Hmm, What am I thinking….
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Life

I have been spinning Mary Chapin Carpenter’s cd The Calling. (I am also reading a book by Robert Coles, more L’Engle stuff, and Dostoevsky so not all pressure for my ranting here falls on MC2) I really am provoked by her cd. Maybe it’s one of those intersections in your life when you see, hear, connect with an artist’s medium just when you need it. I just know that when it plays something soul deep in my heart is straining beating wildly against my chest so hard that I feel like wrapping something around my rib cage in case this breaks and splinters my sternum on the way out.

I mean songs on the album speak to “your life’s story” and I know even the word ‘story’ is like an electrified buzz word in my grey matter. She also uses April charged words like ‘grace’ and ‘calling’. She is an incredible story teller. In her song, Houston, she tells the story of a family caught in the assault of Hurricane Katrina.

I guess words like ‘journey’, ‘home’, and ‘driven’ just make that private place in me that is susceptible to my searching soul  screaming to set out on a quest for participating in something bigger than me stand up in attention. Rick Warren writes in The Purpose Driven Life:

It’s human nature to get distracted by minor issues. We play Trivial Pursuit with our lives. Henry David Thoreau observed that people live lives of “quiet desperation,” but today a better description is aimless distraction. Many people are like gyroscopes spinning around at a frantic pace but never going anywhere.  (P.32)

If you want your life to have impact, focus it! Stop dabbling. Stop trying to do it all. Do less. Prune away even good activities and do only that which matters most. Never confuse activity with productivity. You can be busy without a purpose, but what’s the point?  (P.32-33)

I feel so much of a frantic, fanatical struggle in me to measure up to the expectations of others some days. Then I feel the compulsion of “the call” that Carpenter talks about in her music on this cd tugging at me as well. The two can seem in competition. Warren talks about how God’s will and purpose for our lives is the key to joy in living. I hear that and get it.

The trouble for me most days is that I am waiting for a holy syllabus to be passed down so I can “fulfill my purpose” per divine specs. When “the call” and “purpose” are so general I am left often feeling directionless. I am a rule follower. I am a person who loves “the check list relationship guide”. It looks a little like this:

“April, if you do this and that at this point, then I will be pleased and our relationship is solid and on track.”

 ”April, if you accomplish this then you will have purpose and life will make sense.”

“April, you were meant to do thus and such. Do that and you will be in His will.”

Life doesn’t work that way. No one is going to lay it all out play by play for me.

I do totally believe that there are certain rules and guides that should be followed. There is the golden rule. There is “go make disciples” (Which I believe is different than the traditional evangelical assault tactics of pressuring folks into a carbon copy of their personal versions of Jesus that I grew up with. It stands in contrast I think with introducing them to the person, Jesus Christ . There is often such a lack of love in how we share our story and His story and the intersection of the two  who wants that! There is a difference between introducing people to Jesus and expecting people to look just like me.). There is “a cup of cold water in His name” and “when you did it for the least of these my brothers, you did it unto me”. I get that. There is reading and searching out for yourself what is said rather than just blindly following the moral majority because it’s easier than asking why they believe this, and what was actually meant by what you heard, read, or saw. Don’t get me wrong, I am all about morals and ethics – Judeo Christian morals and ethics, but me the issue is that we’d rather have a falible human person give us a hand written set of those than do the work of reading the Word, asking questions, praying, and researching ourselves. Then we join a band wagon to impose those regurgitated belief on others without checking out the Truth of the matter or loving well. There really is nothing wrong with asking good solid questions.

The calling and life is so much more complex and complicated and challenging than what I grew up believing. It’s true the Word never changes but my view of God does. He gets bigger every year. How to love Him and how to love others gets bigger and more contradictory. People who say they love him make it so hard to love our brother because the argument are the same from those who are and those who aren’t loving Him . “Side with me. If you don’t then one side says you aren’t tolerant or accepting.” The other side says “if you love that person then you are sanctioning behaviors that are wrong.” You can’t just live and love and serve without reservation which is what I think is most Christ like.

He didn’t take on the lifestyle of everyone he met – prostitutes, the militant, the aggressors, the adulteress, the drunk, the thieves, the broken. But he did love and was welcomed by those folks. Jesus was an outcast only among those who thought they had it all together. Those who were “in the right” and confident about their own morality really disliked Him. That often bugs me in light of my own life because I don’t want to make ripples. I don’t want to not blend in everywhere. People talk about Jesus being as L’Engle terms Him, “a universe disturber”, and here I sit out of contact, disconnected, and untouchable because that is safe. Here I sit without getting “too involved” because I don’t want the messiness. I want it peaceful, quiet, and morally clean. The trouble is that doesn’t really sound like Jesus.

   If living God’s will is the way to finding my ultimate purpose then it seems that in my calling – which I think is writing and how I live as I touch people in my sphere of influence- then I am going to make some really “good folks” angry, confused, and disenchanted. I won’t fit in with the “in crowd”. (and that still hurts my heart just like it did in junior high oddly enough) I won’t have an easy life. The modern life philosophy of ‘Don’t I deserve to be happy?’ won’t apply to me. I don’t deserve happiness. I am sometimes blessed with moments of it, but I don’t deserve it. The idol of this age, ‘comfort’ won’t be mine either. Whew. It won’t always feel good to be the me I was created to be.

But I do believe that I will be gifted with some genuine, rich friendships. Jesus was. I believe I will experience real love. Jesus did. I believe I will eventually get past the noise and confusion to peace and joy. Check the garden out. I will leave a legacy if I really care about others with no regard to whether they deserve it or not or look like me or not. It won’t matter if I change their lifestyle because by loving them I will change their world and mine. It might bleed over into helping them do the right thing, but that’s not really the point. Were they loved responsibly and without condition- that is the point. What they do with that love is their business. My business is to lavishly give Love away.

That is purpose. Revealing it in what I am passionate about doing… that is fulfilling my calling.

Currently listening : The Calling By Mary Chapin Carpenter Release date: 2007-03-06

In Memorium 09-06-07

Category: Life

Many Waters,but they shouldn’t) is the tip of an astounding iceberg of incredible work by a woman who could write about children, teens, or adults and matters of art, science, government, music, literature, espionage, theology, philosophy, history, love, parenting, loss, emotions, life, and so much more.

I never met her in person. I wish that I could say that I had. I did write to her and tell her thank you and her wonderful granddaughters shared the letter with her and wrote me in return. I have shared before that one of my all time favorite song writers Andrew Peterson wrote a line about the late Rich Mullins (both men, also heroes of mine) that said, “He never really knew me at all, but I loved him just the same.” I felt that way about Madeleine. She challenged me. She provoked me. She encouraged me. She mentored me. She inspired me. She still does through her works.

If I had five minutes to sit and speak to her; if I were given audience with her for just a few minutes, I know without a doubt that no matter how incredibly child like or simple or just plain nuts it might sound, I would say again what I already told her in my letter.

. Madeleine L’Engle will be celebrating a year in heaven this Saturday, Sept. 6. I hope she gets to hear Rich Mullins lead the hallelujah chorus or something like it on the hammered dulcimer …………And I hope she hears the eternal thank you from me and others like me.  

  “Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much, but the butterfly is a small creature to affect galaxies thousands of light years away.”

 (On personal significance and scientific theory of the butterfly effect)
(Madeleine L’Engle, A Stone for a Pillow, 97)

Oh Madeleine, you let me ride on zodiacs at sea

You allowed me the chance to hear hoof beats

 Of a unicorn

Madeleine, you gave me hope that there can be

The perfectly imperfect family;

The extraordinary in the common place- like a starfish.

You whisked me across wrinkled time

We found a Love that can’t be defined

You gave me a fresh view of faith, music, and art.

And I miss you.

Oh Madeleine, I always cry to read of your Joshua’s fall.

I read again of Louise, feathers, and the wall

And Meg’s my hero.

Oh Madeleine, I find myself on a bridge in the Crosswicks’ rain

The joys of love thrill me time and again

I think of Tallis, Vicky, poetry, and penguins.

I felt so very misunderstood till I met you

I could believe the miraculous and in simple truth.

You give me hope that my dreams and visions weren’t that odd

You gave me a bigger view of our micro – macro cosmic God.

And I miss you.

And there’s so much more

To one day thank you for. ~ April

Currently listening : The World as Best as I Remember It, Vol. 2 By Rich Mullins Release date: 1993-02-01