It may be a strange thing to enjoy, but I love it when people try to determine or guess what's physically wrong with me. Today I was deemed "Eisenlos" by my wonderful co-workes, old Mennonite women who don't speak a pint of English. Basically they declared me to be iron deficient and proceeded to tell me that I was unnaturally pale. I was very grateful for their diagnosis as well as their prescription: 100 ml of natural Apple juice, 100 ml of natural orange juice and 100 ml of beet juice all combined. I am supposed to drink this every day. I love my job. The dishwasher has recently broken so we have all had to chip in to wash 100s of dishes a day. Let me tell you, we are a machine. But it is exhausting no matter how well greased we are.

All day the wind whipped and wined and blew the tent up and down like little kids holding a parachute in gym class (parachute day was always my favourite day. Double dutch, quite the opposite). At the end of the day I ran to my car and was literally not in motion as I stretched one leg in front of the other. Twas a powerful gale! Windy days are delightful except that I always get my hair caught in the car door. Speaking of hair, today a chunk of mine got completely intertwined and tangled in the button on my oh so cute floral apron and I had to cut it off with a knife. The jagged ends look is always a winner.

It was a good day and I am full of ideas about how to spend this evening. Time is such a blessing.

The Intermediate Stages

I wrote this near the beginning of April but as I reread it, I realize how well it fits with my first post. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit Priest and a brilliant man who ran into many walls of controversy with the Catholic church in regards to his interpretations of the books of Genesis and Revelation. As with most controversial theological authors, many of his works are prejudged and sadly his great wisdom has not been given the proper credit it deserves. Or rather, Chardin's God given insight was not seen. While not all of his ideas align perfectly with my own thoughts and beliefs, this poem does. Give him a read if you have not already!

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.


We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
 unknown, something new.
 And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you; 
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
 let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
 Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
 gradually forming within you will be.
 Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
 that his hand is leading you,
 and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
 in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

My dad gave this to me a while ago. I read it, was encouraged, and then like most things, I forgot all about it. I rediscovered it today and really took time to focus on each word. “Trust in the slow work of God” I am very impatient. I like to know everything, to predict my future, to understand. One of the most difficult areas in my walk with God is not faith but relying on God's faithfulness. I never think him to be unfaithful but sometimes when I don't see his immediate answers, I revert to trying to fix everything on my own. Of course this ends up being disastrous and I always come running back to God. And it is often only at this point that he reveals himself to me. And I have learned from that :] I love the last line of this prayer: “Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.” To accept the anxiety that I am living in is a big step. We humans continually try everything in our power to eliminate anxiety, suspense. We try everything to control our lives but to grasp this state of uncontrolled freedom is liberating as well as frightening. If we accept the anxiety of being led, we are completely trusting Christ. It makes me think of the cliche example of being led by someone, blindfolded. Even if we wholly trust the person we are being led by, there is a gripping panic that seizes us and more often than not, compels us to rip off the blindfold. What follows is a wave of relief and safety. But is there not disappointment as well? There is always a sense of failure – why couldn't I have just finished the task before me? And what is safety after all? True safety is being perfectly aligned in God's will. To us being safe might mean side stepping any ominous event that comes our way, controlling the situations we are in so as to avoid unpleasant complications in our lives. But it is when our heart and soul are safe that we experience true freedom. What freedom it is to be liberated of the constant worry over our physical selves! Yes, suffering is plenty in the center of God's will, but we are safest in the eye of the storm because we know who controls that very storm.

We must allow God to take us through the intermediate stages, to guide us fully for as Paul so wisely said, “We walk by faith and not by sight.”

The Ringing Grooves of Change

Tennyson has always been a favourite of mine. It isn't because of his whimsical imagery in Lady of Shallot or his breathtaking story telling in Ulysses. It was when I read In Memoriam that my respect and admiration for the man really grew. In it he struggles with the loss of a close friend, the concept of a loving God and how he can take life away, and the doubts he is faced with when living in a time where God and the church isn't the only explanation for all of creation. His journey is full of pain and honest truth. One of my favourite quotes from the compilation is, "There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds." This was a time when Darwin's theory of Evolution was taking hold and rocking the solid foundation of the Church of England. Those who rejected Darwin's theories embraced strict faith and refused to question. Tennyson lay bare his doubts, knowing fully the existence of God but questioning his own ability to have the faith to really doubt. If you haven't read it, please do.

The title for this blog came from another of Tennyson's quotes, "Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." There is a lot of irony and I wonder if there is some sarcasm in it. The great world. The world's greatness lies solely in the fact that God created it. And it is spinning in a downward spiral. Each change has both good and bad in it but to see the good is getting evermore difficult.

So here are my thoughts on life, God, and the beauty that is still in this changing world.

Life

Maybe I'm sitting here in the dark on this Friday night because I'm too lazy to sleep. But laziness has never kept me from anything before. Perhaps it has put off the accomplishment of certain tasks at hand but it has never been a terminating force. The wind outside is howling. When I first moved into this little room in the back corner of the upstairs floor, I lay awake every night listening and marvelling at the appealing viciousness of the wind. It exhilarates me. It's like the same feeling you get on a winter's night when the stark cold is muffled by a blanket of blizzarding snow. Or on that summer night when the heat of the day sparks the air with an electric buzz and the thunder rolls in, dragging its bursting rainclouds with it. Maybe it's that excited hesitancy found on any such occasions when the choice is yours – to stay in or go out. Both are wildly exciting and yet often we choose to stay in, clinging to the cozy, delightfully pleased sentiment rather than the bold, triumphant dash for the door of the free spirit that is in us all. What is that feeling that makes our eyes sparkle with the unpredictability of the weather? No, close, but it's not love. It is adventure. Unknowns, uncertainties paired with something intangibly dramatic. Each day is an adventure. I try to live each day like the greatest thing yet will happen. And each day it does; another gift of life added on to the already piled high blessings, a surplus of moments where love and friendship provide affirmation, courage and joy, and 1,440 seconds in which God is working, doing the greatest thing he has ever done – being our God. A person would not be qualified as a person if they did not feel at least a slight burst of delight and suspense during a thunderstorm or any of the natural forces of weather stated above, but for me it is always something a little more than that. Alright a lot more, as grammatically incorrect as that is. I find that we should live each day with that excitement, that anxious yearning to see how the time given us is panned out. The weather is wild. It is not tame so why should the instigator, the creator be tame? He is not and that is why each moment is full of surprise, fearful wonder, and adventure.

One of my favourite things about being a waitress is listening to the buzz of conversations. The plethora of stories that meet my ears and the diverse and varied speakers is fascinating. From the man who makes his eating partners whisper whilst speaking self-importantly on his cellular device to the club of elderly women who traipse in bedazzled with red hats, purple outfits and all kinds of bling, you hear many a thing. Some words are normal, many phrases are expected but I heard something the other day that almost made me stop in my tracks. Had I done so I would have most likely dropped a tray of plates or poured coffee on an eagerly expectant caffeine addict, but I couldn't wrap my mind around, “My life is pretty boring right now”. Stated flippantly and very casually, it didn't seem like an unordinary comment. But it is. How could your life ever be boring? Life. The very word is brimming with possibility, pulsing with endless activity and static vitality. To us mortals, life should be a proper noun in accordance to how precious it is. It is sheer arrogance to deem a gift, a blessing that is taken for granted day after day, dull, as if we have the right to decide how it should be lived or even what adjective to put in front of it. A synonym for boring is lifeless. “My life is pretty lifeless right now”. Correct me if I'm wrong but that seems somewhat contradictory. Life is life. It is not ours to do with what we like. It's not a kite that we can just fly when we want and store it in the garage when the kids get too old for it. It is freedom. It is everlasting. But life is only truly life, when we live it not for ourselves, when we step out into the thunderstorm, embrace that untamed wind and say, “Today is the greatest day because it is not my day. Today is Life and Life is God.”