Caution! thrown to the wind.

I'm naturally pretty wimpy. No, it's true--don't try to make me feel better. (As if anyone would try to convince me otherwise.) I just prefer the safer route. Is that a crime, people?!?!?

No, of course not. It is not a crime. In fact it is the opposite of a crime. Case in point: I was the one kid on my high school field trips that kept the whole class waiting as I went down to the crosswalk because I refused to jaywalk. Jaywalking was dangerous and against the law and I wasn't going to do it.

If you happen to be an incredibly devoted friend, then you may have read my previous post about chasing lions, or the more recent one about chasing kittens. Probably you're a great friend but still haven't read those posts, so let me get you up to speed here. Basically, I recognize that I'm perhaps a little too cautious. Actually, I was starting to think that my careful living was getting in the way of actual living. Therefore I decided that it was time to break out of the box---at least a little. So I've been trying new things, things that I don't like either because they scare me a little or a lot, or because they really embarrass me. I'm pretty easily embarrassed, so the list of new things to try was rather long. My "Chasing Kittens" blog lists a few new things I had been trying, and here are a few more:

1. I have been longboarding to school and around town. Strange, I know. Someone lent it to my husband and I found in the garage and thought I'd give it a go. This is very unlike me because falling is bad, but falling in public is much worse. I was just gonna ride it in the street in front of my house, but then I needed to get to school and the car was gone and my bike tire was flat... so I tried this new thing and it's been pretty fun. And the funny thing is that it is drawing a lot of attention and I can tell people are getting all sorts of the wrong impression about me. The longboard is very cool and hip; I am not cool and am unhip. So I'm like a rolling irony cruising around campus.

2. Related, but still very unlike me, I've been trying skateboarding. The longboard is nice and smooth and I pretty much just cruise around, maybe taking some hills or getting low on the board. But skateboards are different creatures. Last Thursday on a whim, I decided that I needed to ride it. Joshua and his friend were headed to the skatepark and I tagged along, but only to read a book and maybe chat with the other wife who came. But . . . then I got on it, did some very failed ollies, and rode the halfpipe a little. I fell quite a few times, but it was fun, and in doing it I made a great summer memory.

3. You know how there's food and then there is other plant life that is really just better for admiring in nature? Lettuce is good to eat, while ferns are nice to look at. Don't mix them up. All my life--really, all my life--mushrooms have fallen into that second category. In my yard: "Oooh, look at the cute mushroom." On my plate: "Why? No, seriously, why? For the love of all that is good, get this fungus away from my food." But . . . in the last few weeks I've been eating them! Once in pasta and a couple other times in pizza. Good news: I have not yet died. Further reports to come.

4. I tried riding my bike hands-free today. This was sort of a dumb thing to try because I've been trying it since about the time I got my training wheels off (3 or 4 years ago) and it has never worked. Never ever. So why did I think that today might be my lucky day? I don't know. But I did try it and it worked exceedingly well. I think I went maybe 30 or 40 seconds without touching the handle bars, even going so far as to unclip my backpack chest strap and swing the pack around to the front so I could grab my phone. And no injuries. A few minutes later I was standing and straddling the bike as I waited for traffic to clear so I could cross the street (and not at a crosswalk!!) and the bike fell over, scraping up my left leg and making me wonder about the operations of irony in the world.

5. I went lap swimming. I used to do this regularly until one day it dawned on me that I actually hated it. That was a few years ago and I hadn't been in a pool since then. But today is cardio day and, by the special request of a friend, I grabbed my goggles and donned my old swimsuits (yes, that's plural). Swimming is hard and I don't like it, but I'm still glad that I did it because it's good to do things that I don't like and the other option was running and I don't like that either. So what did I have to lose? Nothing except my annoying amount of whining about how much I dislike lap swimming. I wonder how many fun (or at least okay) things I miss out on because I decided once that I didn't like it.

6. I dropped by a friend's house unannounced. This may very well be the Ironman competition of social phobias. Calling someone is difficult, inviting someone to hang out is really hard, but stopping by their actual house uninvited and unannounced? Wow. That is over-the-top difficult. Now I can't say that I did it without a few second thoughts (the kind where I headed back to the car more than once), but still I did it. And we hung out and had a great time. I came out of the thing completely unscathed. In other words, I took home the trophy :)

Forgive me this sin

It's strange that we can be so uncomfortable with acknowledging personal sin and yet so comfortable in committing it.

Every Friday night I have the privilege of meeting with a group of friends and fellow believers for fellowship and Bible study. We break bread together, study the Word, and share about our personal lives: experiences from the week past, praises, and prayer requests. Meeting with this group once a week has strengthened my faith and provided me with much-needed spiritual nourishment. I love it!

This past Friday night we studied the story of the paralyzed man from John 5: An invalid for 38 years, he hung around the pool of Bethesda, hoping in vain to be the first to get into the pool when the water was stirred and so to be healed, but he had no one to help him. We talked a lot about the idea of hopelessness and marveled that as Jesus passed through the crowd of sickly and maimed, He picked the worst case to reverse... As we came to the end of the study, it seemed that the lesson was that Jesus was the help of the helpless and that we take hold of this help by acting on His promises.

I thought that this was a pretty good setup for my prayer request.

"Well, my request is for a personal area of my helplessness. I'm normally a pretty productive person, but I seem to be inextricably caught in a bout of laziness. It's terrible! And the worst part is that if your problem is lack of willpower, then it is impossible to will yourself to change. So I need prayer that God will cure me of this laziness."

The group didn't want to accept that. I got a couple friendly chuckles and some advice about letting go of my to-do lists. I protested that no, this really was a problem, and someone shared a story about a fellow classmate of ours who throws away his syllabi at the start of every term and ignores due dates and has all A's. I tried to communicate the problem wasn't really about my achievements (my grades are just fine, actually) but rather it's a problem of my character: I need to do things that I don't want to do. After a couple more rebuttals, I said, "Okay, I think I'll just pray for myself." During our time for prayer, someone did actually pray for me, but it was more of a request that God would help all of us get our schoolwork done during this summer semester.

This strange episode seems to me to be indicative of a rampant illness in our Christian communities, a disease I'm calling sin-ambivalence, characterized by the inability to acknowledge specific personal sin as evil, and the overwhelming compulsion to ameliorate any (possibly justified) feelings of guilt. Some symptoms that you may have observed include a reluctance to admit any personal character defect and when such an admission is made it is spoken of in such a light-hearted manner that one might be led to think that this was not sin but rather just some funny idiosyncrasy. When we confess, we often veil the true nature of the problem, preferring to say something like "I just really need to start getting stuff done!" rather than "I am lazy." Furthermore, we tend to phrase any such admission in such a way as to avoid the impression that this was not some slip or accident, but rather something very in tune with the feelings of our hearts. (Notice how in my own confession, I mentioned how I was normally a productive person, as if to say that this problem was really out of character for me.) When we talk about sin, we rather prefer to talk about sins generally, with the eager agreement that we're all sinners and the underlying feeling that there's nothing we can really do about it and we really shouldn't hold it against ourselves or each other.

please don't make me admit my sinfulness.

On the rare occasion that someone does confess a sin, our first instinct is to make that person feel better. The first words out of our mouths are "It's okay." We assure him that a lot of people probably struggle with this and that it's nothing to be ashamed of. (I get the distinct impression from the Bible, however, that sin is exactly the thing we ought to be ashamed of.) We make sure to remove the sense of personal responsibility from the confessor at almost all costs, steering clear of any suggestion that her personal choice might be the cause. (Since alcoholism is called a disease, perhaps we've concluded that any thing we do that we don't approve of is also a disease, out of our control and not really our fault.) When we ask for prayer so often we avoid the personal. It seems to me that while we avoid making any requests that could give the right impression about our spiritual needs, we're eager to bring up to the group Aunt Sally and her disease. (But the Jesus who heals the paralytic also heals our souls... right?)

I honestly and truly feel that my laziness is a sin and that it is a personal character defect that is interfering with my spiritual well-being. When Jesus bore my sins on the cross--the sins that crushed out His life--I believe that He carried my laziness. And when I choose laziness, I think that it really is an act of rebellion against God, choosing my own desires over His and rejecting His lordship in my life. In other words, I think it's really bad!

And when I confessed it to the group I wanted to feel better, but not because they convinced me that it wasn't really a problem. I wanted to feel better because I received assurance of Christ's power in my life and of their intercession on my behalf. Strangely enough, their attempts to clear me of any wrong doing kinda just made me feel invalidated.

sin isn't that bad. clearly.

Sweet Jesus, I need You... Forgive me this sin: not hookers or heroine, gambling or gin. It sounds so ridiculous but I just can't lick this. I need a miracle, Someone to help me help myself. Laziness cuts me like fine cutlery...

homesickness.

All my life I've lived without getting homesick. As a kid, I loved sleepovers and trips. I never missed my family. I wasn't sad about not being in my own bed. I was never homesick.

When I moved to Tennessee for college, I started to get a different but related illness called homeproud. That's different from homesickness in that it is characterized not by melancholy feelings of longing and wistfulness, but rather by its strong feelings about the superiority of your home to this other place. Tennessee was hot and humid (and later I would find out that it also got very cold and humid), there were no mountains anywhere, the bugs were huge and noisy and included disgusting creatures like cockroaches, the people that lived there would talk to you as if they were not complete strangers... I didn't like this place, at least not in comparison to the Northwest that I had left behind. But still, I wasn't homesick. Just homeproud.

After college I moved back home to Portland, Oregon. While I was there, I saw this sign advertising the state fair:

That's Oregon, I thought, nestled there among the other great states of the Northwest: the Evergreen state (Washington), the Gem state (Idaho), the Treasure state (Montana)... The Northwest is really the land of my longings.

Now I live in Michigan and I've realized that every place has its charms, and I try to live presently within each day and not always be reaching forward or backward for something else. But there are days when the air is different here---when the sky is gray and the earth is dark and fresh, when every shade of green is ringing out from budding leaf and springing blade of grass, when the air is clean and smelling of fir, when the songbirds sing familiar tunes and rain feels close--- There are days like that, days when my Northwest home seems so close. Those are the days that I miss it the most.

I'm homesick.

lunch and Christmas in May

A crowded restaurant, bustling with patrons and filled with the chatter of conversation and the clatter of silverware. Our table, scattered with half-filled glasses and packed with plates emptied of salads and sandwiches and pastas. Our attention, focused on getting acquainted with new friends and re-connected with old ones, centered in the immediate things---lingering tastes, feelings of fullness, the hardness of the chairs, the words to say next.

Then.

First the opening notes intone, then my eye catches up to see a group of teenagers across the restaurant. As their music unfolds, forks are silenced and words fall quiet. The clamoring of the crowd slows, then stops. This choir is captivating a captive audience. They sing of Christ and His holy, humble birth. While the conductor's hands swing and gesture round, the young voices rise and fall, divide and meet again, expand and shrink. Their song moves me away from my seat and to the fields beside the curious shepherds and into the stable scattered with straw and beside the rough trough, my eyes to behold the heavenly King wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Their act of random beauty had become a gateway for me to spiritual contemplation. That day I had both lunch and Christmas in May.