Snapshots Not Taken (November 12, 2009)

I would make a terrible Boy Scout. First, and obviously, because I’m not a boy. Also, tan is not a good look for me - neither are shorts or sashes. I have a gift for getting lost in the woods and I have never helped an old lady across the street. I am hopeless with knots. The biggest reason I would make a terrible Boy Scout, however, is because being prepared is not one of my strengths. Life tends to take me a little off guard sometimes. Usually it’s because there’s something I forgot to do.

Like charge my camera battery. Right now I am in the valley of Georgia O’Keefe. The Southwestern United States is the rugged desert yin to Eden’s luscious yang - lands contrary in form, but equal in beauty. A thousand shades of orange are layered in these mountains, a thousand shades of blue drift across the sky. Night sweeps deepest black when it falls, a fistful of diamonds scattered from horizon to horizon; day dances to tones of autumn, light and shadow keeping tempo for a sun two-stepping between the mountain ranges. The moments in the middle - sunset - leave me breathless every time.

Wedged between a knobby Dr. Seuss-like rock formation and crags of a looming plateau, the sun melts to little more than a pinpoint of blinding light. The clouds, unwilling to let it go, edge themselves with rims of gold, stretching the sun’s splintered reflection long and wide across the vast expanse of evening. The blues of coming night press up against the reds of lingering day and the colors in between have no name. They are only spectacular, unknown but in these brief moments which are neither day nor night.

I watched it all, impatiently, from behind glass. I’m here for meetings and such and sunset isn’t on the agenda. So, when it teased me from the window with its casual grandeur and whispers of glory I could hardly focus on the speaker I was supposed to be listening to. As he was wrapping up, I was out the door, unzipping the camera case that had been burning through my backpack for at least the last quarter of eternity.

I jogged through a dry field and centered myself in the sunset, gauging the best angle to catch it as it fell around me. One photograph captured an anemic imitation of its splendor, and I flipped the lens from vertical to horizontal and back again, steadying it for the next great shot.

The next great shot never came. Instead, there was a whizz and a whirr and the lens retracted back into the camera, closing its eye with a resounding click. I jabbed the “on” button, but I was ignored. Keeping one eye on the ever-changing symphony of color, I removed the offending battery and impatiently shoved in the spare. Nothing. Apparently, I had forgotten to charge that one, too.

Helpless to hold on to even a wisp of the smoldering heavens, I let the sun take its bow in anonymity. This paparazzo was powerless.

I realized then my attempts to capture the sunset had been futile long before my battery died. I had been trying to contain the uncontainable, as if a photo in a frame was an acceptable substitute for standing in the presence of the mountains under fire-kissed clouds. Even if my battery suddenly sprang back to life, it didn’t matter how many photos I took - not one could pin this moment down, not one could lock it into immovable place.

It struck me then how often I try to pin God down. To lock Him into a place of my understanding. I see Him at work during a particular time in a particular way and I want to capture Him in that moment - I want to frame Him and put Him on my shelf. I flip my gaze from vertical to horizontal and back again, trying to limit Him to a view I can control.

The problem is that I cannot contain the uncontainable. God cannot be categorized, limited to human comprehension. When Moses asked Him His name, He answered:

“I am who I am”. (Genesis 3:14)

Endless possibility hangs on that name. It is limitless and it is finite all in the same breath. God is defined by His own definition. He offers no apologies or explanations for this ambiguity. Perhaps, because it is an ambiguous name only by human standards. We, who are pearls, see each other’s luster and nuances of color only by the ever-changing light of circumstance. He, who is a diamond, has a million brilliant facets, each one perfect, each one equal, each one reflecting a different integral piece of Himself. By heaven’s measure, He could have no other name.

I tend to see one facet and draw all my conclusions about Him by the light of that one facet. I try to limit Him to location. I try to limit Him to circumstance. I try to figure out how He works so that I can manipulate the situation when it suits me. I try to place an entire length of endless sky on a minute square of film.

The thing about sunsets is if you watch them long enough, they change. The clouds that were aglow with hidden embers just a few minutes ago have since turned to ash, fading now into the ever-darkening sky. Every sunset I have ever seen has been startling in its beauty - no other sunset has been the same. Yet, it is the same sun that sets every night.

God’s work is startling in its beauty, but it seems He rarely works the same way twice. His methods may vary, but He is the same God working through them.

“I, the Lord, do not change.” (Malachi 3:6)

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8)

My God today is the same God who whispered to me as a child. He is the same God who awed me into silence in university, the same God who shielded me from a rain of bullets in Albania. He is the same God I knew on a hilltop in Wisconsin, walked with on a moon-lit Florida shore; we once drank tea and watched the sun rise over a pond in Indiana. We have run together along the Rhine River and sat on the dunes over the beaches of Belgium. My God today is the same God I worshipped on my birthday in Romania, with some of the most precious pearls I know by my side. I have no doubt that He ‘was’.

The colors with no name have long since faded now, the memory of them still warm on my soul. The fistful of diamonds have been flung far and wide and as I look up at the twinkling lights which God calls out by name, I have no doubt that He ‘is’.

And so, I must conclude, that He is also ‘to come’. Not in the way I expect, I guess, but that’s all right. He’s God - He can do things His way. He, Himself, does not change, but I have learned that if I watch Him long enough, my view of Him changes.

He has shown me many facets of Himself - Protector, Provider; Father, Fear-taker, Friend. He is all of these, but I am learning that He is also more. I cannot pin Him down to Who He has been. I cannot frame Who He is. I will not forget those facets of Him, because I know I will see them again. I just know I will also see Him in ways and places I never imagined.

I guess I’ll just have to be prepared.

Fingerprints (January 29, 2009)

Since I’m airing horrid little secrets, I might as well let you in on another one. I know this one ought to cause me great shame – when I meet other women effortlessly successful in this arena, I sense that great waves of inadequacy ought to wash over me and spur me on to make vast and sweeping changes. It hasn’t actually happened yet, but I always sense that it should.

Here it is: I am messy. I hate to clean. There – my dirty little secret is out in the open. If you’ve been to my house (or seen my office) you may already know this. It pains me to admit it, because society tends to peer down its polished nose at me and “my kind”, subtly suggesting that I am somehow less of a woman because of it. I warned my husband of this minor flaw before we got married, but, swelling with the dizzied flush of new love, he said, “That doesn’t matter – I love you anyway!”

A couple of years on and slightly less flushed, he said, “You’re messy.”
I said, “I know – I warned you.”
He said, “Yes, but you were supposed to change.”

Marital matters aside, the fact remains that brooms and mops do not inspire me. The scent of bathroom cleaner does not sweep me up into fits of ecstasy, and while I love a man with dishpan hands, washing them myself is sometimes the bane of my existence.

The wheres and whys and deep psychological issues related to my “neatness-challenged” self are not really what I’m getting at today, however. I mention it only because I spent today cleaning – not my house, of course (to my husband’s dismay, I’m sure), but a place where I have spent much my life over the last five years.

We, in Düsseldorf, call it the Clubhouse, and it is a special place; a literal and figurative home for myself and countless others who have walked through the door. It’s where we fit in and belonged. It’s where we were family.

As I wiped fingerprints off the walls, I wondered which hands had made them, for many hands have run along those walls. Many feet have slid up and down the great hall, many eyes have shed tears, in laughter and in sorrow. Many enthusiastic arms have hugged hello, and many heavy hearts hugged good-bye. Many memories made by many people had now condensed into little more than fingerprints on the wall. And I was wiping them away.

It made me think. Don’t we spend much of our lives making fingerprints on the wall? Trying to leave something lasting, something that will endure once we are gone? We reach out and touch others, hoping that we will leave an impression, a print that will not fade with time or circumstance. Sometimes, we succeed. And sometimes, the world comes along behind us, wiping our fingerprints away.

The lives we live are transient ones. Some of you know this better than others. While losing the Clubhouse does not erase the memories we made there, memories were made by other feet and arms and hearts before we came, and many other memories will be made, fingerprints left by hands we do not know, after we are gone.

What, then, is permanent? Where, then, is my home? Is there a place where my existence is validated, my heart settled? Where in the world do my fingerprints remain?

I don’t know how many times I have moved. I have changed schools 13 times. I have lived in five different states and three different countries. My hope is that I’ve left my fingerprints over all of them. I don’t know. I do know they’ve left their fingerprints on me.

I know because every time I travel or move somewhere new, there is still a whisper of familiarity, an aftertaste of home. I feel a little bit settled everywhere I go, even if I’ve just arrived. And while that is comforting, the flip side of the coin is that there are now pieces of me scattered all over the world. Everywhere feels a little bit like home, but nowhere feels exactly like home. Or how I imagine it would feel.

Soon I will long for Germany the way that I now long for Albania and Romania, and any beach I’ve ever been on. The landscape of my life will change again and wherever I land, I’ll feel a little bit at home. But not quite. Mere geography cannot quench the little blue fire of loneliness that sometimes creeps along the floor of my heart. I assign a person, place or thing to the feeling, I say that I miss so-and-so or thus-and-such, when what I really mean is that my soul is searching for lost fingerprints, for feelings of belonging, of fitting, of being home, and I think I remember those feelings in those places with those people. Have you been there? Unfortunately, seeing those people or going to those places doesn’t always satisfy the longing we've nurtured in our hearts for them – sometimes, it only makes the longing worse b/c we're at a loss as to what will truly satisfy it.

C.S. Lewis spoke to this phenomenon when he said, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

Often, people see the Kingdom of Heaven as the “pie in the sky, place where good people go when they die”, perfectly simple, perfectly calm, perfectly boring possible existence after this one. I don’t. On the day I cease attempting to leave fingerprints on this life and step into that one, all my misplaced longings will be satisfied, the bits of me scattered and left behind in one country or another will navigate their way back to each other and, at last, I will be Home. Home – where I fit, where I belong; where I am Family. Where my fingerprints will never be wiped away.

“…We have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay.” (1 Peter 1:4, NLT)

That is the appeal of Heaven for me. This good King has built His good Kingdom as the lock for my ever-searching key, every other “home” merely a layover on my journey there. It is beyond the reach of change and decay, a home sweet home that can never be anything less.

Perhaps the reason I am less than enthusiastic about cleaning is b/c of its transience – I can spend hours cleaning one day what will be messy again in a week. It’s a reminder that in this life nothing truly remains, all things and states of being will pass away; everything I do to make a lasting impression on the world will someday be forgotten. Forgotten here, that is. But God notices my attempts, feeble as they may be, to validate my existence. He sees each tear shed in laughter and in sorrow; He has known every enthusiastic and heavy-hearted hug, has watched my hands run along the walls of this world and treasured each fingerprint. My thoughts and actions, though often dusty and disheveled, are not hidden from Him, and He never fails to clean me up when I ask Him to. He’s much better at it than I am.

Which is good, because on my own… I’m a mess.