Hope

It came upon the midnight clear
That glorious song of old
From angles bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, goodwill to men
From heaven's all gracious King!"
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing

Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled.
And still their heavenly music floats
O'er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing
And over its Babel sounds
The blessed Angels sing

O ye beneath life's crushing load
Whose forms are bending low
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing

For lo! the days are hastening on
By prophets seen of old
When with the ever-circling years
shall come the time foretold
When the new heavens and earth shall own
The Prince of Peace, their King
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

--Edmund Hamilton Sears, 1849

The Jerk Factor

Truth is:
I lack the maturity
the strength
or presence of mind
to come up with the immeasurable
grace
needed
to ignore the hurt

How shall I learn
where is my example
how long will it be my fault?
how shall I stand under this burden
long enough to
forgive you
for its placement

truth is
I'm no superwoman
I am just a child
like you
and all I need
is a little grace
of my own

some new and exciting

I know I don't usually post a lot of art things here, but there a few exciting things I can't keep to myself and the other blog... well... not my favorite place right now. So, I'm just going to post it here.

First of all-- after thinking about it for months and months, I finally got a white board to put up in my studio space so I can actually write my thoughts down as well as put up some images that keep me thinking in fresh ways. It is exciting to see my little home becoming more and more mine as I figure out what I want and how to make it work. So here is a little snap-aroo of the space with the new little inspiration board:















THEN-- you have probably noticed this fabulous painting there. this is something I am especially excited about. I don't think it is quite finished, but I think it is so beautiful that I need to share it anyway. For the last three years or so, I've been extremely fascinated and awe-struck b the beautiful colors and stillness of winter, but haven't quite gotten to the place in my work where I feel I can do it justice.... until now! I hope this will be the first of a series of winter celebrations. Stay tuned for that. Here is a little image close up so for a little more of a drool-fest for you.














I have also been working on a few other new-ish things that have come out of a lot of my journey down into the depths. I've been thinking about the relationship between the inner and the outer landscape and think I might try to do a bit more "inner landscapes" in conjunction with the more "outer" ones. We'll see how I end up feeling....











Last but surely not least, I have been thinking of starting something of a new project. Today, as I went through some old things while setting up the new addition to my studio, I came across an old pile of self-portraits. Back in the Spring of 2008 when I took figure painting, we were required to complete one self-portrait every day for the entire semester. Needless to say, I dropped off with that sometime around spring break, but I often think about that assignment and want to take it up again. After looking through all fourty-some that I do have, I could definitely see the growth that was taking place over the course of the semester and was wishing that I had stuck with it. So I've decided to try it again, in part out of curiosity to see how much I've grown as an artist since then. Something else that I found remarkable was the realization that this was the semester that I started wearing glasses, and it seems a bit telling that in only one or two of the paintings and drawings I am actually wearing them. This might also be why I quit doing it... haha... ANYWAY-- here is the first installment of this project. I don't think I am going to try to do it everyday, but maybe once a week or something. We will also see how I feel about that...

I often find myself, at the end of marked seasons or at certain recurring landmarks in my life, involuntarily (or sometimes more voluntarily, depending on the particular instance) looking back on the time marked out, wondering inwardly, how I might have changed and grown over the length. I often find myself asking, "where was I, who was I, when all of this started? What did I look like when this season last came to close?"

This year, as the holiday season is again arrived and we prepare to change our calendars and reform old habits of numbering on checks and letters and legal documents, I find this seasonal reflection to be particularly pressing-- it seems essential, if not inevitable, to take about 12 steps backwards and look over the landscape through which I've traveled. The valley below is vast and stretching and there is much to be seen.

I am now nearly 24-- this is the time of year that I often begin counting days between me and a landmark that I seem to cherish as a sign of my growing up, a commemoration of what I hope to be an increase towards maturity. It is a year today, I believe, since I officially finished my degree at Colorado State University, although in many ways, I was already far distanced from my life as an undergraduate at this point. I remember last December 19th, simply hoping that the Holidays would pass swiftly so that I could find some quiet to sort through all that the previous four months, if not the previous four years, had been and meant. I was longing for the wilderness of January.

And so it began, it seems. I have been in Boulder now for nearly a year-and-a-half and I often find myself reflecting upon the hand that brought me here. Still, looking back on the process of this decision and the events surrounding my arrival, it seems to have been so swift, so inevitable, so outside my own doing or control. I asked the Lord, "Where shall we go together now?" and he answered with a silent sort of transplant. There wasn't a lot of struggle, I don't remember a great deal of wrestling over the details-- only the recurring question, "are you sure?" Apparently, he was quite certain.

As I've thought over the events of the last twelve months, a few things keep coming back: 1) I am certainly not the woman I was. 2) Nothing has gone according to my plan. 3) Oh how deeply he loves me.

As I look myself in the face, I am acutely aware of a fresh sense of freedom-- a freedom that I never imagined possible. I have all too often had these moments in which I've looked back with a strange sense of longing on particularly beautiful phases of my life in which I felt the Lord had broken through to the heart of me in particularly poignant ways-- I think it is often in the moments when I feel the most foggy, the greatest degree of lostness, these moments when I've come face to face with all the brokenness that still remains, that I foolishly wish to be back to a younger, less complex place because I felt better about myself then. I think "I used to be such a lovely soul... what happened?"

But here is a true thing-- the lenses through which I see this former self is more than likely distorted and the truth is that every time I am brought to a new place of growth, there has to be a great deal of demolition and mess to be made before the flower is able to bloom again. And the thing is this: as I walk down the street and catch pieces of myself in the peripheral reflection of shop windows, I sense a lightness, a freedom from many old things that used to bind. I try to find words to describe the difference between yesterday and today, but the yesterday things are so far gone that all I can do is say that they are, indeed far gone. He has removed our transgressions from us as far as the east is from the west. What a lovely mystery.

I have been asking a great deal of questions about forgiveness these days. The fall and into the winter has brought with it a great deal of stripping-- many of these months have been wrought with the blazing fires of refinement as I walk deeper into the forest of things that simply need to be released. On a recent visit back to Fort Collins, I sat in the passenger seat as my mentor explained a process of forgiveness in which suddenly, everything that we used to hold so tightly against one another gives way in a sort of vaporous way. "One day," she said, "you just decide and then you just let go." This is not to say that forgiveness is something that simply happens to us without any pursuit on our part, but rather that in the midst of our straining towards it, in the process of our repeated choosing, it somehow comes upon us in the night and we are free.

It is in this way that I often thankful for all of the wordless mysteries of life. There are no words, no means of expression that seem to do justice to this sense of release that I find when I look over my life these days. When I consider this particular season in my life, there is no doubt a deep sense of the specific and important purpose my good and loving Father has for me in it. Nothing seems accidental here.

I mentioned previously, as I think I have in a few previous writings, that a great reality of this year has been the release of my own plans. Or perhaps I ought to say a release from my own plans. It has been a long and painful process of peeling my fingers away from the plans, the goals, the ambitions that I have, for so long, used as a means of avoiding my heart and maintaining a risk-free, solitary independence. Apart from the Father, I can do nothing, Jesus illuminated. And now, here I am, tasting one small lick of this truth.

It took me a few hundred days of frustration before realizing that my hurt is borne of a stubborn insistence upon my own way, my own plans. I want to trust in my own goals. Yet-- thankfully, in his infinite love and mercy, the Lord does not leave me to my own devices and asks me to dare to dream of the things that are in his heart rather than the small scraps that I can hold in my frail hands. He has something far better for me, but I have to let go. The only way that we learn to trust him is by letting go of everything else. Maybe this is what Jesus said when he admonished the rich man, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will love one or hate the other."

What is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. Nothing this year has gone according to my plan-- plans that I think that I've held in my hardened heart since I was about 16. Maybe younger. I have been working so hard to maintain my own security in the things I could accomplish on my own; there have even been new things that have come about far beyond any plan I could have made and I even tried to fashion those into new, safe plans. Apparently, that doesn't work well either. Of course, I thought God would probably lend a hand here and there when my ambitions became too big for me, but I am not sure I really stopped to consider that I ought to yield to the will of the Father rather than asking him to support mine-- even if I'd found a very convincing argument that these were His ideas. hrumph.

I think, in my immaturity, I've gotten a little mixed up. I've managed to turn a few things around. I got into this mode of thinking that I could use the Lord's gifts, those passions and abilities that he has made integral to my person, for the purpose of my own gain and security. I have believed that although, yes, these gifts will be a blessing to those around me, they are primarily for the use of my own security, my own sense of self-assurance-- I put my trust in the gifts rather than the giver. Apparently, that isn't exactly what He had in mind. And it has been a long hard road of burning and stripping for me to even begin to understand how far off I've been. And I am fairly sure that this turning around will be a long in coming process. I need to learn how to give back the things he's built into me so that they can be used in the right ways, rather than the shallow attempts of my own.

A few months ago, I made the mistake of asking the Father, "Show me what it means to be fully given over." I must have asked this question out of a complete ignorance of what I was asking. Yet, oh how faithful the Lord is. I am learning that the room in his Love for true life and goodness is infinite-- when we actually begin to give everything over, he comes into us and blows us apart with blessing and goodness.

Nothing this year has gone according to my plan and there is no better gift that I could have received. I am so thankful that this season has been marked by such a letting go because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I am starting to understand the security and the abundance that is given in the heart of our Great Father. I have been given a thousand beautiful gifts over the past year that I, never in my wildest dreams, could have known to ask for. In so many ways, I've been both saved from myself and been given the gift of my true self. I have no doubt that the road ahead is still long and full of struggle, but there is nothing else that I would ask for or seek because I know that these are the fires through which he refines us; less and less am I seeking for a day when the trouble ends and the difficulties cease because I am coming to learn that the greater the struggle, the deeper the hurt, the greater the love of a God who dares not leave us alone.

I want to finish this post with some passages from a few books that have named incredibly well much of the wordless realities of what the Lord has been at work in me. I realize that these are quite lengthy, but well worth the read and seem to express much of what I am attempting to say to you here.

"Nowhere is it more important to be in a conversational relationship with God than in our prayer life. Often God does not give us what we ask for, but I believe that he will always answer, always respond to us in some way. It is interesting that we commonly speak of answered prayer only when we are given our requests. When a request is denied, does this then mean that there has been no response?

Some people say that God's silence is an answer in these cases. But I think that if we know how to listen, God will normally tell us something when he does not give us his requests. We will hear it and grow through it if we have learned to recognize and acknowledge his voice.

This was certainly true in the case of Paul's famous 'thorn in the flesh,' which he begged the Lord to remove from him three time (2 Cor 12:7-8). God was not silent, even though he turned down Paul's request: 'But his answer was: 'My grace is all you need; power is most fully seen in weakness.' "(2 Cor 12:9 REB)

God is not impassive toward us like an unresponsive pagan idol; he calls us to grow into a life of personal interchange with him that does justice to the idea of our being his children...

... It is important to understand that God in his mercy often speaks to us in obscure ways in order to allow us the room and time we need to respond. He lets us know that we are indeed being addressed but also that we need to stretch out in growth in order to receive the message. Perhaps we often think, Well, God, why don't you just come out and say it? Tell me in detail how to life. But we are usually full of mistaken ideas about what that would actually mean.

Our minds and values have to be restructured before God's glory, but at the same time our own interests are truly appreciated and understood. We may be tempted to cry out, like Isaiah, for God to rend the heavens, come out of hiding and stand before us telling us what to do (Is 64:1), but we do not really understand what it is we are asking for when we ask that. Probably it would literally kill us or at least unbalance us if it actually happened. So God in his mercy continues to approach us obliquely, in one way or another, but increasingly less so as we mature-- even until we can safely know him as he knows us (1 Cor 13:12).

It is therefore natural and right that God's word comes to us in forms that we must struggle to understand. This is even true of the Bible, which is very explicit in many respects but still requires persistent and energetic work to understand it. In the process of struggling we grow to the point where we can appropriate and assimilate the content of truth as it becomes clear. It is one of the oldest and most common stories of human life that in its most important moments we have little more than the foggiest idea of what is we are doing and saying. And our ignorance is partly for our own good.

Did you really know what was happening when you entered the university or military training, got married or brought a child into the world? In some vague sense you did, perhaps, but you also had very little idea of what it meant in the long run. Had you appreciated all that it meant at the time, you probably would not have had the courage to proceed. Then you would have missed out on much good that has come to you through those events."

-- Dallas Willard, "Hearing God,"105-113

"I still find myself surprised by the trouble God goes to in order to spring the lock on our souls. In weaker moments, I have wanted God to be more like a cruise director or a carnival ship headed for the Bahamas, rather than the one who spoke the worlds into being and who pledged himself in Christ to shape holiness in my heart. I would wish to be less disturbed. Or as the Philosopher Soren Keirkegaard once said, "If you desire, humanly speaking, pleasant and happy days, then never get seriously involved with Christ.

Perhaps it's harder for us to recognize the fingerprints of God in difficult places of our journey because God's parenting has a deeper goal than our own...

So it is understandable that along our journey we have to be reminded that God is a different sort of Father. He wounds-- in order to heal. he dismantles and exposes, so that we might know his cleansing love in the deepest reaches of our being. The Old Testament uses the metaphor of an eagle to describe the kind of parent God is:

'Like and eagle that stirs up its nest,
That hovers over its young,
He spread his wings and caught them,
He carried them on His pinions' (Deut 32)

An eagle knows the moment when the time is right to nudge its baby bird over the side of the nest-- into a panicky free fall through thin air. Then he swoops beneath this fluttering mess of feathers. He catches his young and carries her on his pinions to safety, until, little by little, this bird learns she has eagle's wings too. She can fly.

Do you know what it's like to have your nest stirred-- or to feel like some new challenge has through you way out of your comfort zone? Our faith journey will never make much sense until we can trace the hand of God behind it all.

In his book, The Problem with Pain, C.S. Lewis wrote that God whispers to us in our pleasures, but he shouts to us in our pain. Over the rumblings of your anxiety or your fear or your disappointment, can you make out some part of what he's saying to you?

... God has designed the universe so as to push us out of our comfort zones. We have to step off the side of the nest and fly, even if it feels like a free fall for a while. The naked place of risky newness is the only place we learn to trust him.

.. Our journey with the Lord is often a series of experiences in which we are startled into some deeper awareness that only God will see us through. Only God.

"... When bondage ... becomes apparent, I feel the strangest sort of hope. I know that God is after something good. God begins to dismantle our old ways of coping and when he pries our sticky fingers off the things we trust instead of him, when he exposes a lie that has ruled our lives, we are standing square in the center of his love. God is both beautiful and severe, as singer Derek Webb writes. When God takes the lid off our lives in this way, it's a mercy. A great good, and severe mercy.

Oh for the words to communicate a love willing to come after us in this way! C.S. Lewis called God's willingness to bruise in order to heal 'an intolerable complement.' He means that God's care for us is expressed in all the trouble he goes to in shaping our souls. He is like an artist who is passionate about a painting he is laboring over. Lewis writes,

'In the same way, it is natural to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love, but less.'

"... There are times when we cling to God in the fog... what I realize, though, as I look back in this journey with God is that nearly every thing that's valuable and real to me has come from just this sort of clinging. Other people can tell us a lot of helpful things about God. Reading a book has its place. In the long run though, the real stuff comes from crawling your way back to the watering hold of his grace , over and over again.

What's yours- what you own-- is what you reach for of God in those moments, where the bottom of life has dropped out. Your experience of God in those seasons becomes the real source of wonder.

"...It's a bit of a mystery what God chooses to remove from your life-- and what he allows to remain... But when it insists on coming along for the trip-- the great question inside us swings in a new direction. Might this thing I long to be different be the actual crucible on which God chooses to shape my soul into something of beauty that perhaps only he sees? Could this disturbing interruption of my plans be the actual way God is molding my heart in some new manner?

I often wish there was an easier path. But honestly, I doubt we can experience Christ in any way that matter, by lesser means.

This process of encountering God in ways we do not expect-- of being loved by him according to his definition of love-- is a rite of passage for each of us.

When at least a few of your dreams don't work out, you are at a new place with him. When disillusionment strips you of your illusions, you may be in a position to receive what he has wanted to give all along. When you start to feel as though you are not sure who God is anymore, often you are on the verge of discovering the God you never knew, but who always was-- and has only been somehow shrouded by your preconceptions."

-- Paule Rinehart, "Better than My Dreams"

How To Be Alone

"Blessed is she who has believe when the Lord has said to her will be accomplished."
-- Luke 1:45

"But what is seen
is temporary;
What is unseen
is eternal"
2 Corinthians 8

"What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near to us whenever we pray to him?
-- Deuteronomy 4:7

"The Lord is my shepherd
I lack for nothing
He makes me lie down
in green pastures
He leads me
beside still waters."
-- Psalm 23

Since sometime near Halloween, there is little that I do after getting out of bed before going to my front window to see if any snow has fallen. For some reason, this year, I've been longing for snow more than ever. And it seems, this year, it has taken longer than ever for it to come.

But today--- TODAY!-- to the window I went with sleep still quite present in my eyes, to be greeted by white steps and falling flakes. I supervised the playground while jumping up and down shouting about my excitement. Today, the flakes landing on hair and gloves and coats and hats remained visible in a frigid beauty-- we studied each nearly quarter-inch flake in wonder, examining the design and beauty of this minuscule work of art. My gift has come, even if only for a few fleeting moments.

Last time I really sat down to write, I was full of discontent and unrest. Frustrated and lost. What am I doing? Is this right? But over the weeks, something has changed. I've been given eyes to see and ears to hear.

I've been thinking about the importance of faithfulness. I am remembering my own choices, the power that comes in simply choosing-- choosing to endure, choosing to surrender, choosing to wait, choosing to be patient. Choosing to stop demanding control.

Something in me over the last two or three weeks has shifted. My heart is more filled with peace, I am more patient and am growing in happiness towards where I am for this moment. I am walking through the process of choosing to surrender as the Lord does his quiet work in me. I am laying down my demands for a position that gains recognition and I am surrending the assumption that I must be doing this one thing in order to be happy and content and fulfilled.

I am learning how to be faithful when so much feels insignificant, mundane, and less-than. When I was leaving Idaho back in 2007, someone very important to me spoke these words over me-- words that cross my mind on a nearly daily basis: "Heidi," he said,"You are a like a river that flows through a canyon, forming deep things, little by little, wherever you go. You do this in such a way that embeds you in the lives of those you touch." I often find these words encouraging in the midst of the hundreds of things I do that make me wonder if they are going anywhere-- these things that make me wonder if I am going anywhere, if anything I do really matters. These words remind me to remain faithful, to simply ask the Lord to make me as he chooses to make me each day, trusting that he is creating this river in me, even as I cannot see it.

It is the last day of school before the children go home for a few weeks for the Holidays. I sat at my desk in the copy room today, writing a few cards to people who have mattered a great deal to me over the last few months. It has been a beautiful reflection of all the people who have loved me so well, so many gifts sitting on my desk that remind me how well I am loved by the children i am honored to serve each day. It is days like these that I am reminded of the cumulative good borne of a daily faithfulnesses.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of my grumbling, I was reminded of a choice, a commitment, and agreement that I made with the Father quite some time ago; a choice I forgot about. I remembered that I chose to release my career, my job to the caring hand of the Father, pursuing a lesser position in order to create space for his voice. And, in my anxiety, in my self-sufficiency, that choice, that active placement of my life in his care suddenly faded into the background and I began to cry out again.

But I think this process was an important reminder of a lesson that I find I must continually revisit in my life-- the importance of choosing to cling to one true thing in the midst of the emotional roller-coaster. Anyone who knows me is aware that I have been gifted with a greater saturation of emotional effect that the average person-- my emotional life is soaking. And it is easy for me to find myself hijacked-- how did I get so far off course? And so, I must often come back to these choosings. What will I choose to cling to, what word of truth will I return to when my heart spins me around? I have often found that this is the greatest source of peace, these grounded choices.

And so I am remembering the choice of faithfulness. I am choosing to do the hardwork of photocopying, cutting and pasting, hole-punching, and stapling because it is the call of faithfulness for this season. I am choosing this because I know that these seemingly lowly positions have a great deal to teach. I am remembering that the Lord has promised to be faithful, that he is our great Father, who promises, "Everything I have is yours."

And so I am learning to wait, to patiently endure. And as I continue to choose, I find that I am learning more and more to love. I am learning that the true things of value may not be in that which I expect-- they aren't in the things that I thought I was destined to do. The things of value are often found in the overlooked, the insignificant in the small. The things of greatest value are not neccessarily in the classroom-- they are found on the playground and the lunchroom. It isn't the highest achievers and the oldest, but in the youngest, the five-year-olds, who write in wobbly handwriting and pared-down drawings.

I am learning that a great deal of my love and fulfillment is not found in making things that get applauded or appreciated. I started out this semester longing to be in the art classroom, but I am learning to recieve the gift of simple relationship. I am learning what love and value really is. And why would I choose anything but this?

"We do not know what Matter is when we look at Matter alone; only when the Spirit dwells in Matter and uses it as a tool do we learn the capacities of Matter. The sensitiveness of eye and ear, the delicacy of the artist's touch, are achievements which we could never anticipate from the study of the lifeless. So, too we do not know what Humanity really is, or of what achievements it is capable, until Divinity dwells in it... We must not form a conception of Humanity and either ask if Christ is Human or insist on reducing Him to the limits of our conception; we must ask, "What is Humanity," and look at Christ to find the answer. We only know what Matter is when Spirit dwells in it; we only know what Man is when God dwells in him."

-- Archbishop William Temple, "The Divinity of Christ"
(From Dallas Willard, "Hearing God")