it is well

Explaining to regular people why speech and debate tournaments are fun is extremely difficult. Yes, you’re wearing suits the whole time. Yes, you have to discuss dry topics like the federal court system for multiple hours a day. Yes, the schedule is so packed that you find yourself with five minutes to scarf down lunch in between rounds. But somehow, between the stress and – to put it bluntly – the sheer weirdness of tournaments, laughter and rich conversations abound. Friendships form quickly in the high-pressure environment of competition.



Ryan and I at our first practice tournament. It was at a corrective school for juvenile offenders...you should ask me for that story sometime ;)



Sweet NCFCA friends

 

 

These people never fail to make me laugh!

Considering how important tournaments had been in my life since sixth grade, I was surprised to find that I really didn’t miss them this year. As a matter of fact, when I spent time investing locally instead of prepping for and travelling to tournaments, I started to find the friendships, adventures, passions, and personal identity I spent so much of high school longing for. On a surface level, you could say this is because I cultivated deep roots in one place instead of trying to maintain dozens of long-distance connections. That’s true. But on a deeper level, I was happy because I stopped needing things like friendship, adventure, passion, and a personal identity. I just didn’t care that much anymore. After my wayward heart spent years wrestling with doubt and loneliness, I realized that I really didn’t want anything besides God.

When I felt most lonely, I looked to Him for companionship and learned that He was my best friend – the best friend I could ever ask for. When life seemed meaningless, I looked to Him for purpose and found in Him every reason I needed to charge joyfully ahead. Instead of expecting achievement to validate my existence or people to meet my emotional needs, my heart sang, “I am already filled, I have already become rich, I am already a king.” (1 Cor. 4:8) And, in accord with the beautifully backwards laws of God’s kingdom, I began to receive in abundance all the things I thought I had needed in the very moment I stopped needing them.

But as Mumford says, “this city breeds the plague of loving things more than their creator.” Now I wonder - have my affections relocated from God to the gifts He has given me? Do I really believe that I would be no better off if I had God and nothing else besides?

God has given me friendship. I love people – therefore I must be endlessly miserable as I try to look just right, act just right, and say all the right things to win people over.

God has given me work. I love feeling productive – therefore I must constantly push myself through crash-and-burn cycles of stress and exhaustion in order to accomplish things.

God has given me words. I love creating beauty with words – therefore I must feel as though I have no personal worth unless I can prove my superiority in the use of language.

God’s blessings quickly morph into perversely overinflated idols, making endless demands of us as they crouch on the thrones of our hearts. It’s not that we love them too much; it’s that we love God too little. We can free ourselves from these bloated blessings when we love Him more.

“Our heart is unquiet until it rests in you,” writes Augustine. This fits with the Christian axiom "rejoice in the Lord always." When our happiness is fixed on Christ our joy should be permanent because no one can take Him from us or us from Him. But the application of this principle is infinitely more difficult that its articulation. It is easy to love a friend who writes me beautiful letters and hugs me when I’m crying and makes me laugh. It is hard to love someone who I cannot touch, someone whose voice I have never audibly heard. As a human, I am so bound by my senses that it feels impossible to love something they cannot perceive. Such is the nature of this earthly city, which breeds the plague of loving tangible created things more than their transcendent Creator.

I am currently re-reading Genesis, which I find stranger and more wonderful each time I return to it. In the first few chapters of the Bible we hear about two particularly righteous men: Enoch and Noah. Both were saved from destruction – Enoch from physical death, Noah from the worldwide flood – because they found favor in God’s eyes. Why did they find favor? They “walked with God.” A brief visit to Strong’s Concordance suggests that walking with God does entail following His commandments. But it is also more than that. The same Hebrew word is used for “walked” and “went”, as in “Lot went with Abraham”, “Rebekah went with the servant,” and “Abraham was walking with his guests.” Walking with someone implies actually being with them. Walking with God does not simply mean you do what He says; it also means that you experience His presence in an interactive way.

As an introspective person, I relate strongly to St. Augustine. Sometimes I feel like I am reading about a more brilliant and spiritual version of myself when I read the Confessions. Here is how Augustine describes his thought life: “I questioned you about each thing, asking whether it existed, what it was, how highly it should be regarded; and all the while I listened to you teaching me and laying your commands upon me.” Augustine knew the meaning of walking with God. He willingly welcomed the Spirit into his consciousness, fusing his own mind with the mind of Christ.

The human thought process is an endless conversation with oneself. Augustine allowed his thought process to become an endless conversation with the Creator of the Universe. No wonder his mind was able to reach heights that make mine spin! From the inside out, Augustine surrendered his whole being to the influence of God. And so, even after losing his mother and several of his dearest friends, Augustine could write to his Lord: “Blessed is he who loves you, and loves his friend in you and his enemy for your sake. He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all are dear in the One who is never lost.”

God has richly given us all good things to enjoy (1 Timothy 6:17). But the world can only be rightly enjoyed if we love it through Christ, in whom all things hold together. The things of this world are intrinsically brief. They are made to be beautiful in their passing, just as a spoken sentence has meaning only when one sound dies away to make room for the next. A heart fixed on transient things will experience constant death as the things it loves passes away. A heart fixed on Christ can say, as Augustine said, “Praise God for the beauty of corporeal things, and channel the love you feel for them onto their Maker…If kinship with other souls appeals to you, let them be loved in God…and carry off to God as many of them as possible with you, and say to them, ‘Let us love Him, for He made these things and He is not far off.’”

God has given me friendship. I love people – therefore I will thank God for the people in my life and do everything I can to draw them closer to Him.

God has given me work. I love feeling productive – therefore I will prioritize the tasks that matter most to Him and trust that He will work everything out when the body He has given me needs rest.

God has given me words. I love creating beauty with words – therefore I will use my mouth and my pen (or my computer!) to exalt Him.

Friends desert us, work unravels, computers crash, but if we have loved these things in Christ, none of our affection is wasted. Our love for these blessings has brought us nearer to God, opening springs of delight in us and in Him.

Returning to the world of speech and debate tournaments: I visited regionals at the beginning of this month. After the tournament ended, I was a saltwater wreck - black mascara tears and all. Of course, I will stay in touch with some of my NCFCA friends, but there are literally not enough hours in a day or days in a year to keep up with everyone. And in a sense, I love everyone. Each person’s presence affects the atmosphere of an entire tournament, so that the difference is acute when even one person isn’t there. I will miss each person’s unique presence in my life. And as the departure of San Antonio friends to their respective schools fast approaches, I can sometimes feel myself becoming melancholy, maybe even afraid of the change.

I’m glad I feel sad when people aren’t around - it means that I actually like them. But the sadness should not be ensnaring; it should not become a “slough of despond”. My friends are all safe in the hand of God. I can trust that our time together is made more beautiful by Him in its very passing away. And who knows when He will choose to snatch us up from the four corners of the earth and weave us back into each other’s lives. “All manner of things shall be well” in His time.

I long for my thought life to become a conversation with God so that I can see from His perspective, acting and speaking with His love. I have such a long way to go, but I am excited for the journey.

For now, thank you, dear friends, for being in my life. I hope we learn to cherish Christ in each other and each other in Christ.

 

CrossLife seniors

where the ink disappears to

Painting turtles with my favorite artista.

 

Sometimes I feel like I am writing in disappearing ink.

I labor late into the night over a 3 page scholarship essay but don’t advance to the next phase of competition. I meet with someone who is struggling and spend hours thinking about how to best help her, but she won’t respond when I try to reach out for follow-up. I pray for the same person every single morning but don’t see a whit of change in their life.

These moments of letdown, of stasis, of seemingly fruitless waiting are torturous for a person who wants to get stuff done (a.k.a ME). When I pour myself into an effort that doesn’t yield results, it feels like I’ve just written pages upon pages, only to realize that I was using disappearing ink and all of it has vanished – all the emotions, all the energy, all the time.

But I cling to a truth very different from what I sometimes feel. I believe that God is working in space and time, weaving every “wasted” minute into a triumphant plot twist that I am simply too short-sighted to anticipate.

Speaking of short-sighted, I am. Literally. Everything more than five feet in front of me melts into a watery blur when I’m not wearing glasses or contacts. My vision is worse than most peoples’, but since I live in an era and a country with excellent optical technology I don’t think much about it. Still, I can’t say I’ve ever given thanks for my limited sight. Not, that is, until a few Saturdays ago.

Two weeks back, I met a boy of around eight years old at the refugee shelter. I’ll call him Orlín. Orlín has been blind since birth; he has no idea what the sun or a house or even his own mother’s face looks like. I couldn’t tell at first because I found him zooming Matchbox dump trucks around the kitchen at just a few notches short of light speed. (Apparently Orlín had already felt around the room and figured out where the obstacles were.) His mom had to tell me that he was blind when he tried to join in a game that involved distinguishing between red and black playing cards.

Partway through the afternoon, I brought out my watercolor paints. Orlín wanted to paint with the other kids. He dipped his fingers into the water dish I gave him to make sure it was full and clutched the red plastic paintbrush with a vice grip. I asked Orlín which colors he wanted, and there was – of course – a long pause.

“Rojo, azul, verde, amarillo, morado…” I began to list off the colors in my box.

“!Todos los colores!” Orlín answered. All of the colors!

Wrapping her hand around his clinched fist, another shelter volunteer showed Orlín where the colors were on his palette. Orlín has no way of understanding what colors are, but he memorized their names and could tell when one of them was running low – “!Necesito más azul!”, he would command, waving his paintbrush at me as if it were a scepter.

Orlín leaned low when he painted, his face just inches from the page. Every so often he looked up at me and asked,

“?Qué pinté yo?”

“El mar,” I would tell him. The ocean.

“Como se ve el mar?” What does the ocean look like?

“Your ocean,” I said to Orlín, “Is blue, but it turns green when the sun hits it. The sun is warm and golden, which is why there are threads of gold in your ocean. The sun is mixing with the water. Es bellísima – it’s so beautiful!”

Sometimes I told Orlín that he was painting a forest with green-capped trees, or a red and yellow flower. But he painted with gusto and every picture wound up dripping wet and saturated with color. In the end, Orlín agreed that all of his paintings were oceans. Before I left he asked me,

“?Dónde están mis cuatro mares?” Where are my four oceans?

Visits to the shelter are always precious to me. I try to at least summarize my experiences when I get home so that I don’t lose them. But even if I had never written about Orlín, I know I couldn’t forget him. Orlín - the boy who could not see colors, but loved them anyways.

And the question Orlín asked me more times than any of his other (many) questions will likewise never leave me:

“?Qué pinté yo?” What did I paint?

When circumstances enter my life that seem like (to quote my dearest Kay Ryan) “monuments to randomness”, when I spend days on end writing in disappearing ink, I have no reason to lose heart. I only need to look up at God and ask him, “What did I paint?” After all, He is guiding my hand through every brushstroke. He would never trace an irrelevant curve or drawn a pointless line.*

 

*Geometry pun 100% intended.

 

I have seen God’s resourcefulness come to bear in my life time and time again. In eighth grade, my family was kicked out of our speech and debate club. The change was abrupt, unfair, and devastating. Through speech and debate I had found, for the first time, an entire group of people that shared my passions and interests. Suddenly, the community I had put more stock in than any other was taken out from underneath me. Did that loss feel pointless at the time? Absolutely. But it became one of the most positive things that ever happened to me.

When I lost my speech and debate club, I became conscious that I needed the church. Church was no longer just a place I went every Sunday with my family; it was a community of people bound together by ties so much stronger than shared interests. God knew that I needed His people. He put me through a trial so that I could realize where my loyalties must lie.

And I can honestly say that few things bring me more joy than being part of the Church – not just the universal Church, but also my local church, Believers Fellowship. Of course it’s not always easy; family life never is. But even in the fiercest storms I am enfolded in the hearts of people who love Jesus, people who draw me closer to Him and to the joy that is Him.

The truth that God works all things for good never changes, but it is changing me. I hope you will let it take hold of your heart and transform it until you hardly know what’s happening inside of you. Then you ask God. He is painting something beautiful there – He promises.

--

Food for thought:

Odd Blocks, by Kay Ryan

Every Swiss-village

calendar instructs

as to how stone

gathers the landscape

around it, how

glacier-scattered

thousand-ton

monuments to

randomness become

fixed points in

finding home.

order is always

starting over.

And why not also in the self,

the odd blocks,

all lost and left,

become first facts

toward which later

a little town

looks back?

 

“Let Your work appear to Your servants

And Your majesty to their children.

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;

And confirm for us the work of our hands;

Yes, confirm the work of our hands.”

~Psalm 90:16-17~

 

 

The finished turtle!

Olivia wanted me to pose with my pictures...although, for the record, she helped me *a lot* with the mermaids. ;)

 

κοινωνία

Christmas break was a different kind of animal this year. I alternated between being so busy that I forgot to eat (if you know me, you know how weird that is) and reading Harry Potter for hours on end in odd corners of my house (because, obviously, books are just more enjoyable when read upside-down on the staircase landing).

I also learned a lot. I learned about the Church and the Mayans and Hogwarts, thanks to God’s creativity in making different kinds of people and people’s creativity in writing different kinds of books. But mostly, I learned about myself. At the end of break, I wrote down 7 “life facts” I had either forgotten or never realized before. Here’s #3:

“The closer I get to someone, the messier the relationship becomes. But it also gets better.”

I think this homely but heartfelt sentence can be expanded on a grand scale. Getting close to anything means giving it permission to hurt you. I feel the ache of loss every time I volunteer at the refugee shelter downtown. For a few hours, I talk with, eat with, play with, and sometimes nearly cry with a bundle of precious souls. Then, they climb into a van which takes them to a bus which, eventually, takes them a thousand miles away. Here is what I wrote one afternoon after coming back from the shelter:

“I can still see Erica and Andrés’ faces pressed against the thickly-screened window. They are smiling and waving. Tomorrow, they will be in another state, and they will forget the girl who made beds, swept, watched ‘Finding Nemo’, and danced in front of the security cameras with them. Now I have their names with their faces and personalities still fresh and attached. But the more tender, living memories, the emotions and mannerisms, will slowly be taken from me. Only names will stay behind, like fossils imprinted on rock: concepts defined by empty space, feeding on absence. It does not feel beautiful to me right now, the way we touch each other’s lives. So much of me is lost with each person I encounter.”

If I could go back to time and talk to the Aubrey who wrote that paragraph, I would tell her that it’s good she felt something when Erica and Andrés left because it meant she cared about them. I would also tell her that the presence of pain does not mean the absence of beauty. Closeness means opening your heart, which means hurt, but also means fulfillment.

Maybe I should put it this way…

One item tops my virtual lists of character flaws, discouragements, joy-killers, lifelong struggles, etc. This slithering sin has tyrannized me and poisoned life’s sweetest moments. Its name is selfishness.

I have long agreed with G. K. Chesterton – “how much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it” – but I am also very bad at making myself small. Thus, I can spoil a lovely day by snapping at a family member who interrupts my study time. I can suck all the healing out of words spoken to a struggling friend by contemplating how gentle and sympathetic I must look. I can and do repent of these failures, but I also repeat them. Again and again and again.

Today, it dawned on me. I finally realized the full impact of a truth my parents have taught me since I was little: put off and put on. It’s not enough to put off selfishness; more selfishness will rush in to fill the void. I need to also put on love.

And what is love? Most would agree that love has to be more than a feeling if it is to last for any length of time. But love must also be more than an action – I know because I have “served” my brothers on many occasions (such as by picking up their LEGO bricks which, only moments before, impaled my bare foot) without expending so much as one-sixteenth of a milliliter of goodwill.

I do not dare to pretend that I fully grasp what love is. I’m sure there are as many sides to it as there are thoughts in Dumbledore’s pensieve. But as I mull over passages like 1^st Corinthians 13 and 1^st John 1-5, I become more and more convinced that at least in part, love is identifying with someone else to the extent that their good becomes my good. That’s why love is patient: if controlling my tongue is the difference between blessing and wounding my friend, then I am happy to do it. Love isn’t jealous: if spending time with someone else helps her to grow, I’ll gladly relinquish my claim on her schedule.

I believe that communion – κοινωνία, sharing, fellowship – is central to love. Jesus didn’t just write us a certification for cancellation of sins; He took on our decaying flesh, shared in our sufferings, experienced our temptations, and became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). Jesus’ method of redemption was a sharing of identity - His righteousness for ours, ours for His. And His prayer for the believers He left behind was a plea for unity: “that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be in Us” (John 17:21). This communion is something Jesus’ first followers preserved: the church devoted itself to fellowship (Acts 2:42), and Paul shared his own soul with his beloved Thessalonians (1 Thess. 2:8).

Now I press a few buttons in my mental elevator and descend from the abstract to the personal level.

It’s comfortable to hold people at arm’s length, because they can’t hurt me if I don’t need them. It’s nicer to share articles about refugees on Facebook than to spend three hours cleaning up a play room that fifty-something children have passed through. I feel safer when I spill my thoughts in a private journal than when I let my acquaintances see that I am weak and flawed. So I do not commune, I do not share my soul.

And then what?

“The modern man does not immerse himself in anything he does,” wrote Octavio Paz. “Always, a part of him remains intact and alert…The solitude that this engenders…is a total condemnation, a mirror of a world without escape.”

What we might call being reserved or independent is often a hyper-individualism that shuts us up inside of ourselves. When I protect myself instead of giving myself away, I am locked into a room of mirrors. I cannot see what is true, beautiful, good, and eternal; I only see my own reflection staring angrily from every nook and cranny of this world without escape, reminding me of all that I fail to be. I am condemned to confinement within my own mind.

Life is meant to be shared. Specifically, it is meant to be shared through Christ. When we come to people through the One who became like us to save us, we don’t have to fight for self-preservation or pleasure. Christ has already given Himself unreservedly to us. And in His presence we find fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11).

This is why beauty and pain coexist when souls collide. This is why relationships can get better and messier at the same time. Communion requires a surrender of self to others, a death of desire. And death, of course, causes pain. But dying to self is a way of imitating what Jesus did for us, of sharing in His sufferings.

Communion with others flings ten thousand doors open, letting us explore the new and unimagined wonders God has placed inside of each person. It splits our little worlds apart so that we are aware not just of ourselves, but also of the star-like souls that fill this madly spinning planet and of the One who spoke them all into being.

My ambition for 2016 is to love well, to make the good of other people my own good, to live not in fear of loss but in anticipation of grace. And thus item #5 on my life-fact list:

“I am part of God’s story and my life isn’t just made for me; it’s made to fit in other peoples’ lives. Sometimes I glimpse the big picture, sort of like when Harry and Hermione time-travel in Book 3 and finally understand why everything happened the way it did. That makes me happy.”

Oh, and lest you think I spent my entire break drawing analogies between spiritual truths and Harry Potter, let me give you #1 on the list:

“I love bugs.”

Do with it as you will ;)

Love as always,

Aubrey

Sweet Adelaide is...

...a beautiful soul...

...who knows how to delight in the world.