Edenic "Consummation"?

They didn’t have to try very hard but my sister and brother-in-law talked me into staying another day in Denver on my trek back home to Minnesota. All Shelli had to say is “art museum…library across the street” and I made my decision.

So, I’m coffee shop, library, and art museum hopping this morning instead of sitting in the driver’s seat. Thinking. And getting my soul filled with art and writing.

This whole idea of “gifting” is going deeper and deeper for me. I guess that was part of the purpose of what happened this summer. But the more I think about it the more I have the distinct conviction that the notion of personal gifting (or whatever you want to call it) is actually not peripheral but very central to the gospel message. I’ve never made the connection before but it seems glaringly clear to me now…and therefore something that I can’t not live and pursue. In faith and freedom.

Here it is: Jesus didn’t come just so that we wouldn’t go to Hell. He didn’t just come so that we would have “life.” He came for a whole ‘nother thing that’s above and beyond that: He came that we would have life to the fullest.* There’s so much packed into that little phrase. He didn’t come so just so that I wouldn’t perish. His very heart is that I would begin my long, arduous, and profoundly rewarding trek back to, well, “Eden.”

In using the word Eden I do not refer to geography. In Scripture, the Garden of Eden is not only an actual place but it also represents what God originally intended our communion with Him to look like. Furthermore, just as the Garden’s very design and purpose was to be context to foster said communion with God, so was our very existence for the same purpose—which means that such Communion is the consummation of our existence. So basically, the Garden was a place for that to happen and now remains a reminder of the pinnacle of how things were meant to be. Then, skip forward thousands of years (how many thousands I do not care to dispute), Jesus made that Edenic Communion a possibility once more.

So that’s what faith is about. It’s infinitely more than just not going to Hell. The idea that “not going to Hell” is all Christianity is about may be one of the most terrible and, unfortunately, effective lies. In truth it’s essentially about “getting back to Eden,” if you will.

That said, there’s another deeper nuance to the idea of Eden. I think the best word that I can use right now to describe it is “uniqueness.” (I’m still mulling this over, but) I think that maybe inherent in the idea of Free Will is the idea of Uniqueness. Uniqueness is tied in with the autonomy that is innate in Free Will (which necessarily also prescribes the freedom to not choose this Consummation that I’ve described, but that’s another blogpost). All of that to say: I think that if we’re designed to make choices then we necessarily are also designed to be unique on and individual to individual basis (I realize that I’m stating the obvious, but please just allow me to explore—however poorly—the underlying philosophy).

So, if the Consummation that Eden represents is the very purpose of our existence then that must naturally mean that the Consummation of our Uniqueness is at the center of the Heart of God as well.

And that is why I’m beginning to think that the idea of gifting is so married to the fullness of the Gospel: God wants us to become everything He created each of our unique selves to be. That takes figuring out the unique talents, gifts, strengths (whatever your brand of appellation for them happens to be)—and maybe some of the weaknesses too—and allowing God to place in you in a spot where those qualities He gave you will be refined, honed, channeled and brought to their ultimate, again (not to overuse the word) consummation.

The Christian walk therefore, in it’s truest form, makes its adherents anything but homogenous; and that’s the beauty of it. The Body of Christ, when we are all walking in the Light and Path that we are designed to then everyone is, yes, “on the same page” but that does not mean that we are all the same. Actually, if two or more are "on the same page" then that is because we are reading the same pages and are in the same Spirit. This means that the Church being what it’s supposed to be—that is, every individual on this path back to Eden, a path that inherently requires a very real corporate community to healthfully accomplish—would be the most perfect representation of Diversity that could ever exist.

And this why “gifting” is so essential to the heart of the Gospel.  The Gospel essentially says, “be made whole, be restored to your original design, just be the YOU that you were created to be. It’s not as easy or simple as it sounds but it’s what you were created for and therefore your soul will never stop longing for it until you get on this truest of Bandwagons that ever existed….”

So: I need to be me. I need to allow this artist in me to be and to blossom, even if I’ve never seen myself this way because it’s “impractical.” I don’t get to make the rules, I don’t get to decide what’s “practical” and what’s not. The Edenic Economy has completely different rules and I’m finally kind of starting to read the “Rulebook” with this hermeneutic. It’s Truth, and it’s freeing because, well, because “…the truth will make you free….”**

When you look at it this way, it’s a wonder anyone sees the Gospel as a constraint on life. It’s actually is as real as it gets.

(Day 7)

*John 10:10

**John 8:32

(Day 6)

I don't have much to say today.

I spent the day in the car between Salt Lake City, UT and Denver, CO. I spent most of that time listening to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I have some thoughts brewing, but I won't begin to express them until I've finished the audiobook. I think it was Hemingway that once commented on how deeply the Russians make you feel. It's so true.

I'm realizing that in going back to Minnesota I am going to be entering into a period of time when there will be very little spiritual "in-pour" into my life and I need to learn what that looks like and how to be healthy with that. Should be interesting. But I'm glad that I'm aware that I need to change some of my expectations on that front, and that I'll need to be more vigilant about self-care (as my sister calls it).

I mean, if I'm ever going to live overseas I need to at least understand this. Alaska was rich in friendship and now Katie, my last remnant of that (and a strong one) is gone. Lord, help me.

That's all.

(Day 6)

Road Trip

Sometimes you just need your best friends.

I got back to Minnesota (from Europe) drained. Emotionally drained from all the good and bad and realized that while I had had a steady stream of emotional outpour I was running on low myself—I realized that very little in-pour had happened this summer. It was time. I knew where I needed to go. So I called Karissa and asked if I could drive out. Then I told Abby I was going…just to see if she could make it happen. Didn’t take much for her to be in on the weekend.

The morning after the retreat I hit the road to Utah and spent 2 days by myself in a car with Tolstoy, stopped in Denver to sleep and spend some quality time with my sister and then arrived here in Utah on Tuesday. I leave Utah tomorrow, but this has been good. And the mountains…ahhhhh….

Karissa and her husband Matt are foster parents. There’s been a lot of outpour from their lives too in the last year as well. Abby’s in a better place than she feels she’s been in a while and, seriously, talk about a breath of fresh air to all be together! I never cease to be amazed at how blessed I am in these two. On the friendship front, God has been incredibly good to me.

Every once in a while (usually exactly when I need it) I am reminded of what the deepness of friendship can mean. None of us are blind to each other’s faults and we’ve walked through a lot of ugly together. So. Many. Tears. But the joy—oh the joy. And the grace. Wow. I think I needed to be reminded that I have this beautiful thing in Abby and Karissa and to be filled up by it. It’s amazing how I can be filled by them just “being them” and just knowing that they know me and they know me well and not only do they still love me but they love me very, very deeply and they still respect me.

And it’s mutual. I feel as if I’ve very poorly summarized what these two mean to me but beyond all that I’m not sure I have words. So, suffice it to say, I needed to come to Utah and I’m so glad I hopped in that car. I’ll go home filled up. :)

(Day 5)

A "Released" Amateur

I said that I wanted to write more about “writing.” Here goes.

I’ve never seen myself as an artist. I’ve actually seen a lot of things about myself and things that I love as simply fragmented and incoherent aspects of me and I’ve often struggled to figure out how they fit together and even tried to get rid of some because they just “didn’t make sense.”

The fact that I love to write has always been one of those things. It never really made sense or seemed useful (by the classic American standard: money). Also the fact that I love Italy, the fact that I also love mountains, but the fact that I’m a bookworm too and then the fact that…*sigh* the list goes on.

But this summer I feel like God has been addressing these things one after another and telling me to be me. If I am going to encourage others to be everything they are meant to be then I must explore this in my own life and God gives me unqualified permission to love the things he created me to love.

That said, I’m beginning to come to grips with the artist’s soul in me, and it feels really good. It’s not an academic degree, it’s no formation or education in me, it’s actually a part of my constitution. And I need to cultivate that. Because He gave it to me. Period.

It started with a question that someone in Italy posed me this summer. I was describing the whole legal education thing and what that meant for me and they said: “But what about your passion for art and literature?”

I had never had anyone ask me that before. It made me think, and then it surprised me how much it made me think. In my culture, art and literature is highly impractical and so in a way it is considered respectable to not pursue it. In Italy, it seems that this is less so. So, I thought a lot about that question. This summer I admonished someone to become all they were meant to be through Christ and then realized that there were areas of my life to which I needed to apply that very principle.

But this release has not been difficult, it’s been so freeing and it feels great. I ruminated on this question for a while and discussed it with a fellow writer friend. She encouraged me to ignore the “amateur” part and bolstered my already burgeoning conviction that I just need to sit down and start doing this.

And in all of the discipline I’ve learned all of these years I’ve never applied any of it to my writing. And it’s day 4 and I love this so far! I feel that what I’m offering on a daily basis (thus far) isn’t as deep as some of the posts that mustered in the past but I feel like I’m covering a breadth that I’ve hitherto never explored.

As far as the literature part goes, I have dared to sign up for a highly "impractical" course in law school called "Law and Literature." Only because I love literature. And that's okay. I'm really excited about the books (and plays) we'll be reading and having a forum to discuss it.

Anyway, that’s all for today. I will not always be able to say this so I’m just going to take advantage of the opportunity now: I love this “being who I’m supposed to be” thing. :)

(Day 4)

Common Denominator: It's Not About Me

I eventually want to talk more about how this whole resolve to “write” came about but it's difficult to do without taking a moment to explain the difficult part of being in Italy this last summer. And it’s hard to talk about the “difficult” vaguely, but since I want to move on to talking about the very positive things that have born out of the painful situation so far, I’m going to try.

Over the last couple of years I have been exploring the idea of “spiritual gifts” and what that means in the Church today (the church meaning the biblical version which may or may not correspond with where I spend my Sunday mornings) and in my life today. I had come to some conclusions but as soon as I’d felt that I’d nailed some things down in my theology and was feeling more “confident” in my own “gifting” then all of that mental and heart work was put powerfully into question in Italy. I'll come back to this, but this last weekend was extremely timely as I needed to sort through some of said question. And I did.

First of all, during the retreat I was able to articulate what the common denominator is between all of my supposed gifts: intercession. Not “intercession” in the sense of intercessory prayer—even though that happens sometimes—but intercession in the sense that all of my gifts (it’s still hard not to use that word without quotation marks) are gifts that go between things:

•  Prophecy (not telling the future, it’s truth-telling) goes between a truth and a person.
•  Teaching/Discipleship goes between knowledge and/or wisdom and a person.
• Communication (still thinking about this one, I’m not always effective at it, but I do have a heart for it which plays very directly into my love for language) goes between ideas and people. 
• Advocacy (enough said).

All of these things share one common denominator: they’re not really about me. I’m often meant to be a "go between" and my gifts center around relaying something that has nothing to do with me. This was incredibly enlightening to me because it made me realize where my weakness then lies: when I make it about me. That means, when I take personally however the situation goes--good or bad.

I think of all these gifts I’ve struggled most with the prophecy. Paul tells us we’re all supposed to seek it out and desire it but frankly it’s the one I find the hardest. It’s so many things but the words "isolating" and "painful" are the first to pop into mind.

Ever since my prayer life took off, things got harder. But I remember a couple of years ago, before I went to law school I could feel God asking me to say yes to “intercession.” In my head at the time that meant "intercessory prayer," of course, and the idea freaked me out. But I remember being facedown in tears on Secora’s living room floor in the dead of winter and saying “yes” to God about it with her as a witness.  I had no idea that what I was getting into was way broader than merely spending hours in my closet in prayer at odd and random times for who knows what--well, basically way broader than the small idea I had in my head. Actually, it turns out, He’d been breeding this in me for years.

So yeah, prayer and “prophecy” got harder. I started hearing things. I started getting insight into things that I couldn’t always talk about or even feel like I could trust. I started seeing situations as if they were on a completely different plane of existence than the one I was waking up in every morning. I don’t know if all of this makes sense but suffice it to say that while it got more and more painful it also has gotten (as I’ve written so many times before) more and more REAL. But I often doubt it. I often doubt whether or not my spirit hears things or my flesh gets in the way and I mess things up. It’s such a fine line to walk and one that take extraordinary sensitivity and investment. It’s exhausting.

But just as I was starting to get in a groove about this, God threw me a curveball this summer: I felt Him ask me to do something far and beyond what I’d ever heard before and it was, well, kinda crazy.  I was asked to be far more vulnerable that I was comfortable being and I was asked to go into a far more vulnerable place than I would have ever been comfortable going and there was no small measure of "relay" involved. 

I didn’t know if I was hearing right. I fasted for 3 days to get to the bottom of it and I did: "GO." I knew it wasn’t me because there wasn't an atom in me that wanted to perform this aforementioned "relay." And I went. 

And it did not go well….Yeah, suffice it to say, it did not go well. The situation is very complex--indeed far more than I had any idea--and the whole affair ended up taking a direction I could have never foreseen. And really, it all ended up being far more personal even for me than I had expected the situation to be. It's messy loving people. But anyway, it goes perhaps without saying that it kind of rocked my emotional world. What was that? It's still kind of painful even to write that, actually.

Anyway, it took a month of processing to get to the point where I was even ready to pursue the idea of gifting again. I thought I was sure about all of this stuff (FINALLY) and then this happened. And while all of the logical, biblical mantras ring true about “prophets” (again, truth-bearers not fortune-tellers) being perennially misunderstood blah blah blah, it doesn’t make the heart heal faster.

And then I went on the retreat. And then I realized this common denominator about these strengths I’ve felt and been told I have. And then I realized that there is an inherent weakness in this “common denominator” and that is that I can easily make the thing I’m called to relay—in whatever context—all about me instead of the thing and instead of God.

And that’s what I did this summer. That’s why the whole thing was so painful. And that’s what God wants to deal with in me before I can move on and grow in my gifts and be who I was created to be. That's at least part of why He allowed this to happen. I have to trust that I'm not crazy and that God knows what He's doing. That relay was His not mine and it's not. About. Me.

This is just a sliver of what went on this last month and particularly this last weekend but I’ll write about more later (I know I keep saying that). But this was the most healing portion, I think.

In other news, after my ode to the Facebook sabbatical I’m back on. But back on with boundaries. Also, I’ve noticed that with this commitment to write every day I am more content to just write about one thing—I don’t feel so much pressure to get my entire heart out on the page. I’m incredibly grateful for that. And tomorrow I'll try to tackle the subject of this newfound impetus to write.

Here’s to growth and God.

(Day 3)

Social Media…

So we all know social media affects us to some degree, but I’ve been off Facebook for about a month now and there have been some interesting and unexpected insights into what the world of social media has done to me. Every once in a while I will pop back onto Facebook “just for a minute” and it happens again: the time drain. That part is no surprise, I guess, but I do wish I could just use the thing in moderation. So far I can't. Grrr

I went of Facebook for a variety of reasons (and people) but the easiest one to talk about is that it is such a distraction for me. I love being able to keep up with people from a distance and so Facebook is great for that. Frankly, I live far away from the majority of people in my life that I care the most about, so Facebook is such a great way to consolidate keeping tabs on them. Without this tool it is true that “keeping in touch” is harder, but what has most surprised me about my Facebook sabbatical is that I didn’t realize what a drain it was on my creativity.

I think inherent in creativity is the need for it to be first "externalized" and second "acknowledged." Or really, if not acknowledged at least publicized. This is my own experience speaking, of course, as I’m no authority on the matter, but well-known author Madeleine L’Engle corroborates this:

“The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been stillborn.”*

I experience this with writing. Even though my readers are very, very few, there’s something about putting my thoughts online in an organized fashion that gives me that outlet that I need.

That’s where Facebook comes in. I have found that I have written more in the last month than I have in a long, long time. Not all of it has been “published” on this humble forum but I’m been surprised at the prolific degree of the words flowing out of me. Granted, some of this may be due to the time on my hands; part of it may be due to the events of the summer and the effect they had on me, driving me to process through writing (perhaps more on this later).

Maybe all of these things. But I have realized that some of it definitely has to do with the fact that I no longer sate my desire “to be heard” through small little--sometimes insignificant, sometimes not-- quips called “status updates” or even photos on Facebook. This “outlet” being removed, I have had more to say about many more things. I’ve been forced to hang on to my thoughts about things longer and to be more circumspect about what needs to be externalized and even more fastidious about what is “publicized.”

All of this as been very interesting to realize in the last month. I may come back to the world of Facebook soon but I’m really glad I’ve had at least this month to me, myself, and my thoughts.

(Day 2)

*Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water (Page 30). Emphasis mine.