In the throes of death

I watched a fly die this afternoon.

I was trying to read a book in the Seminary commons, but a persistent and sporadic buzzing kept distracting me. I looked over to see a fly on its back, about 10 feet from me, buzzing and flailing its little fly legs. It couldn't aright itself. It couldn't fly. It couldn't move. Then it quit struggling, and I thought that was surely the last of the fly. I sort of mourned its death and thought again about the transience of life and what it must be like to be in the last moments of life before death comes...

I returned to my book and shortly thereafter the buzzing started again. This time I cared less about the stupid fly and just wanted to be left to read my book in peace. It buzzed, it flailed, it ceased, it died. And I enjoyed the quiet.

Mark! You changed my life!

The book of Mark.
It's changed my life not once but twice---

I was a young teenager and over the last several weeks something crazy happened to me. I encountered the word of God: beautiful and full of truth. I encountered the Word of God: beautiful and powerful. I began to pray, to worship, to search the Scripture. Life was changing. As that summer drew to a close, there was a decision point. It was time to go back to school in California which meant that I would be leaving this community of Christian disciples in Washington. . . . I had the hem of Christ's garment in one hand, and my torn fishing net in the other. What to do? To leave Washington meant basically giving up my faith. I knew that to go back home would be to sound a death knell to this new discipleship. But to stay in Washington meant leaving home, leaving my family, leaving my friends and everything I knew.

Then God brought to me Mark 10:29-31.
"'I tell you the truth,' Jesus said, 'no one who has left homes or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel, will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and fields--and with them, persecution) and in the age to come, eternal life. Many that are first will be last, and the last first."

That was it. I knew what I had to do. After some thoughtfulness and trepidation, I phoned my mother to tell her I was moving to Washington. I had become a disciple of Christ.

Stillness. Silence. Secrets. Sunlight.

The parlor was completely empty.

The thick, dense carpet silenced any sound that dared drop to the floor.

The sunlight drifting through the window revealed the only visible motion:

  the motes, swirling and suspended in light, headed neither up nor down. Lost in space. Lost there, right in front of her.

The man next to her, the man touching the top of her hand, he leaned slightly toward her and whispered his great secret.

Inside of her: those few words cut inside of her like a finely sharpened filet knife. 

Through the young, pale skin. through the subcutaneous fat, slicing through the fascia and through the lateral abdominal muscles. they cut through the dark and mysterious, lively cavity and cut through to her spine, severing the bundle of nerves at the middle of her back. Her movement was gone, paralyzed by his secret.

Stillness. Silence. Sunlight.

My terror is ordinary

I'm terrified of being trapped into ordinary life. 

I'm absolutely terrified of being trapped into an ordinary life. 

Banal, pedestrian, dull, boring, tedious, quotidian, monotonous, uneventful, unremarkable, tiresome, wearisome, uninspired, unimaginative, unexciting, unvaried, repetitive, routine, commonplace, mundane, humdrum, lifeless, insipid, vapid, flat, bland, dry, stale, LAME.

Please, God, remove me as a brand from the smoldering pile of insipid living.

>>This fits in perfectly with

my existential crisis

http://bit.ly/aKPrye

 "Your life is Eden."