Why did you doubt?

This past week I used a slow work day to finally get to that task I had been avoiding: copying my Word files to my new laptop (or newish, since it's been several months!). Unable to shed my file pack-rat tendencies, I keep nearly everything I've ever written--work, personal, and college documents alike. Perhaps I simply enjoy the nostalgia of browsing through my old thoughts. Or maybe it's akin to the feeling I get when I hear about people who read books and then promptly sell them to the nearest used book store or on half.com. In any case, I have trouble letting go.

As I was sorting and categorizing the messy wake of my college files, I came across a writing assignment that really spoke to where I've been in the last months--full of doubt about God's ability to navigate me through the foggy future. And with no other blogging topics niggling at my mind, I thought I'd at least post something to not let myself get out of the habit. (And that's the lovely thing...you are always free to plagiarize your own work freely! Though, of course, it wouldn't be plagiarism in that case.) So here it is:

Why did you doubt?

Matthew 14:22-33

You wouldn’t expect those who are already walking on water to doubt. They appear to be feeling the water under their feet like a concrete sidewalk, doing what most people only dream of. They are the firm foundations I look to as heroes. While they may do heroic, noble things, it is still important to remember they have the same type of problems I do.

It’s easy to read the story of Peter walking on the water and judge him for his lack of faith. At this point, Peter had seen Jesus raise a young girl from the dead along with many other miracles. Presently he was already walking on the water, there were no if’s; he was doing it. Yet, he still doubted. “Of course,” I think to myself, “I would have never doubted like that.” The whipping surf and black thunderheads would have all faded into mere background static as I confidently walked toward Jesus, my eyes firmly fixed on his face. But before my pride solidifies, I remember how soon I too look away from Christ to watch the turmoil around me. He, not the wind and waves, fades into the background, and I can’t recall what faith feels like. I might appear strong, even look like my feet are boldly skimming over the water, but inside I’m sinking and seeing only waves.

I’m not sure what I would say to the question, “Why did you doubt?”. There doesn’t often seem to be a logical answer, not with all I have heard and experienced of God’s power and faithfulness. I guess the only answer would be that I focus on the things around me; the wind and waves are often easier to listen to than the truth I know. Trials seem to give me spiritual Alzheimers, and that which is so familiar to me escapes my memory. My answer to the questions most often is that of Peter. “Seeing the wind, [I] bec[o]me frightened” (14:30) and the water no longer holds me up. I live the paradox of believing, yet still say, “Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Yet, Christ offers grace for those times I doubt, I just must not become too prideful to say, “Lord, save me!” (14:30).

Sweet Million

This morning I walked out on our balcony to see that our tomato plant was now stretching more than a foot above its stake. The sprawling Sweet Million cherry tomato seems bent on living up to its name; it sends out new branches every few days and is increasingly pregnant with tiny green orbs.

This tomato is the behemoth of our balcony garden, outshining our other attempts to augment our lack of a back yard with khaki-colored plastic pots. The companion tomato plant dwindles in a neighboring pot a mere quarter of the size of its gigantic cousin. Two pumpkin plants poke up near the railing, small but determined—despite their lack of vines, they already have buds (which my farm-boy husband informs me are the male flowers, first to appear but full of only pollen, not fruit, potential). Behind and to the left, tiny melon plants wiggle in the breeze.

As I pollinate tomato flowers with my fingertip, I'm reminded of my parents' vegetable garden back in Wisconsin. We had one every year--a black-earth sprawl bursting with vegetation to feed a family of ten and weeds--so many weeds yanked from the ground by me and my siblings. Oh I hated it--hated the shivering dryness of the dirt on my hands and bare feet and the endless, shadeless rows always waiting expectantly--ironically, as much as I now long for something more alive than this balcony fading into muted gray wood grain. Oh how things change...

Murky

Conversations whirl around me as I work from my corner of Caribou Coffee, blending with the soothing, though all-too-familiar strands of the store’s music CD. It’s the same one they played yesterday and the day before.

I know because this is day three of work-in-the-coffeehouse week. It’s nearing the end of month 2 of my stint as a contract writer, and I’ve migrated here from home office to couch to dining room table, each stop an attempt at an environment conducive to productivity. The growing files have put me ahead of schedule, bringing my fevered pace down to a leisurely dabbling punctuated by perusing the latest headlines on foxnews.com or an attempt to resurrect my long-neglected blog. I should feel, I don’t know…accomplished or satisfied with the positive feedback from my client and my first check newly center-pieced on our dining room table, but they do little to quell my growing restlessness.

I feel like I’m in some sort of mid-twenties mid-life crisis, which sounds too dramatic to even my own frustration. But the description fits—I’m stuck in a career that uses my degree but bores me to tears (literally). And my recent move to North Dakota does nothing to move me toward a career more in tune with my interests. As I scroll daily through health care and engineering job postings, I feel out of place with a head full of the writing theory, literature, and the ability to massage words into a pleasing hum of rhythm, syntax, and connotation.

As I wake up next to my husband, I know I wouldn’t change any of the complex web of choices that brought me to this new apartment in this wind-swept prairie city. Some things even my dream career can’t eclipse. Yet I wonder sometimes whether the path I’ve chosen will ever loop back. I have to hope that there will be something that tastes of the satisfaction I sipped as an undergrad sprawled in a professor’s office discussing literature and writing theory.

This week I've been able to trust, to remember that God is sovereign, that he is Father and his plans are not for calamity, his will good, pleasing, and perfect. But lately my gaze is less than steady and the wind and waves make my footing on the water shaky at best. So I wait with something less than patience, hoping with imperfect faith that my next step will materialize in this murky present.

scraping

A week ago I read through the paper of the woman I'm tutoring through her master's program--it's the story of her life, re-constructing the journey of her personal development, bricks of her experience mortared together with theoretical constructions of psychologists. Her life, summarized in ten white pages, is an eloquent picture of God's intervention & protection--her present faith solid, a wall of confidence in his ability to provide for every need, despite the hurts and darkness of the past. I stop looking for comma splices to wonder how to get to this point where having faith seems like breathing.

My faith seems more like having an asthma attack. One day I think, "Wow, I've got it, this breathing thing..." It's just in and out, in and out; my lungs feel light, full of air. But the next minute I'm scraping the air for oxygen. Leave me alone with my thoughts for two minutes and my fears fill my lungs with concrete. "Oh ye of little faith..."

I read her paper and I'm envious of this surety--does it grow like this eventually, if you keep trying long & hard enough?

I think of my Grandma Florence, a veritable amazon of faith, speaking life into people so fully & frequently that we were lucky to not catch a busy signal when we tried to call her house. I miss her now, wish I could dial her number, ask her how she got there. What was the secret that made her words strong & resonant like the voice of a prophet?

Today, as the rain breaks against my windshield, blurring tail lights into soft red on 694, I think of all the things I can't see the end of, and I remember that it's daily..."take up your cross daily," and I'm oddly comforted by the thought. Maybe faith is found in the building up of days upon days of cross-bearing, burden-casting, continual asking, and waiting. Perhaps it isn't ever happened upon suddenly and is more like a far-off scene slowly being brought into focus.

a few scattered thoughts

I pull out three folded purple post-its from my purse, filled with scribbled words I thought breathed of poetry at 10 am when my mind strayed from the job aid I was eeking out in scattered keystokes. Unwrapping them now, I search between the lines for inspiration but the thought is gone, energy emptied in three meetings between 1 pm and 3, typing one-line emails to my coworker in a neighboring cube. I'm restless...

My writing lately has accumulated into a pile of creased post-it notes, five lines stashed in the upper left corner of Word documents saved in my "misc." folder. The story I'm working on sits with paragraphs of scene summaries, but the strands of plot seem like stray threads that pull out when I tug at them.

I wonder if other recent grads feel like this: like I'm thirteen again, all angst and acne, trapped in a body I can't quite figure out, filled with warring desires for the past simplicity of childhood and the autonomy of growing up.

a toast to Eliot

I've been thinking about time...mostly about not having enough of it, I suppose. My work day blows away in a midst of papers and key-strokes, sometimes drags in between bleary eyed computer stares and counting the birds perched on the power lines outside my window, but the work piles up the same. I think in cliches: so much work, so little time.

I'm left with the longing for time to just sit, just think, just spend some hours to process all the whirling changes, the tangled knots of life that only get more twisted everytime I shove them back in the "later" box that I'll open when I have more time.

I remembered a "floaty," metaphysical paper I wrote about the relationship of time & Christ's death as portrayed in several of T.S. Eliot's major works--the whole point of it being that in his poetry time is presented as one of the things redeemed by Christ's death, time itself, as well as humankind from it. A few lines from The Four Quartets keep running through my mind:

"If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. "

and

"But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time is the occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love."

And...this is the part of the post where I'm perhaps supposed to ask poignant questions, draw some conclusions about how this poetry intersects with my life right now...but honestly I don't have any (conclusions), so I'll just throw some Eliot on the screen & some of my own uncollected and somewhat tangled threads of thoughts...

one form, stage, or style to another

Transition:
Webster says it's "passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another, CHANGE;
a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another,"
and even he feels ambiguous at best to this thing I'm trying to navigate. I remember being warned about the "real world," but any words of wisdom on how to navigate it are lost somewhere in this passage from one state to another, a state that feels tumultuous in a frozen, sluggish sort of way, like a hurricane painted in still life.

I try to get used to this:
daily drive to work, cup of coffee (two, three...) to warm my hands, chilled by the the vent that never fails to blow above my window, whether in the snows of early April or the streaming sunlight of the weeks before. I've got it down--how to write in:

• succinct,
  
• yet detailed,
  
• bullet points;

I've got objectives mapping out the next 8 months; I'm learning to plan out my day, prioritize...the scattered papers across my disorganized desk an objets d'art to something delightfully irregular.

But I haven't mastered the CHANGE, the move from a day filled with words and philosophers to a life of "personal development plans" and people arguing about whether to source cream cheese or peanut butter. Somehow I can't, don't want to, make myself fit there.

The work world never seemed glamourous; I'm not that naive, but I imagined those "free nights" with eagerness born of too many nights huddled over my computer screen, scraping words from a mind more like a wrung-out dishrag than a sponge. But they came then, the words that seem to elude me now, during free nights not filled with last-minute papers, dark-mooned eyes trying to eek out what the heck was so great about Aristotle.

I'm still trying to find movement, evolution from one form to another.