Drawn North

It is the madness of great love to see God in everything.  -Julian of Norwich

I grew up aching to see God.  A little girl with a compass longing to find true north.  Instead, it bobbed randomly, as if edging near iron-ore.  I would become the Creative Girl.  The Student Leader.  The Girlfriend.  The Musician.  Privately, I would satisfy my longings with food and inappropriate relationships.  I would lie and swear and dabble in mischief. 

But when God bolted through space to sidle up next to me on a sunny college campus day, to draw close and whisper in my ear, "Do you know Who you are rejecting," my compass started spinning dramatically until it pulled in tight and tighter and tighter still to N.  Finally, the madness stopped.  And the new madness began.  The madness of great love. 

I saw a sunrise and said "God creates."
I watched a lame man drag his foot across campus and said "God loves." 
I looked closely at the layers of rock in Archeology lab and said "God designs." 
I looked in a mirror at every flaw and said "God heals."
Everywhere I looked was "crammed with God." 
And still is.

God:  "I will astound them with wonder upon wonder."  -Isaiah 29:14

God is the center of everywhere and the circumference of nowhere.

Pinwheel Living

I'm such a weakling at Hobby Lobby.  I come home with weird things like ceramic frogs and 5-foot silk sunflowers.  The other day I came home with a giant, yellow-polka-dotted pinwheel that I promptly stuck in my just-emerging but still dead-looking perennial bed.  It's one of those things, like plastic pink flamingos or mutant butterflies clinging to vinyl siding, that make you wonder why you're smiling. 

A pinwheel can only do two things.  It can be still and it can move.  It's more exciting to watch when it's moving, and I can look at life that way.  Spinning-pinwheel vision.  Accomplishments, activity, progress.  I always end up knocking my head into some hard wall of wisdom that says, slow down for pete sakes.  Be still.  Be. 

But Thomas Kelly, a long ago Quaker who spoke the language my heart speaks, told me I can have both. 

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once.  On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs.  But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to diving breathings.
-Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

He's not talking about alternating between spinning and stillness, depending on the speed of wind.  The secret is "simultaneity."  It's Moses holding the staff and Joshua fighting the battle all at once.  It's me making dinner, filling out the grocery list, and refereeing an argument,  while my heart is beating in the tempo of worship. 

Stillness undergirding the speed of life. 

How to Prayerfully Handle bin Laden's Death

News of Osama bin Laden's death came as a surprise to me, like everyone else.  A decade goes by and the little boy who was snacking on Cheerios in his high chair when Matt Lauer was reporting live on the World Trade Center disaster is a 7th grader who shaves his lip on occasion.  I'd forgotten about bid Laden, even when I've joined people in the strange ceremony of removing our shoes, as if on holy ground, to be scanned at the airport. 

Now he is dead, shot by special forces, who rose above technical problems like broken helicopters and quick-changed their strategy, removing the body covertly from the building in Pakistan.  American crowds spilled celebrating into the streets of DC and NYC.  The huge crowd atYankees Stadium stopped the game to chant U! S! A!

I, too, reacted excitedly.  Hooray for the tired troops who finally get a victory.  Hooray for the 9/11 families who see some closure.  Hooray for the innocents who won't be killed at bin Laden's command. 

But, hooray we killed him?  The Old Testament is full of God-ordained battles and victory dances under the dangling bodies of enemy kings.  But Christ came along and preached love, forgiveness, peace.  Martin Luther King, Jr. said words that seem to flow from the heart of Christ and apply to this dilemma:

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Beautifully said, Mr. King.  But the convictions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German preacher who was part of the plot to assassinate Hitler, truly capture my heart on this issue.  Andrew Zirschky wrote this in a fascinating recent article:

Bonhoeffer's Ethics, left incomplete at his death, provides helpful theological thought about violence in the face of horrendous evil.  Bonhoeffer took the interesting stand of proclaiming actions such as those he agreed to participate in against Hitler as unrighteous but responsible, sinful and yet without better option.  Bonhoeffer did not rejoice at the prospect of killing, rather he mourned, admitted the sinfulness of the undertaking, and reserved all judgment of such actions for God.   -Andrew Zirschky


In the end, Bonhoeffer was caught and hung by the Nazis and Hitler took his own life.  Ugly and complicated is all of it.

So, with great sobriety, I thank our brave troops and I petition our mighty God for his grace.