just from Jesus simply taking

I babysat a 3-year-old boy on Tuesday. He slept most of the time, but at one point he began to cry out. I went into his room and sat on the edge of the bed.
"What's wrong, Cesario?"
He just kept crying. I rubbed his back and asked again, "What is it, buddy?"
Then he stretched out his arms to me and said, "Uppy." I lifted him up and he completely melded into me, without hesitation, his head on my shoulder and his arms on either side of me. He just lay there, and I began to sway. I hummed the only song I could think of: "Nothing But the Blood of Jesus."

As I rocked this little boy in my arms, whom I held so close to my chest, I thought about how completely safe he felt. He was completely dependent on me. Maybe he'd had a bad dream, or maybe he'd just opened his eyes and been afraid of the dark and quiet. Whatever it was, while he was by himself, he was scared. But in my arms, he could rest, because it wasn't up to him. I was there. Cesario trusted me with his entire well-being, which allowed him utter rest.

What would it look like to be like a 3-year-old child in Jesus' arms? What would it be like to trust Him so much, that all fears and worries completely disappear in His presence, and we realize, "He's here. It's okay now"? What would it look like to rest in Jesus? I want to know that complete lack of fear that comes with trusting in the Lord. I want to rest in Him.

"Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the LORD loves rests between his shoulders." (Deuteronomy 33:12)

I asked Cesario, "Are you ready to lay back down?"
There was a pause before his little brown-haired head shook "no" against my cheek. I didn't expect him to think about it, then say, "Why, yes, I suppose that is sufficient. I'll lay back down now." And, in fact, I preferred he wasn't ready. I wanted him to feel safe forever.

things

I think about quite a few things throughout my day. Never mind that I have 7 classes, meetings, an internship, and global warming to think about. These are a few things that have been on my mind the past few days:

Socks. My parents bought me a bunch of socks in August. The company's called "Wigwam" and has a huge sale every six months in Sheboygan. I wear a pair of these socks, thick orange ones that reach my ankle, when I go to bed, because when my feet are cold I can't fall asleep. I call them my "bed socks." On night I forgot to put on my bed socks, and I wore these brown socks (still Wigwam) with cream-colored argyle on them to bed. The next morning I didn't think about changing them (because they weren't my bed socks!) and I ended up wearing brown socks with my black dress pants. They were a distraction to me all throughout church.
"And Jesus gives us hope...."
My socks don't match.
"...not just for eternity...."
My SOCKS don't MATCH.
"...but also for right here on earth...."
My socks are not matching RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE!

Tea. I know I should be more refined, and rave about Tazo or some Indian tea with herbs, but my favorite tea is Bigelow's Lemon Lift. I tried Chamomile tea yesterday, and the very smell made me uncomfortable. Not to mention the color is reminiscent of what you find in the snow after a very hydrated dog has passed by. Drinking Lemon Lift is like drinking sunshine that spreads throughout your body and shoots out your fingertips and toetips, like in Beauty and the Beast when the Beast is transformed back into a prince. (And a very unattractive one at that. But looks aren't everything. He was rich, too.)

Jesus/The Lord of the Rings. I think about TLotR a lot. My mother scolded me as we watched the trilogy over break when I kept quoting things before they were said.
"'Do not trust to hope."'
"Do not trust to hope."
"'It has forsaken these lands.'"
"It has forsaken these lands."
"HEATHER!"
Like a good eight-year-old I resorted to silently mouthing the words. Like a good mother she could hear my lips smacking and knew I was trying to get away with it.
My point is, I have these movies memorized, and they come back to me all the time - sometimes applicably. This morning I thought about struggling, and how much I have been struggling the past few months with the same problem. I get so frustrated with myself, because why can't I just be done with it? Like when Frodo's laying on the mountain at the very end, and he tells Sam, "There's nothing, no veil between me and the ring of fire!" (To which my dad starts singing, "I fell into a burning ring of fire..." Kind of a mood ruiner.) And Sam says, "Then let us be rid of it, once and for all!" Sometimes I think, "Let me be RID of IT!" I think about Smeagol's argument with Gollum, and how, when Gollum finally left, Smeagol bounced around shouting, "Smeagol is FREE!" How much I would love to raise my arms in victory and say, "I'm FREE!"
But. The third or fourth time I saw The Return of the King in theaters (I'm telling you, I'm a maniac), just as Frodo is standing on the edge of Mount Doom with the Ring, the woman behind me said in aggravation, "What are you waiting for?" Then Sam shouts at Frodo, "What are you waiting for?" And Frodo, who has been completely taken over by the thing, slips it on his finger, saying, "The Ring is mine."
I have this burden, this sin, this hurt, this desire, whatever it is, in ring-form hanging around my neck. And I want so badly to "cast it into the fiery chasm from whence it came," but I also don't want to let it go. I want to be rid of it, I want to be free, and the audience is shouting, "What are you waiting for?" Why can't I just let go? What hold does it have over me? How can I still be holding onto something so destructive, so oppressive, so hurtful?
Sometimes I wish someone could rip it from me, just take it and throw it away. I often wondered why Elrond didn't just push Isildur in the fire himself when he had the chance. Or Sam could've pushed Frodo in. Or someone could've pushed someone into something JUST TO END IT ALL.
But Frodo had to do it. It was his burden. No one could've done it for him. But you know what I love about that? He had people with him, beside him, for him. In Sam, who carried him up the mountain. In Galadriel, who appeared to him in a vision and offered him a hand to lift himself up. In Aragorn, who fought battles to protect Frodo and enable him to succeed.
And you know what? Frodo did succeed. Gollum had to bite off his finger, and he was almost swallowed by lava, but in the end, he's rid of it. In his own words, "It's done. It's over."

Wow. What does this mean? Did you even read all that? Sometimes analogies make situations really clear and understandable to me...but they don't make dealing with the situation any easier. If anyone had told Frodo, "Hey, bearing the One Ring is kind of like..." I'm not sure he would've said, "Oh, in that case - TOSS - all done. Who's hungry?"

I just want to keep all my fingers.

every day is a resolution

Things I have quit:

1. Ballet (age 4)
2. Gymnastics (age 8)
3. Band (age 12)
4. Show choir (age 15)
5. Business Management minor (age 20)
   
6. All the King's Men (age 22)
   

I'm sitting in the silence of an empty house, in my sage-green chair my dad pulled from the end of someone's driveway two summers ago. I'm currently reading The Rise of Silas Lapham, because I've taken a break from AtKM. (I say "taking a break," though I'm not 42- or even 27-percent sure I'll finish it before break is over.) I've already read Housekeeping (another American Novel novel) in this break within Christmas break. Part II of AtKM to be continued....

The silence has been nice. No TV, no radio, just the occasional sigh from the cat sleeping on my bed or a car passing on the slushy street outside my window. I found my mind wandering, however, even amidst the enjoyment of my book. The string of large-bulbed Christmas lights strung haphazardly across my room (Dad thinks my room looks like a trashy Christmas tree lot) makes me think of the Christmasses past. And the red snowman mug of Earl Gray tea beside me smells like fruity pebbles. I can't drink it anymore.

But speaking of quitting, New Year's resolutions are a ridiculous concept to me. Much like cookie jars (like cookies even last that long) and the hooks my dad put on the inside of the bathroom door to hang our bathrobes on, when no one in my family has a bathrobe. I make resolutions all throughout the year and don't need an entirely new one to encourage them to stick. I wonder if January ever feels used, like it's just a month in which people acknowledge how to improve themselves?

So as we approach the front stoop of the new year, what do I have planned? My New Year's resolution is to stop resolving and to fall into the hands of God, because if there's anything I've learned in the past year of my life, it's that human plans never, ever, ever go the way you think they will.

"I am the LORD. Those who hope in me will not be disappointed." - Isaiah 49:23

All the King's Men, pt 1

Prologue

My eyebrows hurt from frowning so much while I read this book. Half the time I don't understand what has happened, is happening, or will happen, and the other half I don't understand why what I understand to be happening needs to happen in this story. So I've decided, to aid myself and any others who have trouble with this book, to summarize, in story form. I shall include in bold, to the best of my ability, the words Robert Penn Warren uses that I don't know and had to look up. And the parts I didn't understand or forgot, I will make up.

Part One

Why hello. I am your supposedly-college-educated narrator who still has terrible grammar, Jack Burden. I am opening this story in the back of a 1930s nightclub owned by Slade, then introduce you to Sadie so quickly that you think it's the same person until suddenly about fifty pages later I use the pronoun "she" in Sadie's description and then the entire mental image you've concocted of him (now her) is obliterated, she not being Slade and all.

I work for a governor who I call "The Boss" for most of the story. Back when he was simply Willie Stark, he was somewhat naive and married a school teacher named Lucy. She was also naive. I met Willie when he was running for governor and I was covering the story as a reporter. Sadie, who is reminiscent of that girl on The Hudsucker Proxy who pretends to be a Muncie girl, very dramatically calls Willie a sap and tells him he's being played, and that he'll never be a governor. Willie gets drunk and for a few pages I describe the way Sadie stands over Willie's unconscious body and stares down at him.

Willie goes to law school and gets learned up real good, then comes back with gubernatorial flare to win the office. I quit my job and Sadie, who's working for Willie, tells me to come work for "The Boss." I do, even though he's a sap. But he's a more powerful sap now.

He's very intimidating, and whenever you see three asterisks (***) between paragraphs the time shifts, so sometimes it's 1939 and sometimes it's 1933 and once it was 1914, but one often feels like he is being flushed down a chronological toilet and all the dates are swirling around as you drown in wordy water.

I knew Anne and Adam Stanton back when I was a child. I say about 50 times that Adam won't go fishing with me anymore, and I used to love Anne, though she wasn't very pretty. I married Lois, who was prettier than Anne, but I haven't explained yet what happened to her. Maybe in part two. In part one, however, I have dinner with Anne several times, and Adam is a fancy schmancy surgeon with oleaginous hair (as most people had in the 30s).

Willie, after becoming somewhat successful, has an affair with a girl on skates in Chicago, and upon finding out, Sadie cries into my chest and laments about having the small pox when she was young which left pock marks in her face. Apparently she thinks Willie owes her something, and just two-timed her. I'm not very good with women, so I just awkwardly pat her on the back and tell her to get over it. I should've said something like, "I ain't noticed Mr. Willie askin' fer ta marry ya," but not all books written during the 30s and 40s can be as poignant as Gone with the Wind.

Before I worked for the Boss and was a journalist, I was a grad student studying history. For about 75 pages I read my ancestor Cass Mastern's journal about having an affair with a woman named Annabelle, whose husband, Duncan Trice, shot himself. Then Cass leaves Annabelle and frees all his slaves, then dies during the Civil War. I am left pondering this all and the reader is left wondering, "What the crap does this have to do with anything?"

End part one.

reading lists

Tomorrow I'm going to begin reading for real. Like when you're 11 and you promise you're not going to trick your gullible friend, and each time you trick him and then promise again, and your friend says, "You said that last time," and you answer, "But this time I mean it." This time I mean it. Tomorrow I'm going to start reading for real. I've uncommittedly begun All the King's Men for my American Novel class next semester, but tomorrow I'm going to dig my heels in the sand and, come tidal wave, come land shark, come Peyton Manning walking down the beach with a come-hither look, I shall read.

I'm also re-reading Entirety by Dana Candler. I read it for the first time over the summer, as I sat in a bedroom in a Salt Lake City mansion that nestled comfortably between the shoulder blades of a wealthy mountain. Those mornings were quiet, and my heart would fill with God's intimate love for me like the room filled with curtain-filtered, golden-yellow early-morning sunlight. I am loving the romance, as Misty Edwards's forward puts it, of leaving all behind in order to cling to Him in greater measure.

Have you ever had a book beckon to you? I have an entire author beckoning to me. Louisa May Alcott is sitting on the edge of my top-most bookshelf, swinging her pantalooned legs and sighing in that "oh, all my words, like eggs, are spoiling in the refrigerator of disregard" sort of way that makes me want to leap to one of her books and consume and ingest as many of her words as possible. Incentive: As soon as I finish All the King's Men, I can read one of L.M.'s novels. In the meantime I'll need earplugs while I sleep so I won't hear her sighs.

I begin this blog on Christmas break, Anno Domini 2009, with the vow to write regularly, ponder often, and avoid getting sugar cookie crumbs in my laptop's keyboard. Amen and Amen.