If You're Not Spending the Evening With Your Valentine

Here it is- 6:45pm on Valentine's Day.

If you get to be with your Valentine today, Happy Valentine's Day!  I hope that you're spending the day being loved well by the one you love.  If you happen to find yourself at Red Lobster, please eat a Cheddar Bay Biscuit on my behalf.  Seriously.

But this message isn't really for you.

This message is for us.

Those of us who don't look forward to Valentine's Day.  Those of us who squeeze our eyes shut tight and try to get through the day with as little sorrow as possible.  We, who walk that line, sometimes less-than-successfully, of trying to not seem jaded or bitter or jealous or lonely on this day that makes us feel most jaded or bitter or jealous or lonely.

This message?  It's for me, from my Father.  And if God is your Father too, and you hurt on February 14 too, then this message is for you, too.

If you don't have a Valentine
If you have never known a February 14th with a Valentine and you wonder why
If you can't be with your Valentine today because they have gone where you can't follow
If your own arms are empty and you wish for nothing more than to celebrate this day with your own little ones

I'm sorry for how much harder this day can make that.  I'm sorry with the groaning, weeping, gut-wrenching sorrow of someone who understands each of these places.

Will you let me remind you?  You are not forgotten in the chaotic mess of pink and hearts and red and flowers not for you.

I see you.

Better, far better, God sees you.

He holds our tears in a bottle, yours and mine- not forgotten; never wasted.  Each tear for a purpose, Truth tells us, though Feelings tries to convince us otherwise.  Don't believe Feelings.

Remember with me that Truth is more important than Feelings.  The Truth is that we couldn't be more loved- not if our kitchen tables and office desks were veritable mountains of rose bouquets or if we'd gotten enough chocolates today to send us into a sugar coma to last until the first good spring thaw.  We couldn't be more loved, even if our arms were full of someone to love.

Remember with me that this world is not our Home.

Home is coming, though.

Home will be when our feelings and Truth finally match up.  When we will not only KNOW we are loved, but we will FEEL loved beyond our wildest dreams.  Love so deep and unconditional and full and rich and nourishing and playful and glittering and perfect, that hearts and chocolates and flowers won't stand a chance.  We will forgot the sensation of being lonely.  Can you even imagine!?!?

We will know only the Truth of Love.  And it will be forever.

But in the meantime, you and me?  We're going to fight our way through.  We're going to press into Jesus and know that He will sustain us and that one day all will be well, though today feels anything but.  I am praying you through today.  Will you do the same for me?

And now I leave you not with Happy Valentine's Day, but with a better closing, and this if for all of us who call God Father:

Cling to Truth until we're home, friend.   One day in Heaven.

Did you hear the train?

Yesterday my nephew, who's four, was here for a quick visit.  Oakley loves trains.  And by that I mean he LOVES trains with the fire of a thousand burning suns.

Anyway, we were walking up to an electronics store, where his dad was looking for a gift for his mom, "from the kids".  As I was opening the door to let Oakley in, he turned suddenly to look at me with wide eyes.  "I hear a twain!" he exclaimed.

I listened, and he was right.  There was a train whistle blowing.  But if he hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have noticed.  If I had continued into the store and you had asked me, "Was there a train whistle blowing outside?" I'd have said no.  With confidence, no less.  And I'd have been sure I was right.  I didn't hear it because I wasn't listening for it.  It's not that I don't like trains.  They're fine.  But Oakley?  That boy lives and breathes trains.  His love of them causes him to be forever tuned in.  He is always, under the surface, listening for trains.  And so he hears them.

I can't shake the memory of the excitement on Oakley's little face, and how I felt when I realized that I was totally missing what was so important to him.  I can't shake it because of the spiritual lesson it reminds me of.  We hear what we're listening for.  We see what we're watching for.

God isn't hiding.  He isn't hard at work in exotic mission fields only.  His visions and dreams aren't blocked from the Western world by some sort of high-energy microwaves.  What blocks him out is us.  Someone says God spoke to them in a dream and we pass it off as indigestion.  We're not looking.  We're not listening.  We're walking through life, spiritually blindfolded with spiritual earplugs firmly in place.

We have forgotten silence.  It makes us nervous; and no wonder.  It is in the silence that the Spirit can speak to us.  He comes in the still, small voice, remember?  We fear what He has to say to us.  Will He insist that we surrender something?  Will he press us to do something that frightens us?  Will He poke and prod at a wound long covered, long ago sustained, but never healed?  And so we drown out the silence.

We scorn stillness. We call it laziness.  And worse than that, we ignore the entreaties of our God to be still, and we say instead that Good Christians work for the Lord.  Never mind that the Lord asks us to come away; to walk away from all the bustling and be alone with Him.  Never mind that this is the pattern set for us by God's own Son.  We decide for him that God understands.  That family needs me to bring them a casserole.  My kid's science fair project is due tomorrow.  My house hasn't been dusted for weeks and the in-laws will be here soon.  I have to bring snacks for the Bible study.  We leave no time to be still.  We make excuses and we stay busy and we un-learn how to do it, so that even if we give it a half-hearted attempt, we fail.  We fidget.  We check our email.  We look at our watches.  We make mental lists of things we need to accomplish.  We've forgotten the skill of stillness.

And all of this points to the same problem.  We are too busy being good for God to be with God.  We are too busy serving to be still.  And at the heart of it, hidden deep down beneath layers of spiritualization and justification to protect us from the sinfulness, is fear.

We fear that what we will hear, what God will tell us or ask of us, will be too much.  Too hard.  Too scary.  Too impractical.  Too radical.  We fear the opinions of those around us.  Our family.  Our friends.  Our churches.  We have decided that refusing to hear is less sinful than refusing to obey.

We know how the world perceives radicals.  It's not positive.  We don't want that.  We want, instead, the clean, sanitary, bright-and-shiny GOODness, and not the unknown of GODliness.

We don't hear the train whistle because we're not listening for it.

We don't hear God's voice because we've made a concerted effort to drown it out.

But God isn't asking us to be good.  He is asking us to be Godly.  To face down our fears and trust him enough to look foolish.  Trust him enough to seem irresponsible.  Trust him enough to let others- even others in the Church- call us radical.

We resist.  We do life half-heartedly, and because of that we become overwhelmed with all the things that pull at us.  We try to get by on spiritual junk food, and then are mystified when we have no spiritual energy.  What God calls us to do is not possible without his power.  And we cannot tap into that power if we're not listening and obeying.

God will not empower us to do busywork in order to ignore His true calling in our lives.

We're doing it wrong, Church.  We're doing it half-way, and half-way doesn't cut it.  The whole world is watching.  They're watching us do it wrong and label it "GOD" and suffer through life.  Why on earth would that draw them in?!?  This should not be.  Because it's not just yourself that you're making miserable.  It's ruining your reflection of God, too.

All or nothing.

Embrace the unknown.

Listen for the train.

Lost and Found

This is where I keep my earbuds.  See them?  They live here on the hook by the door for easy access when I go to the gym.  This system was working pretty well.

Then I got kitties.  Here they are.  The little black one is Daisy and the biggest gray one is Mary.  They're nice.  I like them.

And yet, there are a few downsides to cats.  One is that kittens like to play with...well...nearly everything.  And knowing this, I decided to hide my earbuds so Daisy didn't chew them or relocate them for me.  So I did.  And then the next time I went to the gym, I couldn't find them.  I couldn't remember if I'd put them away somewhere, or if I'd just planned to do that and in the meantime, Daisy made off with them.  I figured that Daisy had probably batted them off the hook and stashed them away somewhere, like a crazy squirrel.  So I looked for them.  I looked lots of places.  Like under the bed...  

And under the dresser...

 Under the couch cushions.  No earbuds, but I found my long-lost barrette!  Yay!  I also found a hair ribbon and a tube of chapstick that I know aren't mine.  Ew.

They weren't here, either...

They weren't here (this is behind the couch)

I bet you wish you could have looked in here!  Lots of stuff, but no earbuds.  :(

Maybe in the cleaning bucket?  Nice try.  But no.

Under the bathroom sink?  Nope.  But I found some other junk.

Not behind the TV, either.

How about the stack of stuff I haven't organized yet in the Spare Oom?  That's a negative, Ghost Rider.

I put off looking in the basement as long as possible.  There is a really impressive collection of random stuff down there.  Also a bunch of gigundopedes.  Ew.

[if you don't know what a gigundopede is, you can find it in google images under "house centipede".  For the squeamish among my readers, I will not post a picture here.  You're welcome.]

No earbuds here either.

Earbud free area.

Even underneath.

And then, after about 10 days of looking, I finally found them.  Here they are!  Do you see them?

Look closely at the bottom of the scarf.

Yep, they are right where they always were.  I put the scarf there to hide them from Daisy.  It worked!  It also effectively hid them from...me.

Sheesh.

Red Box Encounter

Tonight I waited patiently behind a college-aged guy with an arm covered in tatoos and his two buddies at the RedBox at Walmart.  His chewing tobacco spit bottle was sitting on top of the machine, and his friends were loitering off to the side, lanky and restless.

He was swiping his card as I walked up.  We all waited awkwardly for the machine to spit out his game.  By the time it did, the guy has started talking to his friends and doesn't notice.

I notice.

I decide not to be bossy and wait for him to notice, too.  He doesn't.

Eventually the machine sucks the game back in and displays an error message.  The guy notices that.   "What the...?"  He reads the error message and reports it to the boys.  They shift impatiently and make sounds of general unrest.  The guy debates trying again.  Maybe the machine is broken.  I finally speak up.

"You waited too long to take it.  It'll work if you try again."

"It came out?"

"Yah."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Well, I thought you would see it..."

"You shoulda been like, "He, Tatto-guy, stop talkin' and get your game."

We all laugh as I somewhat feebly defend myself by saying I didn't know it would get sucked back in if he waited too long.

"I guess I'll do it AGAIN," he said pointedly, looking at me in mock accusation.  Finally, the hard-to-get game makes its second appearance of the evening.

As he leaves, Tatto-guy turns to me and says, "You have a good Saturday night."

And we part ways.