the rose of kiev

A few weeks ago, I sat up late with my landlady talking and drinking cheap moscato wine. Our two-hour conversation strayed all over, from stories about her Chilean upbringing to the story of how I met Dave. Halfway into our second glass, God and Evil wandered into the conversation. She gestured with her wine glass toward the windowed walls, admitting that because of Nature's beauty she believes in God, but she has a problem with all the evil happenings in this world. She reached up with both hands and repositioned her glasses, and looking at me over the rims she told me story after story of the things she has seen: a single mother dying of cancer and living alone with her mentally handicapped son, friends' daughters raped, people shot. "How can I believe in a good God?" she asked, words slanted with her Chilean accent. Every time this kind of question comes up in conversation I have the same answer. I swallowed a sweet mouthful and replied, "It's the cost of ...

I'm generally comfortable in my own skin and satisfied to be myself. But if there's one thing I don't have, and am morose to be without, it's discernment. Dictionary.com describes it as "acuteness of judgment and understanding". Some of its synonyms are "shrewd" and "astute". My favorite synonym is "perspicacity". Solomon asked for discernment when God came to him in a dream and offered him anything he wanted. Proverbs can't stop yapping about those who are discerning ( here , here , here and then some). A man of discernment is considered knowledgable and wise . I have some friends that are perspicacious. I want to be a perspicacious person. And I am not. I wish that weren't the case, but that's just the fact of the matter. One of my dear friends has been going through some difficulties in her life over the past few months. The problems are all knotted up and intertwined, the strands gummed together and fraying, almost...

In her life, my grandmother has tried many tactics to get the love she longs for from her family.  She'll throw a fit at my brother's ballgame to draw attention.  She will show up unannounced on doorsteps.  Many Christmases I've received a set of "Thank You" notes under her tree.  She is generous; and often that generosity comes with fine print.  She works very hard in all the wrong ways to get the affection she's so desperate for. All my life she's been like a woman holding a handful of water, not understanding that the tighter she grips, the more drips away; rather than having more control, she only has less of it to hold. My grandmother is an intelligent and well-read woman who has been in church almost every single Sunday of her life.  I have no doubt that she's read and heard and been taught the story of the prodigal son many times.  And I wish so badly that she could've really listened to it and heard what the story had to say about who God i...

A baked ship on a listless sea lies limply on the waves.  White light tramples on the splintery boards as the vessel rocks in the glare of the sun.  Deck is bare and sail is empty; the lonely helm creaks as the weak current catches the rudder. I stumble up on deck, a bottle sloshing in my hand.  My eyes are unable to focus; puking over the side helps the hangover.  And I look over to the wheel from the railing, remembering the storm that drove me below decks. The storm came quickly; I had not been scanning the skies for the hints. Suddenly the rain had begun; a gust pummeled the sail as the tide kicked at the rudder beneath.  I clung to the wheel, already straining to breathe, to stand, to steer.  I lashed the wheel as another of the storm's tantrums pounded down upon the deck with heavy waves grasping at my shoes.  I battled over to the mast and fought to furl the hysterical sail. The salt and the raindrops stabbed into my bare hands, as the storm's shrieking began to grow. Lo...

So we made it.  We made it the beach.  And from now until the 12th I pledge to write about every day here, to show you our beautiful little family. Dave and I left at three in the morning to pick up Brandon for the 11-hour drive.  What a good man Dave is - the only break he got was a 90-minute window in Virginia before I quickly wussed out and became too tired to drive.  We passed several cars along the way that we could tell were headed to The Beach, even if we didn't know who they were.  After all, there are at least a dozen other Xenos homechurches each of 30 or more people going the same way to the same place, so we're bound to encounter a few.  Through the dark farms in Ohio and tumbling into the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, getting lost in Virginia clouds and then emerging upon the pines and sandy knolls of North Carolina.  Passing through Wilmington, passing the Food Lion, passing the gift shops, to get to the bridge.  That bridge is our one way onto our beach; it...

I have a lot of compassion for people who have past scarring from bad churches.  What a terribly confusing dilemma - looking for the place reputed to be the first haven for the ragamuffins and outcasts, only to find the family of Christ full of judgment and all sorts of grief. I know.  I've been hurt by the Christian church in the past.  I have suffered as a result of misunderstanding, fear, and the imperfections of the people who makes up the church.  But I'm still here.  And I want to help woo the alienated and give them hope and a reason to fall back in love with God's church. In my life I have been in three churches: one Baptist, and 2 non-denominational.  Presently, I go to a college-age homechurch in Xenos .  We call ourselves Kodiak; this is some of us in the picture above.  And it's a good little church.  We're 30-some young adults between the ages of 18 and 27.  We're a weird, abrasive, creative, and passionate group of people.  We meet in the living ro...

I had been up since seven that morning, which, since I should've been out of bed by 6:30, meant that I had been running late all day. Running behind stresses me out, and as any girl can testify a hormone-stress cocktail is volatile if allowed to mix, and I could feel the spoon stirring inside of me. Even though I was running late to dinner with a friend on campus, as an act of prudence I changed course and sat next to Mirror Lake for 5 minutes to calm down. I sat in the grass and watched the fountain, waiting for the emotions to settle. Then along comes a happy couple of ducks waddling along the edge of the lake toward me pecking at the grass for food. Their boat-shaped hips swayed awkwardly from side to side as their flourescent- orange pancake-thin feet slapped the stones; I noticed the disproportionally pompous curled feathers at the tail of the male and began to laugh out-loud. Never before have I ever been so assured of two of God's attributes - His pleasure in the act of ...

I laid in bed at around six'o'clock in the evening a couple weeks ago, listening to the ceiling fan as I stared at the wall. It had been an exhausting week filled with a rainy birthday, a sinus infection, and not enough time with Dave. Earlier that afternoon he and I sat in the Lowe's parking lot for an hour wearily talking through ways we had let each other down and how to get through the rest of the school quarter. As I began to wake up from the three-hour afternoon nap we had taken together, I contemplated many things that fit into one general heading: Marriage is hard. Those who are married understand that small sentence with every fiber of their experience and being. Those who are not married may be aware of its truth, but the hard wisdom isn't in you until you're in it. But for me, the difficulties have been opening my eyes to see something about God and the importance - the beauty - of freedom in love. What's so strange about God is that He is both a pa...

My friend Sarah and I had lunch the other day and we spent the time catching up on the past two weeks apart. Roommates this and graduation that and how short on sleep we both are. How technology gives us the power and expectation of ceaseless communication and immediate results; that the world seems to turn faster than it ever used to. ---------------- Walking to class this afternoon a stroke of twitching red in the gnarled crab apple to my left caught my eye. A perfect red robin was standing on a branch just behind a shield of red berries stretching his small scaly legs and shaking his feathery body, his movements the equivalent of a yawn. With a small sharp dive, he alighted on the mulch under the shade of an OSU building's smokestacks, and I felt compelled to stop and watch. As multiple students passed me by, in groups and on cell phones with destinations and deadlines, I watched quietly as the robin's little wife cautiously hopped out into view from behind the bush at the f...

I have realized that some of the most gracious and affable people are those who have a practical construction of grace in their lives. Often times, it seems those least able to point to a verse or rattle off a quote are the most able to live it in their lives with gratefulness; that those most educated in the vocabulary of grace have the most difficult time in the practicality, the street smarts, of grace. Grace is most definitely a religious word, but it's something I have more visible examples of outside of any church building. This is what I mean when I say  gracious  here: a disposition to act in kindness, pleasant, one who offers a reprieve, compassionate and forbearing. As of late I have been thinking more specifically of those who are gracious as an attribute of character. I've been in the church or church settings quite literally all of my life. I was in the pew with the floral dress and white panty hose, I was in the Christian school's folding chairs in my plaid un...

In "The Last of the Mohicans", there is an extraordinarily compelling scene. A handful of captured colonials are brought before the Huron indian Sachem (the wise man) to have their fates judged. Their captor has a debt of life owed by these colonials, so the Sachem rules that one girl will be sacrificed to settle the debt and her sister and their friend Major Duncan may go free. Duncan, shown previously to be honorable, but jealous and a kiss-ass, does an incredible thing. Given a check for freedom, he volunteers freely to trade places with the condemned girl, a life for a life. He is stretched over a fire to burn to death, having to now settle the debt that only a life given, not just generously offered, could have fulfilled. What struck most forcefully was Duncan's recognition of the currency of his life and a willingness to pay that price when necessary. This theme of sacrifice of life dogs the steps of impactful literature. In Mark Twain's Tale of Two Cities , whe...

Holiness has lately become an object of fascination for me. In the Bible, the word "holy" crops up over 500 times, and that's not counting other words like "sanctified" or "hallowed". God is holy, He made the Sabbath holy, His Spirit is holy, His name is holy, His angels are holy, and He wants to make his people holy. But, pardon my unholiness, what the hell does it even mean to be holy? After some minimal online research I've put together something somewhat satisfactory. Holy is: perfect, set apart, unique, pure, sacred, of divine quality. God was emphatic about communicating His holiness back near the beginning when giving laws of every kind to His Israelites. They would give holy, eat holy, anoint holy, wash holy, sacrifice holy in a holy place , live in a holy city , commanded to be holy because they are set apart , God's showcase of holiness to the world. Holiness is something we do to show ourselves different and unique. And they...

So how do I pray, God? After a lifetime in 3 churches, after reading the Lord's prayer, after praying aloud a thousand times with friends, another thousand times trying to bumble through it with just you, I still don't know how to pray. How frustrating. It's not for lack of want. I just don't understand the methodology. After reading Miriam's Prayer and Mary's Prayer and Moses' Prayer, all with formula and poetry, is there some unknown code I need to crack? I long to overhear Daniel's long hours spent in prayer, hunched over the windowsill facing Israel. I long to overhear Elijah's conversations with you up in the mountains by the brook, or John's communiques with you as he walked the hot sand in his camel tunic. The people who knew you and knew how to pray, but their most intimate communions with you unshared and secret, and the silence of such drives me mad. It's not for lack of want. I just don't understand the methodology. You used Ja...