I was at my desk when Jake called. 

He caught me midday at work to share how a difficult conversation he had initiated earlier that day had gone. I scurried away from my desk to a more private area, the office courtyard.

When Jake had finished recounting the celebratory parts — and the less favorable parts — of that conversation, he asked how my day was going. 

“It’ going pretty well. I’m movin’ a little slowly though today,” I remarked with a snag of guilt.

We concurred a shot of cold brew (just enough to speed me up for the remainder of work hours, but not enough to keep me from slumber later) was the best course forward. 

It saddened me later to realize that I had deemed my day mediocre because I wasn’t uber productive or efficient. Is that really how I want to judge my days — by how productive I am? Not in the least.

Paul urges us to not be conformed to the pattern of this world (Romans 12:2) — our thinking patterns included. Nowhere in the holy Scriptures do I find God judging anyone by their efficiency or how many tasks they marked off. Working as unto the Lord, yes. But productivity along, no. 

The Lord seems to care more about our connection to him. 

Seek the Lord with all your heart, mind and strength…

Abide in me, and I in you, or else you’ll produce no fruit…

To be clear, I do believe that we can abide in the Lord and get things done. It is a question of right ordering: will I value abiding in Jesus and obeying Him more than checking things off my list? I sure hope so: Jesus created us as human beings, not human doings. And, I surely don’t want to dismiss a prompt of the Holy Spirit just so to feel good about completing my to-do list. That is fruitless. I hope to apply what Solomon taught us in Ecclesiastes: everything under the sun is meaningless, save for fearing the Lord. 

Having weathered a string of days in which I was measuring the success of the day by my productivity output, I realized that such a measure made me feel far from Emmanuel, God with us. For me, no level of productivity is worth that cost. He gives us the gift of revealing himself and calling us to him; I refuse to put intimacy with Jesus, my sweet Savior, on the back burner. 

Practically speaking, this has meant taking a 2 minute “silence and stillness” ceasura in the middle of my work day. A time to pause in the midst of pings; a time to listen to the soft, still voice say things like joy only comes from me, or, you are my beloved daughter; remember who I say you are. These 2 minutes have a disproportionate effect (in the best possible way) on my connection with the Lord. It has also meant reprioritizing quiet time in the morning. I crave that time to be with the Lord, yet too often it is cut short or “life gets in the way.” What an ironic idiom, given that Jesus himself is life (John 14:6)!

I desire to listen to the checks and prompts of the Holy Spirit and obey those. That is how I want to measure this day and all that follow. 

Now, to check off posting this blog…just kidding 😉 

Quite literally, I see the glass half-empty. Or, in my case, I see the turquoise Contigo bottle that accompanies me everywhere (often I forget I don’t even realize I have it in hand), as half-empty. I always want to have water available: it’s good for me, therefore, why wouldn’t I take care to keep a full bottle, whenever possible. My knee-jerk logic goes something like that, anyway.

I’m not an overly negative person, so the metaphor in this vignette isn’t at all reflective of the typical half-empty / half-full analogy. Track with me.

For me, the metaphor of the half-empty bottle is reflective of how I naturally run my life in some ways. For instance, I am naturally inclined to want to control the “good things.” I want to hold them close, protect them. Intellectually I know that trying to clutch them – be it friendships, our cute apartment, our savings, what have you  – doesn’t help anything. Simply and beautifully this is because I am not sovereign. It is the Lord who gives and takes away. The Lord. Not me.

It’s also related to the perfectionism that strives to rule me: my perfectionism tells me to worry about not screwing up new hire orientation or hiring a new team member at work. My perfectionism wants me to be in control so as to not let others – or myself – down.

I wonder though, what would happen if I indeed saw imperfection as a gift — if I let my water bottle remain 2/3 empty (or, rather, 1/3 full) because I was so consumed by being in the present and savoring all of its nuances. If I was instead focused on the good gifts of the Lord around me, that I am the daughter of Christ and get to live with at least one foot in His Kingdom, whenever I choose to accept that gift. If I lived every minute in full trust of the Lord. What if I dwelt on future dreams or let my mundane thoughts turn into prayers for big and small things alike?

That’s the journey I’m on right now — figuring out how to live “palms up,” while still “making the most of every opportunity” (Ephesians 5:16). It’s the journey of figuring out how to become more conscious that Christ literally lives in me and fills me with the Holy Spirit. And because of that, it’s okay if my own water bottle hits empty from time to time.

“Abide in me and I in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”  – Jesus

I’ve been gnawing on what it means to abide in Jesus for a few years now. Though a concrete picture of a grape clinging to a vine, Jesus’s command to cling to Him as if He were a vine and I, a piece of fruit, used to feel too abstract to actually live out. Marriage – and a little knowledge about winemaking – has begun to teach me what Jesus meant.  

When I married Jake, I became more intimately known than ever before. That’s when this verse started to take on a whole new meaning. No longer could I try to turn my head from my own ugliness or hope the world would be too enchanted by what is good about me to truly see what is bad about me. (I mean ‘me’ in the deepest, truest sense.) Another human now knows every single aspect of me – the good, the bad, and the ugly. The me-centeredness, the impatience, the greediness – all the things that I had managed to hide from most people (including myself) are now exposed.

Lovingly, Jake calls me out as these heart issues inevitably surface. If I start speaking to him brusquely or my priorities are out of whack, I hear about it, which I’m eternally thankful for. Because my faults usually either hurt him or create a barrier between the two of us, I end up – eventually, by the grace of the Holy Spirit – for the Lord knows I am a stubborn one – recognizing my ugliness and asking Jake for forgiveness, which he graciously gives. Jake wrestles with me in the arena of my own heart to make me more beautiful and pure through and through. My desire is to become more like Jesus and in calling out my ugliness, He helps me do so.

Seeing these mere, yet telling, glimpses of my imperfection, has made me realize that I make a terrible god of my own life, let alone judge based on my own limited understanding what is right and wrong and who is just and who is unjust. It has made me realize more than ever my need for a good God and made me seek Jesus more fervently and willingly submit to His perfect ways. As I have sought to know Jesus’s heart, He has taught me to cling to Him.

~  ~  ~

To produce the most flavor, winemakers often like to strain the grapes as much as possible without pushing them to the point of death. This is because subjecting the grapes to harsh conditions makes the grapes slurp more nutrients from the vine and therefore have a more concentrated flavor.

Just as in harsh conditions, grapes naturally cling closer to their vine, marriage has been the conduit to teach me about my need for Jesus. Which has in turn taught me to turn to the source of Life amidst challenges. So now I get what Jesus means when He tells me to cling to Him like a grape clings to the vine. He makes me fruitful when I cling to Him – and not because of what I do, but because in Him is eternal life and Love itself. So if I’m connected to Him, I also experience Life in the fullest and also have Life to give.

Now that is something I can cheers to! 

In my creative writing class, we discussed the challenges and rewards of unshared attention, or presence. This is my favorite type of writing actually – when I write about an experience in which I am simply soaking in every sensory detail and the effect it has on me. Discussing the value of presence in class has freed me up to relay some short prose that simply relay either an actual moment in time or an imagined, yet feasible, moment in time. Hence, this is #1 of what I expect to be several more similarly themed entries. Now that the intro is longer than the text itself…let’s cut to it! 

I could no longer see underwater; the sky mirrored a mix of blood orange and pure orange, with some lemon grafted in too. The orb of blinding light emulating from the sun gradually sunk closer to the horizon line. The buzz of people on the shore sizzled down with the eclipse of the day. A wave would crash while another one behind it silently crested. The salty water highlighted with white foam slurped its way back into the rumble and tumble of the surf. 

The littlest one glanced longingly from the pond at her slightly-larger yellow duckling counterparts resting about a foot away on the grass. She stretched her body, neck, head up, up, up to be as tall as possible to assess the situations. She – let’s call her Gurdy – found her friends were indeed all there, just beyond the cement wall that separates the pond from the lawn.

Moved by ambivalence or problem-solving – I’m not sure – Gurdy bobbed her body up to look and down to relax and sip the murky pond shallows. She decided joining her brothers and sisters was worth the trouble of the mini-van-length trek to the rock ramp. Gurdy swam intently to the rock, ran up the ramp and toward her fuzzy friends.

Gurdy paused before coming upon the group’s security guard, the First Goose. Comforted, perhaps by the lack of response from the Goose, Gurdy continued on to one of two snuggle huddles of yellow ducklings. She joined in her brother and sisters’ harmless pecking of one another to cuddle as closely as possible with one another.

They fit like perfect puzzle pieces. Their closed eyes resembled dried out tangerine seeds, creme-colored and slightly wrinkly. As the minutes passed, some stretched their legs, some shimmied in closer. Amidst the movement, they remained close, like living puzzle pieces meant to fit together.

Build in the time to read

Cozy on the couch – snuggle.

Let words ruminate.

__________________________

Writing this haiku at the 2016 NEDA Conference was the catalyst of me fighting for reading time and creative time. Thank you, NEDA, for this unexpected benefit.

No, the afternoon treat, was NOT this frappacino. It was a podcast. Well, sort of.

I’ve heard it said, “we live life between the ears.” It’s true. My afternoon turned around while I was running – it wasn’t the activity, but rather what I listened to – what I poured into my head – that changed my heart and attitude, and therefore my perception of the day. Today, what flipped my afternoon sunny side up was an episode featuring Shelene Brown on a podcast fittingly the “The Influence.”

Shelene expounded on her latest book “Ridiculous Faith.” What would life look like, she invites us to wonder, if we had as much faith as Moses, as Noah, as Daniel? What would it look like if we placed as much trust in God’s promises as we do in the fact that the chairs we sit in won’t break, that the banks where we keep our money won’t go bankrupt? You see, she points out, we unconsciously put so much faith in what is seen. But what if, she challenges, we lived based on ridiculously unshakable faith in what is unseen – in God’s promises. That God loves us so unconditionally. That we cannot go anywhere and not be seen and known and loved by God. That he sacrificed his precious Son for us (parents, can you imagine sacrificing your child?).! That ultimately he desires a relationship with us – not because he has something to gain, but out of a completely selfless love and desire for his loved ones to unlock life to the fullest.

What if we followed where he led without coming up with a “Plan B” in case his crazy plan didn’t work out? What if we shared words of encouragement and life-changing truth and acts of kindness with others as the Holy Spirit led us to share without a filter? What if we lived in complete and utter freedom, not dictated by fear?  For the Lord says, “Fear not, for I am with you” (Isaiah 41:10) – there is nothing conditional about it. What if we placed complete and actionable trust in the King of the Universe?

Join me in a thought experiment about what that would look like.

Overcome by these thoughts and the example of Moses leading at least 600,000 Hebrews out of Egypt and still taking time to go to the mountain to meet with God, I absolutely needed to pause my run. I needed to let God’s faithfulness steep inside my heart, mind, and soul. I need to make room for those “mountaintop time” with God. That daily time with him will allow me to live out this faith I so long to live out. Because without “mountaintop time” – without taking time to commune with God to ask him to use me as an instrument in his eternal plan – I am running a frivolous and altogether meaningless race. Without making “mountaintop time” to meet with God, I am founding my life on sinking sand when a solid foundation awaits me and calls to me. So I paused my run to pray that God would grant me the grace to be part of his butterflies-in-the-stomach, holy, worthy “Plan A.”

I should add, It is not at all because I am great or my faith is noteworthy that he invites me into his story. No. It is purely because of his faithfulness that I am allowed into his fold. And you are invited too.

Friends, what started as a dreary afternoon marked by fatigue transformed into a blood-and-spirit-pumping experience.

Okay, here is where the frappacino comes in. Before hearing the encouraging conviction of Shelene I was trudging through the day. After, I felt like it was a day to celebrate, so I treated myself to my first-ever double chocolatey chip frappuccino and sat and enjoyed it on the adirondack chairs on the summer turf in the middle of Menlo Park. It represented taking time to think, be, observe, rejoice, enjoy and not always “do.” We live in a “time-scarce” culture where few people feel like they have enough time. But we do. An Irish proverb I found on a tea bag one time claimed, “when God made time, he made enough of it.” It’s all about how we use it.

So I sat and enjoyed the frap and thanked the good Lord for the gift of his faithfulness and giving me a boost in faith in him.

When I made my way from the turf to the sidewalk to return home, I ran into a homeless man named Alan whom I had spoken with previously. Per usual, he struck up conversation. We talked for a few minutes – I reminded him that we had met before and he asked me why I got married so young and how my hubby was doing. We high-fived five times in the course of our five minute talk. It was the perfect end to such a life-giving excursion. Our world is thirsty for love. And I know I only have the capacity to love when Jesus abides in me. Love God to love others. So first, let’s love God. Shall we?