Further thoughts on listening and answering a call from God by Fredrick Buechner. Thanks again to Seth for quoting it first.
“I hear you are entering the ministry,” the woman said down the long table, meaning no harm. “Was it your own idea or were you poorly advised?”
And the answer that she could not have heard even if I had given it was that it was not an idea at all, neither my own nor anyone else’s.
It was a stirring in the blood at the sound of rain. It was a sickening of the heart at the sight of misery. It was a clamoring of ghosts. It was a name which, when I wrote it out in a dream, I knew was a name worth dying for even if I was not brave enough to do the dying myself and could not even name the name for sure. Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you a high and driving peace. I will condemn you to death.
I had a fantastic time at the coffee shop on Monday night. It was warm out. I didn’t really need the red flannel shirt I was wearing, the one with the two bottom buttons missing and the hole in the elbow.
Do you ever have moments where you are awake? Moments when you notice the way the street lights make the buildings glow like a desert dune at dusk. Moments when you realize how tall some of the buildings on State Street are, and how beautiful, palatial even.
Do you ever have moments where you feel like a kid again, and every tree is a potential fort, even palm trees. You think about how fun it would be to climb up to the top of one and look out over the imaginary jungle, and then go swinging from a vine to the next palm tree fort in your jungle kingdom.
Most of the time I don’t think like this. I am caged in a world of my own thoughts, and I can’t even see the red bricks in front of me as I walked to Java Jones, let alone the cool Spanish, ivy-covered arch in Paseo Nuevo. Monday night, though, I did notice, and for some reason, I get in this state of mind when:
- I am listening or have just finished listening to really good music,
- I am at, am going to, or have just left a coffee shop, and
- I am feeling spiritually connected to God.
I don’t understand it, but every once in a while all these things come together. In those perfect moments, I walk through town seeing. Really seeing. Like a painter sees a pink and orange sunset. Like a musician hears the song she has just recorded and enjoys the perfection of each note. Like a smoker feels when he has that first cigarette in the chilly morning. The way he imagines he’s the Marlboro man, sitting atop his horse, gazing at the red horizon.
In these moments I think I feel like Jesus must have felt after he was baptised, when a white dove landed on his shoulder, the heavens opened up, and his soul leapt with the Father’s love.
It’s a little windy outside. Through my tint shadowed window I can see the fog shadowed sky. The trees seem a deeper green than usual, just like the way the bouganvilla by the side of the freeway looked brighter and deeper pink because of the rose colored tint on my sunglasses.
There is a long, leafy branch that is blown whenever a car goes by. It goes up. It goes down, and then in bobs for a while, like a bobber on a fishing line, only the car is the fish that got away.
Plants and humans are like lovers. I breathe a deep meal of air. A little nitrogen. A side of carbon dioxide. An entree of oxygen. My lungs digest the oxygen, giving a carbon dioxide present in return, which is, to a plant, almost like flowers or a box of chocolates, wrapped beautifully in sparkly silver wrapping paper with a red ribbon tied around it.
The plant outside my window loves chocolate. She unwraps the box carefully, making sure not to tear the paper–she’s saving that for her scrapbook–and opens the box, enamored. Then, carefully, she picks up the smallest piece and nibbles on the end, glancing every once in a while at the beautiful flowers it was given. She knows she’s loved. In return, she puts food on the table every night.
Or every breath. It’s a beautiful relationship.
Sometimes it is nice to put on my rose tinted sunglasses and stare at the world like this. It staves of cynicism, and like those AIG commercials always say, probably adds 4 years or so to your life. Unlike those AIG commercials, however, my rose tinted sunglasses don’t worry about whether I’m going to outlive my money.
Continued from yesterday’s post.
I was starting to get frustrated.
We’d been looking for 45 minutes and still couldn’t find the keys. I had prayed. We had prayed as a group. I told my story about the shark’s tooth to Chris, and paced around, certain, confident even that I would find the keys. Yet, here we were, still stuck on a dusty dirt road in front of the small house we just built. It was getting dark, and we were about to be in big trouble.
“What happens if we don’t find the keys?” I asked, cringing at the sight of the woman we were here to build a house for as she dug through our trash.
“We’re going to find them,” Chris replied.
“But what if we don’t?”
“We’re going to.”
“Chris,” I said, hoping he would answer my question. He paused and thought.
“Well, we could smash everyone into one car,” Chris replied, “and call a locksmith tomorrow. It’ll be expensive, and I don’t want to leave our car here in the middle of Mexico. We’ll come back tomorrow and it won’t have a radiator and it’s wheels will be gone. No that won’t work. We need to find those keys.”
I remembered the shark tooth and went back to praying and listening, sitting in the house thinking, trying to look busy so the rest of the group wouldn’t think I wasn’t being helpful.
Prayer is a funny thing,
especially listening prayer. You never really know for sure whether your being spoken to or if it’s just your imagination coming up with things. Anyway, I felt like God was telling me to go stand outside. Not to do anything, just to stand.
So I walked out of the house and stood in front, waiting, listening, feeling the breeze, and looking over the city which was starting to light up.
Yes, prayer is a funny thing. All of a sudden I felt this rushing of love all around me. I felt a bit what God was feeling for me, for my group, and for the family we were helping. “I love you,” it said like a gust of wind.
I smiled and said, “Me too.”
As I said it, there was a loud cheering from the car.
“What happened?”
I asked, after walking over. I was pretty sure I already knew.
“Well, we had all given up looking,” Kathy said exuberantly.
“I was still looking!” said Megan.
“Ok, Most of us had given up,” she continued, “and so Garrett was joking around and picked up a roll of toilet paper and… Garrett, you tell it.”
“I picked up the roll and held it to my face,” he said while he demonstrated, closing his eyes and rubbing the roll of TP lovingly on his face. “And I said, ‘Mmm, downey soft.’ And then the key just FELL OUT!”
“Yeah, it had been inside the roll this whole time, and we had no idea.”
We were leaving. We said our final goodbyes to the family and got into our cars.
“There is a real Jesus!” Jessica said, as we were waiting for the stragglers to climb in. I just laughed and smiled.
See part 1-4 here.
We were just about to leave the jobsite.
It was late and we had been working hard for 9 hours. About an hour before, Emily, our psuedo-forewoman, had arrived at our site and started rushing us to finish.
“I’m supposed to get you out of here by 5! My boss is going to be mad,” she said in the midst of launching cement trowels and shovels 15 feet away to a pile so they could be cleaned. She was a beast.
We had finished it. The house was done. Beautiful. Home,
but now we had a problem. After going to get the gifts we had brought for the family, Garrett had lost the keys. He thought he had dropped them in the car, so we checked under the seats, in the trunk, in the cupholders, in the compartment with the spare tire, everywhere, but they were nowhere to be seen.
The sun was starting to set. People were getting home from work and the volume of the neighborhood was going up. Mariachi music blared from cheap radios. Loud voices carried from dirty cement porches, and little niños cried in delight. Mexican families drove by our worksite, and children and adults alike stared at the 15 gringos raking through the dirt, tearing apart a car, and frantically searching everywhere.
I, however, was not frantic, not even phased. The exercise of building, the satisfaction of completion, and the wonderful breeze blowing across my face had put me into a very deep peace. God felt near in this place of the poor, and I wasn’t worried about silly things like keys.
Instead of searching frantically, I prayed and sauntered around, staring meditatively at the ground, remembering my sixth grade science camp.
The camp at Rancho Alegre
was just 30 minutes from home in the mountains above Santa Barbara. It was the second or third day, and we were taking a hike to a spot aparently plentiful in shark teeth, even though it was miles from the ocean. The whole earth was covered with water once, didn’t you know?
I really wanted a shark tooth. Only really really. I was in sixth grade and it was a competitive year for me. I wanted to win all the contests that year: the wrapping paper fundraiser, the jog-a-thon, the jog-a-thon fundraiser, the halloween costume contest, and I did. I won them all. Now, I wanted a shark tooth.
A strange thing happened though. Instead of going to search and dig in the ground frantically like everyone else, I prayed.
“Dear God, I know that you don’t really care about shark teeth, but I would like to find one. So if you don’t mind, would you please help me. You know where all of them are in the whole world. Would you help me find just one?”
As I prayed, I sauntered slowly without a location to dig in mind. Everyone else had found a spot and by now had made several holes. Instead, I paced and prayed, and as I did, my eyes picked out a spot on the path.
I’ll dig there, I thought. I was confident it was the right spot, but also afraid my confidence would soon be dissapointed. I knelt down on the dirt, grabbed a stick, and started scratching away at a shallow hole.
Then, I saw it.
Not two inches from where I started digging I hit a small rock. Scraping away the dirt revealed it was a tooth.
I just stared at it for a few seconds dumbstruck. Really? Did this really just happen? Slowly, I walked over to our counselor, still mesmerized by my discovery.
“Yeah! That’s a big one,” he said. “Good find Joe.” I looked around and watched all the other kids still digging. Although the last to start, I was the first one to find a tooth.
“Thanks God,” I prayed. “That was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed.”
When I told Chris the story as we were looking for the keys, he was only the second person to know how I found that tooth.
The keys were still missing, but I was praying. And listening. I was going to find those keys.
To be continued.
11 x 22.
242 square feet.
3 kids, 2 adults.
The bathroom is in an outhouse connected to their old home, the one with the caved in roof, the one that we were replacing that week. You couldn’t flush the toilet because it wasn’t connected to running water. There was a bucket that Victor filled up and you dumped water in when you were finished. It only smelled a little bit, but it was an outhouse so no one minded.
Their house was messy, cramped. There was a small TV perched on top of a cabinet. It was the highlight of the room and our eyes were immediately drawn to it when we snuck a peak into the shadowy house.
“It’s amazing how little we actually need,” people constantly say when I tell them about the house we built and how much better it was than their old place.
11 by 22 and two-hundred and forty-two square feet. Just two rooms. An improvement.
“It’s true. It’s amazing,” I say. “Three little girls and two adults all in that one bedroom house. The one we built was bigger, but not by much. They were pretty happy too.”
It’s easier to be content with poverty when it’s the status quo.
When the house was done, it looked huge to our eyes. Eight and a half feet tall, it was the tallest house we’d ever seen. We’d built it with our hands, knew every nook and cranny. We knew the flaws, the perfections. We had hammered the frame, like putting together a puzzle. We had lifted the walls and laid the roof on top. When you finish a puzzle, it’s more than just a picture. When you finish building a house with your hands, it’s more than just a house.
Construction is contemplation. You never really see something unless you build it yourself. We had contemplated that house, and it became taller than our much larger houses in the US.
Eleven by twenty-two. Two-hundred and forty-two square feet. Eight feet tall.
When we gave it to Victor, he shook all of our hands, even McKenzie’s, the little 8th grade redhead. He said, “Muchas gracias. Es bonita.” Their little girls drew us pictures of their new house, us standing around it holding hands.
I was sorry to leave that place, that country. I had contemplated it, and I knew it, if only a small part. 242 square feet of it was mine, ours. We gave it away, but the memory of it was still there. It was a little bit of home in Mexico.
What a joy, to give home to someone! It was a small home. But home should never be diminished.
What fragile creatures we are. That a basketball game, a humiliating basketball game, a blowout, but still a game, could shatter self-confidence and depress. I’ll admit it, I was depressed last night watching the Lakers curl up and die while being kicked repeatedly by the Celtics. How did this happen?
No doubt the Celtics are good, great even. They played defense. They played offense. They deserved to win. It’s just that, unless there are feelings of self-righteousness, it’s hard to watch a men get mauled like that. It’s like watching a dog in a fight get its jaw ripped off. The other dog doesn’t stop, he keeps tearing the poor animal to pieces.
It’s not a fight though. It’s a game. It’s a game.
What fragile creatures we are. Maybe it’s not a that game depresses, but that the stripping of success reveals how shallow the foundation of our happiness lies.
