Talent

      Often, when confronted by individuals with startling or unusual skills or abilities, we remark on their talent and predict that they will or should be famous one day.  Anyone extraordinary should never be cursed to live on the sidelines of life and settle for simply normal.  Why is that what we call "talent" must always be rewarded by success or fame?  We have a natural inclination to elevate the best or most fascinating among us to the upper eschelons of society.  Talent cannot be "wasted" on the ordinary crowd.  In our minds, all the celebrities are fit only for one another's society so we can both idolize and ridicule them as their dirty laundry is strung out for us to see.
     There is something inherently wrong with this.  For starters, it is aggrandizing the small details of individual human existences into over-sized spectacles fit only for entertainment. On the grand scale iof things, man is pretty small.  Each person is insignifcant in the larger history of our race.  This is what makes the Gospel so unique.  The Bible tells us that although man was made from dust, yet God cares for us, even while we were still sinners.  I love David's words in the psalms: "What is man, that you are mindful of him?"  Even in our most magnificent, talented, extraordinary moments, we are nothing.  At our largest, we are still small.  Pretending otherwise is pride, folly, and falsehood.  The other thing wrong with the mentality that talent-deserves-reward is that it defies the New Testaments "the church is a body" metaphor.  The body has many parts, each of which serves a different and equally vital function. Granted, some functions are more...dignified...than others, but they are all equal.  In a sense, then, we all have a "talent" or a gift or a special ability to use within this greater body.  When we begin to dignify some talents above others, we are implying that certain talents or gifts are less important or, more tragically, not important than all.  When we begin to value people for what they can do, then we fall into the salvation-by-works trap that the Protestant reformers worked so hard to negate. 
       I would argue that instead of restricting people who possess the "flashy" talents (generally centered around performance) only to the "flashy" circles and environments, we should let them stay within their communities, if that is what God has called them to do.  I have been given certain talents, and over the years, there have been voices speaking into my life encouraging me to pursue success and attention because of my gifts.  And yet, I get confused with too much attention and have never felt right seeking notareity for myself.  I love what I do, and am constantly reminded of Eric Liddell and how he felt about running: "When I run, I feel God's smile."  I love sharing my talents with the people immediately around me and staying on the margins a bit.  So this brings me to another question: if you have been given a "flashy" talent, ought you to seek success?  Those on pedestals, whether for good or ill, have influence and influence can always be used for God's glory.  But still...
     
      In my short life, I have seen people of great talent and have even been on the receiving end of accolades. I always feel strange when people compliment me or tell me I should be such and such or do this and that.  The reaction is a mixture of pleasure at being recognized, pride and being better than other people, for enjoying the success, and guilt for not first thanking and acknowledging God.  How does the Christian respond to success? It takes serious training and dedication to direct every acknowledgment of the gifts you possess to God and to thank Him.  Every moment, we must remember our smallness and His greatness. But there is more than that to it.  If we experience success or praise for our talents, it is acceptable and even good to rejoice that we have been used. That God has graciously seen fit to bless others through us.  It is good and even joyful to take delight in the works of our hands and in what we can do.  The high I get after I have finished a job I knew I completed to the best and fullest of my abilities is, of course, partly pride, but it also dancing of my soul in feeling itself acting according to its nature. Our soul rejoices when it gets to do what it was created to do. I think the Proverbs 31 wife had a heck of a smile.

Friends

     As I write this, I am surrounded by good friends. They are friends I haven't necessarily known for a long time, but they are still friends. One friend I spent several hours with giggling, curling hair, and dousing ourselves with sparkles before donning pretty dresses and heading out to a masquerade. One friend I love with and she fills everyday with silliness and joy. One friend I know tangentially from the second friend and he recognizes the value of many things the rest of the world dismisses. We are all sitting around my living room late at night, two of us puttering around on our computers and two of us crafting spectaularly inventive Christmas decor for our several bland apartment. Michael Buble is playing on Pandora and I have just put away my homemade cinnamon raisin whole wheat bread.

     I have other friends, ones I have known so much longer and with whom I share many sweet and precious memories. But these friends are here now. These friends have seen me at my worst and at my best and understand what my school and the people in it are like. Friends are people who accept you and cherish your oddities and don't mind you sitting in your pj's on the living room floor with the remains of fancy make-up on adding random, semi-helpful comments about the decorations strew about you. I love my friends, but I have never really understood the value of companionship until recently. I have never wanted to need people, seeing this desire or need as a weakness. People will always leave you, so never need them so much that they can hurt you.  Now, I know that God is my constant in my life and the steady stream of people flowing in and out of my life--some drifting away only briefly, ever to return, and others flowing forever away, never to return--is not a weakness but a blessing. God is teaching me to love fully and openly, acknowledging that nothing is permament but all people are eternal and that each soul He chooses to run headlong into our lives (or even just tiptoe around the edges) is precious and oh-so-important. We cannot measure who they are to us or who we are to them. We must just open our arms and our hearts and, smiling our hugest of smile to our Heavenly Father who loves to surprise us with gifts that delight our souls, say "thank you."



                                                              Thank you.

Even ground

     Some days feel like it is all you can do to eat regular meals and remember to drink water and, oh, yeah, perhaps go to sleep at the end of it all.  And then somedays you remember how to breathe. Today was one of those days. Despite being an early morning, the majority of my day concluded early and I was released into a pleasant afternoon filled with casual social encounters and some quite time by myself. After my post from yesterday and my day of stillness today, I feel "reset."  Well, not quite. "Reset" implies that I have returned to ground zero and everything is normal which, of course, it never has been. Rather, it has been one of those days where life seems manageable and, contrary to yesterday's summary of my general apathetic state lately, today was a reminder that my life is not my own. To remind us of this fact, God sometimes bats at us with a giant paw to knock us off our self-created pedestals and out of our ruts of self-pity and self-absorption. Other times, like today, He quietly clears His throat in the library corner and points demurly to His latest handiwork. And you just smile. Because you know. And you thank Him for His graciousness and for His extreme generosity in letting you in on the process.

"Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received grace, we do not lose heart, but we have renounced the things hidden because of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God, but by the manifestation of truth commending ourselves to very man's conscience in the sight of God...For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bondservants for Jesus' sake." 2 Corinthians 4:1-3, 5
 

     As much as i would like it to be, my academic career or reputation is of no importance if I am not following God and His plan for my life. As much as I would love to be a million things and often (ashamedly) see my self as the bright and shining figurehead of Christianity's biggest breakthrough of the last 100 years, I know that God has many other things planned for me and that the limelight would be a gift too easy to squander for a heart as addicted to attention as mine is. It is a wonder He bothers to use us at all.

 

But He does.  What a gift!

Depletion

      Lately, I found myself devoid of will and inspiration, filled, rather, with an alarming sense of apathy. I realized today that my desire to accomplish the goals and tasks set before me has completely overshadowed the love I once had for my work, whatever it might be. I don't really care about school anymore and am struggling to find a reason to excel in my assignments. I feel my mind, too, slipping into a watery stupor where my thoughts slosh about like dirty seawater. I don't bother to examine them or think critically about the information and stimulus I am receiving. I am a sponge that is too tired to be wrung out.

                                         Why have I ceased to care?


      I heard a friend described as a person of great drive today. I thought drive was something I possessed as well, but it seems to be gone now.  Funny, I think God is revealing more and more how much I must come to depend on Him and not myself. I once thought that my drive, my determination, and my fierce vision for the future would last forever and would be something I could always really upon. Clearly, I was mistaken. It is a depressing and disheartening thing for a person who claims to feel such passion to find apathy taking up residence. I have been trying to find the source of this malaise, and the only thing that holds water is the increasingly-less-recent poss of my best friend. I truly loved this person but never quite realized it until they had passed on. At least, I think this is love. I am not really sure what love means anymore. But I do know that there has been only one person in this entire world to ever make me feel equally safe and vulnerable. My trust was implicit, although the particulars were often hard to express. With their loss, my mind and heart raced to recovery, only to find that their memory was and will ever be as indelible as a scar. It aggravates me that this grey season in life has been caused by a single individual. I don't like to need people that much even though that is the lesson I have been trying to learn for the past four years.  I am awfully good at shoving people away when I need them most. I just want them to try harder. "No, you come to me. I will never come to you even if I want to."
       In the end, I will find my desire to live again. That must sound like I wish to end my life here and now. Nothing could be farther from my mind. Try as I might, I never could hate myself enough to wish harm upon myself and frankly, I am just too scared and lazy to ever try. Rather, what I fear is living a purposeless and uninspired life where I am locked in a personal, self-created and self-sustained hell of endless tasks that I accomplish with speed and efficiency to the exclusion of all else. College has made me a homework machine and I object.  I trust that God will sustain me no matter my mood or spiritual state. "For we have this treasure in earthen vessels so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves" (2 Corinthians 4:7).

Part Two: Hesitation

    I hate to sully this page.  To clutter it with words too poor and ugly for its beauty.  There is such a cleanness to a fresh sheet of paper, a blank webpage, an empty canvas.  They share a common purpose, to be filled, but by whom?  Who is worthy to spoil such innocence, to invade the unassuming openness of the possibility of the vessel?  What words are worthy of being transcribed?  I fear to write ugly things, thoughts which are incomplete and haphazard.  I wish all my thoguhts could flow majestically ordered and profound from my mind, through my fingers, into the glow of my computer screen.  But I have no such skill.  I am not Mozart whose scratch sheets and practices compositions have never been found if they ever existed at all. 
     I can only begin where I have already begun: incompleteness.  It is disappointing, but inevitable.  I am not where I wish to be and have never been to that strange country of imagining where the dreams are more real than the waking and all you have to do to receive is ask.  Delays.  Expectations abruptly and coldly refused.  Retreats.  I have so much to say, but I am not entirely sure what it is, yet.  Like Orual in Till We Have Faces I am with book as some women are with child.  I have only just conceived.  My thoughts are new and unformed yet very much alive.  The proverbial nine months is a long time to wait for something that teems in my brain like the ants that infest the older dormitories at school in August.  Disgustingly, fervently alive. 
   Waiting.  Waiting for visions and for circumstances I can smell coming, experiences I know will shape me and have not arrived yet.  Can I just do them now, please?  Check them off my list?  Get started working through the pain and growth so that I can start enjoying life sooner?  Can I be done now, please?  No?  I see.  I understand.


   Well, no.  I guess I really don't understand.  But I should very much like to.


   I am bad at patience.  My curiosity and my desire to act to experience fuels the pumping of my heart until it swish-swashes now and again, the gentle murmuring of eternity cooling and slowing my actions.  Like the anxious, timorous horses of my younger days, I fret and strain at my halter, rapidly bouncing up and down in place because I am not allowed to go forward.  Please, let me run! 
    For me, for now, the path is slow.  God asks me to wait, and be still.  To bite my tongue until I have something to say.  Something real to say, not just the snatches of my inspirations and the groanings and grievings of my eyes as they become increasingly witness to a sorrow to deep and too old for words.  I am too young to speak to such things.  My words are for the living and cannot help the dead.  I must be content with insufficiency and trust that my Maker will, like Baalam, fill my mouth with His words.  For I undoubtedly will stain and corrupt the virgin page--only He can create a Life and a Word without death.