Voices in My Head

Anne Lamott, one of my favorite authors, says "Left to its own devices, my mind spends much of its time having conversations with people who aren't there.  I walk along defending myself to people, or exchanging repartee with them, or rationalizing my behavior, or seducing them with gossip, or pretending I'm on their TV talk show or whatever.  I speed or run an aging yellow light or don't come to a full stop, and one nanosecond later am explaining to imaginary cops exactly why I had to do what I did, or insisting that I did not in fact do it."

I love Anne Lamott.  She makes me feel normal.

Life Slipping By

Mont. St. Michel, France

I know when I am going to die.

All I have to do is go to deathclock.com and enter my day of birth and BMI and a few other things and it gives me the day of my death and starts ticking down the seconds. It says I am going to die on October 23, 2042. That date seems a bit too close to today's date, so I go back and choose the "optimistic" setting. That setting gives me an extra 24 years. My new day of death is November 14, 2066. I am sticking with "optimistic".

Either way, the truth is I am going to die someday. It could be soon, or it could be many years before my deathclock.com seconds run out. No matter what, my journey on this earth will be very brief. I don't mean to be flippant about something that should be taken seriously. I would take it seriously if I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Its just that since I am in good health, I sometimes forget that my days are numbered. I get caught up in the trials and to do lists and forget that I have a finite number of seconds to spend here. Seconds to live, like pennies in my pocket, how am I going to spend them? Unlike pennies, putting seconds in the bank is not an option. I can spend my seconds deliberately, or I can let them disappear into the air unheeded, but either way, they are lost to me forever. So, how can I spend my seconds wisely?

If I thought that I was born by chance and would die on a day randomly determined by my blood pressure readings and driving habits, I would live differently. I would work my way through a list of eat-drink-and-be-merry-nesses. However, if I believe that Someone put me on this earth and He will take me back out of it, that changes everything. "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind and with all of your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself."

Those are my instructions.

Love.

Simple instructions, yet not so simple. It seems like "all" should be easy to measure and loving should be easy to do, but sometimes it isn't, and constantly I fail. So, the question presses, how do I spend this second, and the next one, and the next one so that when I am down to the last handful of them I can say with the apostle Paul, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith"?

Holding Hands

 

Small children are taught to face dangers and difficulties by holding hands with their daddies.

Most people grow out of this.  I never did.  

 When I was 13, my Dad and I decided to climb a “fourteener”.  Early one summer morning when the air was still chilly enough to make clouds of our breath in the half-light, we started up Long’s Peak together. 

Our legs were just warmed up, when we came up behind a group of college age guys, the football team at CU in Boulder.  For a few minutes, we hiked close enough behind two of the guys to overhear their words.   “This is pretty tough, a girl couldn’t make it...” I didn’t linger to hear the response. Instantly I determined to beat those college athletes to the top of the mountain.   I switched into a high gear and blazed by, pointedly flipping my long blond braids over my shoulder as I passed.  We left the football team in the dust, and raced them the rest of the day. 

We flew through shady forests, miles filled with lodge pole pines growing tightly together, narrow tops pointing toward heaven.  We strode through the gnarled trees at timberline, not pausing to wonder at the fields of miniature wild flowers that carpet the mountainside. We scrambled through the boulder field.    Sweaty, and with legs beginning to ache, we reached a narrow hole in the rocky ridge where climbers pass to the back of the peak for the final push to the top. 

This final mile crushed my bid to defend the strength of girls everywhere.  The mountainside is steep; each misstep is accompanied by the scrape and rattle of loose rocks tumbling down the sheer drop-off of thousands of feet.  Slips are sometimes fatal. 

Fear of falling slowed me down.   My short little body defeated me.  Even stretching as far as I could, my fingers and toes couldn’t grasp the next little ledge or crack I needed to use to pull myself up the last rocky cliff.  

That’s where hands came in.  Over and over, my dad’s strong hands boosted me from behind. In particularly difficult spots he scrambled up ahead of me, reached down, grasped my arm, and pulled me up from above.  “It’s OK Bethy, I’ve got you.” 

My rivals, the CU football guys caught on to my determination, if not the motivation behind it.   They slowed their own pace to help pull and push me up.  Eventually, I sat at the top scraped, and triumphant, sharing lunch at the top of the world with my former enemies.  The fact that they gave me a hand up made all the difference.

During the steep and dangerous seasons of adult life, when I can’t quite reach a firm foothold, it is still a father’s hand that pulls me up and over.

William Barkley said,  “When we believe that God is Father, we also believe that such a father’s hand will never cause his child a needless tear.  We may not understand life any better, but we will not resent life any longer.” 

In the book of Isaiah, God says “For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, ‘Do not fear, I will help you.'" He is saying to me, "its OK Bethy, I’ve got you.”

Echo of 1140

Bernard of Clairvaux and Me

Bernard of Clairvaux spoke at Notre Dame in the year 1140. I walked through those halls a few days ago. Perhaps his words still echo through those magnificent stones because It feels like they were spoken just for me. "Even Simon son of John, called and appointed by the Lord to be a fisher of men, will toil in vain all night and catch nothing until he casts his net at the Lord's word. Then he can catch a vast multitude. Would that we too might cast our net at this world today and experience what is written, 'Behold he will give his voice the sound of power.'...I can hope that what I say will be effective only if he makes it so. I must ask him to make this voice of mine a voice of power."