To the men...and the ladies.

There is one thing I have come to deeply value over the past few months: the men who aren't afraid to kick life in the face for me. I have brothers and friends who have fought for me in prayer over some of the most heartbreaking months of my life this past semester. Some of you have made a point to call and check up on me. Some of you have emphatically stressed that you want to be there to fight on my side. Some of you have offered to give a beat down on my behalf. And some of you have given incredible spiritual advice and encouragement. I think I would have given way to the terrible feeling of being in this battle alone if not for you.

Seminary is full of people looking to get married. And honestly, who can blame them? For those of us with very firm and specific belief systems it can seem a daunting task to find someone compatible to share life with in an increasingly pluralistic and globalized society. Why not move your hunt from singles groups or eharmony to a place where you have this in common?

I made peace with my singleness a long time ago. First out of necessity, but then because I realized: life happens in the waiting. We are always becoming someone. Who we live our life for defines and shapes us. If all (or most) of life revolves around a search for someone to marry we are defined by our expectations of that person long before we ever meet him or her. Is this who we want to become? People who think only of a checklist or of trying to gain the attention of others?

Here is my point. My brothers, you may not have a wife or girlfriend, but plenty of your single sisters (who you will never marry) need you to offer your strength. We are not weak or inferior, but we are NOT the same as you, and we do need you in our lives. Ladies, we have a way of approaching the world that our guy friends could use access to as well. We've unfairly demanded too much and too little of them at the same time. It is time for us to allow them to be who we need them to be and stop getting so offended or threatened when they step up.

So there you go. My long overdue thanks, and long unspoken thoughts. Love.

Anna G.

The Lion and the Light.

You will be safe in His arms. You will be safe in his arms.

When in South Africa we had several encounters with lions. In Sun City's Lion Park we got up close and personal, even holding cubs. They were by no means gentle, yet there was an irresistible quality to the little guys that made you wish they were just a bit more cuddly than they actually were. Later during our trip we went on a game drive that began in late afternoon and lasted through the first hours of darkness. Early in our drive we came across part of a pride lounging on the side of the road. Two females, a male and some cubs sat watching us, watching them. They began to walk around our vehicles. In and out, in and out and around. It's a little unsettling having a giant, wild lion walking around you without the least bit of fear.

There is nothing quite so incredible as night on the African plains. It is mysterious and grand, and draws you into it. Hours can pass without the realization of their coming or going. And there is a voice on the wind that compels you to enter the depths of the night and discover the adventure you've been aching for . . . Such were my thoughts as I stood on the edges of light created by the giant fire at our braai (barbecue) in the middle of the Pilanesburg Game Park. All my common sense and education on such things knows better than to be on the edge of that untamed darkness, and yet there I was, lingering at an unsafe distance from the fire, wishing to be further immersed in the night . . . until I was pulled back to reality by our protective guide who gently reminded me the fire was the safest place to be. "There are lions out there and they are not afraid of you. Stay in the light." I still remember the feeling of moving from the cool African night to the overwhelming warmth of the fire.

Let light and love come rushing through the door.

Later that night, on our drive back through the park, we came upon a lion with a fresh kill. The best Discovery Channel documentary simply can't do justice to the sight of a male lion ripping into its prey. The creature who just a few hours earlier was close enough to touch was now shredding a springbok as though it were tissue paper.

Tonight, on the edges of my own personal spiritual darkness, this memory pushed to the forefront of my mind and replayed itself in vivid color. I felt the message in the core of my soul: You are safe in the Light. Stay there. Don't flirt with the line between light and darkness. The enemy is a roaring lion, prowling about, seeking whom he may devour. He is not afraid of you, he wants to destroy you. But he fears the light.

You will reign in brilliant light.

Countless times in Scripture God identifies Himself with the Light (1 Jn 1:5, Is. 10:17, 1 Peter 2:9, Rev. 21:23). And Satan is called a lion bent on our destruction (1 Peter 5:8). No doubt the Lion is dangerously powerful. But the Light holds the power of life and death. Not the Lion. Run to the Light and don't stray into the darkness.

You will be safe in His arms. You will be safe in His arms.

~ Anna

lovers, art, science and movie analogies.

Jesus wrecked my life. If not for Him I could be safely tucked away in the tender arms of apathy. But He came in, He crushed all my expectation and filled it with something far beyond my comprehension. And in beautiful and agonizing ways He continues to do so. I still feel the product of this initial destruction. I feel it every day in his further demolition of my life, and in the rebuilding. It gives me sorrow and fills me with joy.

If I were to list the things that have gone immensely wrong in my world over the past few months we would be able to tally them alongside the things that have gone wondrously right and perhaps conclude, with Herald Crick, that my life is in a dead heat between tragedy and comedy. But life, you know, is Stranger Than Fiction.

Love often destroys. Like Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Helen and Achilles. The more arduous the love the more potential it has to destroy you. But lovers immersed in such passion never regret the destruction. There is a certain sweetness to the bitterness. Something about being embroiled in the saga awakens you in a way you have never been awakened. Excruciating pain ensures that the senses are not dulled, not lulled to sleep by apathy. And if you can endure intense pain without accepting a drug to numb it, you are capable of experiencing its antithesis, immense, overpowering and almost unbearable joy.

There's a reason artists, poets and musicians often live such schizophrenic lives of high highs and low lows. Because to create art that makes people feel something, you must live that emotion more intensely than you are capable of communicating through your art. The best art is but a failed attempt to express the inexpressible. And the inability to ever fully express, coupled with the insatiable need to experience more, so perhaps to find the key to expression, can make you crazy.

But there is powerful truth to be discovered in that which can never fully be communicated. Maybe here in our mortal world those things which are most true are those which are least explainable. Those things which overwhelm us, which overpower us, which annihilate us and yet leave us begging for more are the very things which are MOST true. They beg to be experienced, to be contrasted with each other and to find a voice to quantify and qualify them. But it is "like trying to catch a wave upon the sand." You simply cannot. Even science proves this to us. How many times have you found a "verifiable fact" for each side of the case? Does this mean that one or the other is false? Perhaps. Perhaps one method is flawed. Or perhaps you simply don't have all the information you need to understand the facts and see fully how they fit together.

We are, as Stuart in Kate and Leopold so vividly puts it, like a dog who sees a rainbow, but none of the other dogs believe him, because none of the other dogs can see in color. The color exists, the potential of expression exists, but the comprehension never fully does. If we ourselves could perfectly comprehend it we could no doubt adequately express it so that others could also fully comprehend. But full comprehension of something so outside ourselves is impossible. But we try. And we try to comprehend through further experience and we destroy ourselves in the trying. And this is what we call living life to the fullest.

The point I am making, I suppose, is that humanity has a history of embracing that which destroys us because what destroys us redefines us and constant redefinition is essential to rational life. [Here I might insert that by merely thinking we are taking in information, synthesizing it and rationally redefining ourselves, so to cognizantly live and not merely biologically live perhaps there must indeed be an equation between "thinking" and "being"] We give ourselves for a love or a cause. We surrender ourselves to the flames so to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. And so we must. If ever we are to become a Phoenix, we must first be reduced to ashes.

I choose the flames of faith in Jesus Christ. I choose it because out of rational thought and emotional experience I think it is the best and right option. And I continue to verify that decision through the experiences of my life. I continue to try to communicate it as I have attempted (and most certainly failed) to here. It is destroying me and rebuilding me, but looking back it has always done so in a way consistent with that which it has claimed.

And that, my friends, is the great irony of life. It is unexplainable, and so we must try to explain, and with each explanation we get closer to a more full understanding of the truth we can never fully understand, for to fully understand, to ever fully judge the rightness of, we must know all and that (thank you Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, and Age of Technology for reminding us) is simply an impossibility.

Chasing the Teumessian Fox

When the winter sky is clear, find the three stars that comprise the belt of the constellation Orion. Follow the angle of Orion's downward belt (opposite of the side that holds his shield) and the next very bright star you will come to is Sirius (yep, like the satellite radio mogul). Sirius is the primary star of the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog. Up and to the left of Sirius is Procyon, the primary star of the constellation Canis Minor, the Little Dog.


In Greek mythology, the city of Thebes committed a terrible crime. As punishment, the gods sent a giant beast called the Teumessian Fox to prey upon their children. Now the Teumessian Fox had a mystical power, he was uncatchable. He endlessly terrorized the city until the Theban general, Amphitryon, devised a brilliant plan. He set the magical dog Laelaps loose in the city to chase the fox down. Laelaps was destined to always catch his prey. Zeus was troubled by the dilemma of an uncatchable fox being chased by an inescapable dog and so resolved it by tossing them both into the sky setting their contest to play out forever in the heavens. Voila! Canis Major and Canis Minor.

This, it seems, could be a metaphor for my life. Destined to catch what cannot be caught and so to chase forever the Teumessian Fox. Perhaps it would be easier if I could roundly define what is my Teumessian Fox, my uncatchable prey. After much wrestling with this idea and grappling with the question, "what is it that I'm chasing?" I come, I think, to at least one answer: perfect completion.

There is always another deadline. Time is a cruel taskmaster with little respite for the weary or the grace for those who flounder under her weight.

There is always another expectation. The more you accomplish, the higher your level of performance the more that is expected of you in subsequent efforts.

There is always another need. If every hurt of the world today were met another would greet the dawn of tomorrow.

There is always more to know. There is always more to experience. There is always more to have.

This is what makes existence life, right? It's the American dream. Strike that. It's the world dream, the pursuit of happiness. Even in chasing we ourselves are pursued by a relentless sense that we ought to be able to catch and hold what we chase.

Tonight I am tired of myself and my own inability to measure up. If I could outrun myself and be alone without myself for a few blissful moments I would revel in the delight of purely, simply being. How disheartening to find that even in sleep I dream and am there as complex and dynamic a character as ever in waking. There at least I seem to know my lines, but life is an improv.

And so I wonder, am I Laelaps or the Teumessian Fox? The pursuer or the prey? And will this dead heat chase ever end or is it only in being flung into the vastness of eternity that completion is achievable?

to mourn is to sing.

A simple research paper and a little life has begun a revolution in the way I think about a passage of Scripture. The paper I refer to was on Jewish funeral and burial customs in the New Testament world. I won't go into a lot of detail, you can always read the paper :)

In Jewish culture mourning was overt. It was no holds barred. You were expected to look and act and speak like someone in mourning. In fact, culture mandated that you participate in active mourning by such things as restraining from certain social events, entering through a particular temple gate, and dressing in a certain manner. Everyone knew your world had been turned upside down and your heart was breaking, and they were expected to treat you accordingly. What's more, it was in your hands. Those who would offer comfort and condolences to a grieving person were forbidden to speak to the bereaved until they first spoke. (it makes sense why Job's friends did not speak for so long. And it makes even more sense why they should have continued to keep their mouths shut.) Interestingly enough though, after a year of overt grieving broken into a step down process from more intense levels of grief to the less intense, the season of mourning was concluded with a ceremony, and a lifestyle of mourning was no longer permitted. ("For everything there is a season...a time to mourn, and a time to laugh.")

All of this to say, mourning is necessary, and even wonderful. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." To admit heartbreak was to open oneself up to comfort and facilitate healing. To be forced, in a sense, by the cultural norms to continue mourning for a defined season was to be refused the ability to hide from or suppress the hurt and instead to find a way to work through it, with the help of the community.

There is so much that each of us face that is cause for mourning. Drinking the cup of sorrow to the last drop (to paraphrase Henry Nouwen) is the only way to be able to taste fully the cup of joy.

I could regale you with the number of things that have happened in my personal life, family, church family, and in the world that touches me that have been causes for heartbreak in my life over the past few months. I have felt so many times as though I was in mourning, literally and spiritually, sometimes to the point of physical sickness. Some of this is the nature of existence in this world. Some of it is the Enemy's way of battering my soul and trying to discouraging me and make me abandon the path I am on.

But dear ones, we must take comfort in the fact that we are mourning, for we are recognizing and admitting that all is not well in this world, and that there is nothing we can do to raise what is dead back to life. But we know the One who can, who has, and who does. He longs to bring us comfort, but he cannot bring comfort where there is no embracing of pain.

Defiance

I am haunted by two things. How I can ever be a part of making the Name of Jesus Christ great in our world, and how can I make even the tiniest ping of a dent in the suffering that belongs to so much of it? The two are not mutually exclusive. I know that. But I cannot escape the inexplicable feeling that I have nothing to offer for either cause. And what frightens me more than failing to meet some part of such immense need is failing to try.

For some, opportunities for "greatness" as it has been defined for us will never come in this life. We will hear the stories of others who have had this opportunity thrust upon them against their will and who have risen to the challenge. And we will wish for such a moment to come in our own lives. And we will wrestle with a fear of not rising to face it as we hope we will, a question about whether or not we will be so bold should such courage be asked of us. But how easily we forget the courage that must come with living each day as it ought to be lived. How quickly we lose sight of the truth that every day is such an opportunity. A chance to turn and face the injustice of our world head on. To let a tear fall with those who weep, to rejoice at the fortune others celebrate. To give beyond what we can afford to, to refuse to worry about providing for our own comfort. To take the path of integrity when doing so will put us at odds with the culture, to embrace without prejudice the culture that would suffocate everything we believe in. To extend a hand and expose our hearts. To refuse to be backed into a corner or beaten into submission by the threats against our pride and social standing when we offer relentless, unmerited love.

Dear brothers and sisters, we are the warriors on the front lines of the battle. It is we who determine the future. It is we who have been given the opportunity and the responsibility to act. If we refuse to rise to the occassion and meet the enemy head on do we think we will be spared? Never. We will become a casulty of the war that envelopes us, but we will have no reason to be remembered, no hope of offering something of value that perhaps only we can. Real courage is encountered on the front lines of daily life where all is routine and nothing seems to be a matter of life and death. Living life like this is the most painful way. We will encounter resistance every step of the way, and we will be broken, and used up, our ashes scattered in each place we stop along the way.

If you don't believe that, and if you don't think being a Christ-follower has any such ramifications, then you perhaps ought to ask yourself what God you are following, and what Bible you are reading. What Jesus offers is not quiet, uninterrupted, successful, "fat" lives, but a radical lifestyle for which we will be persecuted, but from which we cannot bring ourselves to turn because we know that it is the Life blood of Truth that flows through our veins.

But this is real freedom. Freedom for more than pleasure: freedom for life, the fullness of life that comes only with embracing the sacrifice of God and allowing it to echo strongly, passionately in the way we live. We have prayed for God to bless our country for so long, and finally the opportunity for blessing and chance for greatness is upon us. It looks nothing like we expect, but regardless, now is the moment to seize it, to lay down our lives in pursuit of the Kingdom that has come into our daily world and attempts to turn it inside out and upside down.

Blessed are those who have nothing to offer. For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who are consumed with grief for a fallen world. For they will receive comfort.
Blessed are those who submit to the true Authority. For they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who are ravenous with an insatiable hunger and unquenchable thirst for the ways of God. For they will be filled.
Blessed are those who extend unlimited, unmerited favor to others. It is they who receive the same.
Blessed are the innocent who know as God knows and see as He intended them to see. For they will see God.
Blessed are those who promote reconciliation, forgiveness, and who make way for the Kingdom of peace. They are the children of God.
Blessed are those who suffer because they take up their cross daily and follow Christ. For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Are you willing to truly embrace this life with it's heartaches and it's joys? Are you willing to step up to the challenge and live in defiance of the status quo? Am I?

Sometimes other people just say it better.

How deep the Father's love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom


You're the God of this city
You're the Lord of this nation
You're the King of these people
You Are

You're the light in the darkness
You're the hope for the hopeless
You're the peace for the restless
You are

Greater things have yet to come
Greater things have still to be done
In this city

Greater things have yet to come
Greater things are still to be done here


Let my life light up like the city lights
Let it burn for you in the darkest night


When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should sway
Let this blest assurance control
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate
And has shed his own blood for my soul


Jesus, You are Life and Breath to me


In Christ alone my hope is found
He is my light, my strength, my song
This Cornerstone, this solid ground
Firm through the fiercest drought and storm
What heights of love, what depths of peace
When fears are stilled, when strivings cease
My Comforter, my All in All
Here in the love of Christ I stand

In Christ alone who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless babe
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones He came to save
Til on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the death of Christ I live

There in the ground His body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain
Then bursting forth in glorious day
Up from the grave He rose again
And as He stands in victory
Sins curse has lost its grip on me
For I am His and He is mine
Bought with the precious blood of Christ

No guilt in life, no fear in death
This is the power of Christ in me
From life's first cry, to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny
No power of hell, no scheme of man
Can every pluck me from His hand
Til He returns or calls me home
Here in the power of Christ, I'll stand


Be Thou my vision of Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me save that Thou art
Thou my best thought by day or by night
Waking or sleeping Thy presence my light

Be Thou my Wisdom and Thou my true Word
I ever with Thee and Thou with me Lord
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son
Thou in me dwelling and I in Thee one.

Riches I heed not nor man's empty praise
Thou mine inheritance now and always
Thou and Thou only first in my heart
High King of Heaven my treasure Thou art