One thought away...

I love the fact that God always uses the smallest things to grab my attention and teach me something new - when I actually open my ears and expect to hear from Him.

Tonight I was sitting on the bleachers in the Kensington gym during Rosedale youth group, wedged in between a 3-year-old boy bundled up in a big coat, sucking away at his thumb and cuddling close, and a 6-year-old girl who was intent on braiding my hair and making my earrings jingle. Pastor Matt was teaching, and of all the things he said, one sentence stuck out to me - We are all one thought away from returning to sin.

I think that struck me because I am becoming more and more aware of my own spiritual fragility - the fact that I am easily capable of sin I profess to abhor and hate and avoid. I know that I still cling to many attitudes and habits, especially in how I view and treat people, that is totally anti-God. And those habits are there because I don't guard my thoughts, realizing that every thought that I don't take captive to Christ will lead me away from Him - and every thought I turn towards Him will be cloaked in His glory. It's that old maxim - thoughts become attitudes, attitudes become habits, habits become lifestyles - or something like that order. It's the small steps, the tiny shuffles that may be almost imperceptible, that truly determine the direction of my life. And one by one, they build on each other - to what end?

I don't think however, that the knowledge of my own bent towards sinfulness should paralyze me and keep me from doing or thinking anything. On the contrary, I should run to Christ and cling to His cross, knowing it's the only thing that saves me and frees me. I have freedom in Christ, freedom to follow God and not be locked into a lifestyle of earning His favor, or being incapable of freedom from sin. But that freedom has to be inseparable from my knowledge of my complete, utter dependence on Christ for maintaining that freedom. What a paradox - what a Savior.

Lord, you are truly the only One who saves me.

Grace.

I am officially a pathetic blogger. I haven't posted in nearly 3 weeks. I could blame it on the holidays, on being busy, spending my time on better things like family and salsa dancing, working and Scrabble games...or perhaps because I had a sudden existential crisis where I thought that my life really wasn't interesting enough to write about in a blog.

But - it really doesn't matter if this is interesting to anyone else, because blog writing is a purely self-serving activity. Keep a public journal; expose yourself to strangers; or even create an alter ego that no one would recognize as Whitney Carolyn Klaassen. (I don't think I'm capable of carrying that one off...)

Recent thoughts:

The presence of Grace.

Not my extremely bright, precocious 10-year-old sister, but that constant feeling at work and at home that I am being followed quite closely by the Grace of God. Finding myself reacting in ways that are definitely not Whitney; choosing to bite my tongue and smile when I want to smack a rude, foul-mouthed, abusive parent across the face; choosing to change a dirty diaper when I really don't have to because ER nurses really don't do that (we care more about keeping the child breathing and awake); choosing not to complain to security about parking off site when everyone else seems to make that their favorite activity of the week.

It's almost like I'm watching a movie, and thinking, really, really? Did I just say that? Because that is not how Whitney usually reacts to annoyances. And then I realize - it was Grace speaking through me - Grace totally undeserved, unmerited, given as a beautiful free gift that I am very likely to dirty with the selfish bent of my own heart. I don't react that way on my own. It is the Grace of God choosing to speak and act through me, and I step back and say, Okay, Lord, you handle this one, because I can't do it on my own. And miraculously, graciously, he does.

2 Corinthians 9:8 (New International Version)
And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.

Unfortunately, I don't always allow Grace to move through me. Those times that I see Grace working are few and far between, but experiencing those moments creates in me a longing to see more of them, because it is evidence that Christ is truly living in me and working through me. Not that, wow, I'm such an incredibly nice person (the monologue in my head is certainly not nice sometimes) or that I can "live above" my natural reactions. No, the amazing thing is that God is still in the business of redeeming broken, sinful lives, lives that really, in the long run, in earthly eyes, don't amount to a hill of beans. But God (thankfully) doesn't rate us according to our earthly value. He uses an entirely different scale - one that I certainly don't understand yet.

So! life goes on. I am trying to go to Zambia this May, but I keep feeling resistance - I can't tell yet which Direction it's coming from, but hopefully will be able to see soon. If all else fails, I have 88,000+ frequent flier miles and I'm sure I can find someway to use them, even if only in the USA!

And I'm on day shift!!!!!!! I love it so much. The day flies by and I get to sleep normally during the day. But of course I miss all my night shift crew (What up?!?!?! Mama C! Betsy! Michelle! Dagan! Christina! Et al!)

Oh dear, it's getting crazy..........

The Four Loves

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I finished reading The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis yesterday for the umpteenth time. I have a used copy of the book, picked up from a dusty bookshop whose name I've long forgotten; there were scribbled notes and lines enough in the book before it came to me, and I no longer remember whose notes are mine and whose belong to the previous owner(s).

The Four Loves is my favorite C.S. Lewis book - perhaps more for sentimental reasons, as it was the first Lewis book I ever picked up and read. I know most people are introduced to him through Mere Christianity; that was the fifth or sixth book I ever read by him, and only then because one of my friends insisted on buying and giving it to me because he was so appalled at my never reading it.

I have a deep affinity for clarity, being able to clearly define emotion and relationships and what I owe to God and to the people in my life; and that is another reason I read The Four Loves again and again. The loves Lewis sets out in the book - Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity, along with the introductory chapter on Sub-Human Likes and Loves - help me to define how I feel towards my parents, my friends, my fellow Christians, even God. It helps me to recognize the blessings and pitfalls inherent in any "natural" love, such as Affection and Eros.

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
- C.S. Lewis, "Friendship", The Four Loves

Charity is my favorite chapter, because in it is described the love between God and man - the Gift-Love of God, as He blesses us and bestows on us everything we need for life; and the Need-Love of man, in that I can fully embrace my utter dependence on God and emptiness apart from Him, as something God has put inside me. In "Charity", he describes how we as Christians have to move on past thinking we have anything of value that makes God love us; that I deserve God's love because of my intelligence, my self-sacrificing behavior, my good choices, even my humility. God does not love me because I am loveable; I have to get past that idea if I am ever to truly experience Charity. God loves me simply because He is Love Himself; He cannot do or be anything else.

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. "
- 1 John 4:7-12

"Nothing is inexorable but love. Love which will yield to prayer is imperfect and poor. Nor is it then the love that yields, but its alloy...For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected - not in itself, but in the object...Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire."
- George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

Secrets in the Dark

I finally finished Frederick Buechner's collection of sermons, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons. Normally I don't have to spend 2 months on one book, and if it takes me that long to read, I lose interest long before I finish it. However since it was a collection of sermons, it was more like 37 short-stories together. I really should have been writing my thoughts on Secrets the whole time I was reading it, because it's difficult to look back over 2 months' reading and really remember what struck me or stuck with me. (That's why underlining is so useful to me.)

Reading sermons that I've never heard spoken before always makes me wonder if I would grasp as much, if I listened to them first, as I do when I'm reading them - or would grasp more. Although I've never yet had the chance to listen to Buechner's preaching, his style is such that I can almost hear a warm, low, gentle voice exhorting and explaining such issues as the pain of a loved one's death, the first new breath of Christ on Resurrection Day, the importance of Communion, or the Eucharist - "The Blood of Christ, Freddy, the Body of Christ." The security, warmth and familiarity of home - our Home in Christ. He explores some issues close to heart; some sermons I thought were rather inconsequential; one, in fact, I thought unbiblical. Yet what I found most resonating in his words was his repeated theme that - Christ is the fulfillment of our desires, our hopes, our expectations, the One Way to the kingdom of God; Christ is found when we love one another, sacrifice ourselves for each other, look beyond the outer cloak of flesh and bones, and see truly the immortal soul that we can have a hand in transforming, for either good or evil.

So, a few high points/underline-worthy moments.....

...It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence. ("Message in the Stars")

...It means for us simply that we must be careful with our lives, for Christ's sake, beause it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously. ("The Calling of Voices")

..."Remember the wonderful works that he has done," goes David's song - remember what he has done in the lives of each of us...remember those moments in our own lives when with only the dullest understanding but with the sharpest longing we have glimpsed that Christ's kind of life is the only life that matters and that all other kinds of life are riddled with death; remember those moments in our lives when Christ came to us in countless disguises through people who one way or another strengthened us, comforted us, healed us, judged us, by the power of Christ alive within them...because we remember, we have this high and holy hope: that what he has done, he will continue to do, that what he has begun in us and our world, he will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition. ("A Room Called Remember")

...Faith is the eye of the heart, and by faith we see deep down beneath the face of things. ("Faith")

...And God knows we have all had our wilderness and our temptations too - not the temptations to work evil probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one - to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth. ("The Two Stories")

...We really can't hear what the stories of the Bible are saying until we hear them as stories about ourselves. ("The Seeing Heart")

Home...

I read a sermon by Frederick Buechner today that really struck home with me (no pun intended - I didn't even realized I used the "h" word til I just reread that sentence...). He spoke about our longing for a place in which we feel secure, safe, sheltered; a place so familiar to us, there are no surprises, nothing but total comfort, a place we can truly be ourselves, hiding nothing. He described his own childhood home - his grandparents' rambling Victorian household, complete with rickety porch swings and a dusty piano used by no one. He went on to talk about how our hearts long for home, because in home, we find beauty and rest. And how, in the end, Christ is the true home we are seeking. Reminds me, of course, of another man who once said, Our hearts are restless, til they rest in You.

I myself am looking forward, very, very much, to spending six beautiful days home with my family in Chanute, KS. Chanute is a little town, home to 9,000 people, or fewer, quiet, filled with its own tension and stories that seem so important inside its boundaries, yet whose significance fades away as you drive down Highway 169 away from it. Yet it holds for me people more precious than words can describe - the people who bore me, raised me, taught me what life was meant to be, released me from the nest with their blessings on my restless wanderings through the world. Home means a rambling blue-and-white house, sleeping on a soft brown sofa warmed by sunshine coming in through the large front window, peeling tan stain on the back porch, time spent curled up next to my siblings in the chilly basement watching movies on a TV framed by shelves filled with hundreds of books, being wakened by the amplified croonings of my dad's fire-engine-red electric guitar.

It is funny that my idea of "home" has settled on this last house. My family did move rather frequently throughout my childhood, and my different stages of development are framed in memory by whatever house we happened to be living in at the time - four that I can remember, from birth to sixteen years old. All the houses have been in the same small town, so perhaps the variety isn't that much of a bother to my memory.

But even more than the physical reminders of home, are the emotions that home invokes in me - comfort, peace, total relaxation, letting go of worries or troubles, because here, of all places, I can allow myself to simply be. But, just as Buechner said, home is more than a physical location; for Christians, it is a Person. One who left His home, the most perfect place I can even begin to imagine, and sought to give that home to people who were broken, lost, full of strife, anger, and envy, totally incapable of experiencing his peace in any way.

Life is full of unexpected twists and turns; even now, when I look at my life, I'm at a place I never even dreamed I'd be a year ago. I have no idea where I'll even be living in 6 months, or if I'll still be here in the States in 5 years, what I'll be doing with my life in 10 years. God may call me to move halfway across the nation; or halfway across town. But if I don't recognize Christ as my home - the one constant Faithful One in my life, the one who gives me a Place to Be, the one who follows me through all the red herrings I throw out - if I fail to recognize Christ as my Home, I don't think I'll ever be happy, no matter if I'm living in the most gloriously remote jungle village in Africa, or a dirty urban inner city in America.

My heart is restless, til it rests in Him.

A confession...

I strongly dislike Christmas.

Yes, I am a bah-humbug-type person. First off, the cold weather completely puts me into a cranky, sour mood. I hate cold weather. I despise cold weather. The coats, the gloves, cranking the heater on the engine of the car, scraping the stubborn ice off the front windshield, not being able to roll down the window and feel the air on your skin without your arm hairs freezing off, waking up in the morning and not wanting to get out of bed or shower or even move because your ligaments have been frozen solid, the thick dry feeling of your throat after breathing in hot dry air all night, not being able to wear flip flops every day...

Yeah, I don't do cold weather.

I also don't like buying stuff for people. Crap is my descriptive word of choice. Or rather, I don't like feeling compelled to buy stuff for people. Gift buying should be spontaneous, done because all of a sudden you look at something and realize that this person would love it; or because you see a need, someone in need, and you have the means to meet that need. But yesterday, I found myself staring at an Etsy.com online store at some flower-themed magnets, thinking, Hm, I really need to get something for my grandmother, and maybe she'd like this. And I realized, her fridge is already covered with photos and scraps of paper and magnets shaped like states, and she really didn't need another magnet. All she wanted was something that said, Yes, I am thinking of you and care about you. What she needs is, above all, not crap.

I am learning to be a not-so-materialistic person.

What do I like about Christmas?

I like Advent - the anticipation of the birth of Christ, the reverence given this very coarse, unrefined, dirty event, the birth of a seemingly bastard Child from the womb of a peasant teenager in a dirty hovel of a cave - a most surprising, unexpected way of entry for the King of kings and Lord of lords. I love the spiced smells of cider, the warmth of fire and candles. I love rum cake! I love cuddling up with Amelia and Grace on the couch, the smell of unwashed little girls' hair and the feel of slightly scratchy old pajamas, listening to my father's steady baritone voice reading out loud the birth story from the Gospel of Luke, the pirouette hazelnut sticks and summer sausage with crackers and cheese at ten o'clock in the morning, Sufjan Steven's quirky, joyful, struck-with-awe-sounding Christmas album.

There still is much I love about the Christmas season; still some things that put me off, but many things still that draw me close to God, the people in my life that God has given me to love and be loved by. So I maturely lay aside my intense hatred for cold weather and dislike for buying stuff, and choose to embrace this season of joy.

O come, o come, Emmanuel.

Going back to college....

...in my memories, that is. The other night I pulled out my old vocal music books from good ol' NCCC, remembered singing along with Dave (Dave! David Smith! I know some of you remember Dave!) pounding out old jazz tunes on the piano, singing loud just to hear the notes echo back to me and letting the occasional high F rip off the ceiling of that practice room. Mood Indigo, Old Devil Moon, God Bless the Child; Morgen, Depuis le jour, O mio babbino caro...hating German with a passion, letting the thick gutteral consonants serenade and eventually seduce me into loving the emotion-filled songs...

There is something in traditional, old songs - both the romantic Italian arias by Puccini, and the speak-easy showtunes of Billie Holliday and Nina Simone - that works over a different part of the musical mind than easy-to-sing, foamy songs that you hear on the radio today. Maybe if I knew something, anything, about the psychology of music, I could explain what that is. True story: I miss singing those old songs with Dave. I wish I knew how to play piano. I love singing opera and jazz. It's 5 AM, I'm awake with nothing to do but listen to music and try to not break out in song...my fellow nurses might try to check me in...although they should be used to my eccentric behavior by now...