicuous adaptive strategies. In truth, however, I am essentially a person constantly in struggle against spacing out.

But what I'm noticing about my life here in Ed and Jodi's church, and among the supportive people with whom I work, is how I feel about my mistakes. I feel like my little foolish missteps are helping me map out who I am, really. It's not that forgetting the CD was itself a good thing--it's that I didn't feel like I had to proofread the note and check the package three times before I gave it to Jodi in an effort to maintain a perfect image. It seems like a ridiculous way to have lived, but to be free of it is like being invited out to play. I feel as if the constancy of their love, for me and all of us at the church, shows me what it means when Jesus tells us his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.

I wonder if all the disciples were constantly spaced-out too. It would explain a lot.

Sound Booth Adventures

The sound booth at my church is just wide enough to fit the large sound board and a laptop from which to run the Powerpoint slides. Behind these two controls is space enough for two chairs, and this morning I occupied one of them, the sound technician occupied the other, and watching over both of us stood . . . the Master of Ceremonies.

I don't think he was wearing sunglasses--that would have been totally weird, since it's very dark back there. But as I bent over the laptop with him behind me, I sort of pictured him with sunglasses. Maybe it was his innate dramatic coolness, but I think it was more likely because of a scene at the end of that really terrible movie The Bodyguard (if you haven't seen it, count yourself lucky and don't remedy that). The President or somebody is at some big formal gathering, and everyone bows their heads to pray--everyone, that is, except the Secret Service Bodyguard, who keeps a solemn, ever-watchful eye over everyone there.

Now, in truth, the MC was not there to keep everybody safe, strictly speaking. He was there to keep me from making mistakes. But it's all the same, really. I teased him about being unwilling to give up control, but in truth, I have immense respect for such fastidiousness. While everybody else is singing or listening to the sermon or praying, the MC makes dozens of tiny adjustments to set an atmosphere that supports what's going on at each moment. I don't mind the MC's fussiness (in fact, I applaud it) because it shows a care for the manner in which God is honored, the way His house reflects His generosity and warmth and comfort toward everyone who walks in His door and makes it that much easier for them to seek and worship Him.

There's an aesthetic factor as well; recently, the MC showed a few disciples how to make the Powerpoint slides for the sermons. "Now, don't be doing all kinds of cheesy stuff," he admonished us. Nothing sticky-sweet, nothing amateurish--just do it right, and be classy. Thank God. I don't mean to be snobbish; it just sort of pains me (okay, it's agony really) to see all the sappy stuff that churches do, especially when sometimes it substitutes for the kind of depth people really need.

So, anyway, back when I used to just sit in church, I didn't really ever consider what was happening with the lights or the Powerpoint slides. I'd probably be better at the job now if I had paid attention to which lights were coming up and going down at which moments, but it all seemed seamless, effortless. And now I know that a lot of that is because while the rest of us were praying and singing, the MC kept his eyes open, and worshiped by serving all of us.