Live Patiently with the “Not Yet”

by tashmcgill | Feb 19, 2008 | god ideas, Uncategorized

This is a direct quote from Henri Nouwen’s journal, The Inner Voice of Love. I am in a deep season of ‘not yet’, just as I was standing at the cusp of a new dawn. I have suffered deep heartbreak before, stunning disappointment, crushing loss. Nouwen is the brother and shepherd that guides me home to the Father. So in my moments of deep despair, I always turn to him in the hope of finding my way back.

I’ve been listening to the words of songsmiths and poets, and in the moments of my own entrapment, I’ve held on to the strength I never had before. I know who I am, even if I am not known. The timing of the Lord is an unusual thing, because when He is ready, and I am ready.. maybe it doesn’t matter if the others aren’t ready. Nothing goes to waste, so I am strengthened with the affirmation, that indeed this season will come to pass. Newness and hope is around the corner. Meanwhile.. I am living with Not Yet, and having to learn a new humility, waiting for Judas to catch up.

A part of you was left behind very early in your life: the part that never felt completely received. It is full of fears. Meanwhile, you grew up with many survival skills. But you want your self to be one. So you have to bring home the part of you that was left behind. That is not easy, because you have become quite a formidable person, and your fearful part does not know if it can safely dwell with you. Your grown-up self has to become very childlike – hospitable, gentle, and caring – so your anxious self can return and feel safe.

You complain that it is hard for you to pray, to experience the love of Jesus. But Jesus dwells in your fearful, never fully received self. When you befriend your true self and discover that it is good and beautiful, you will see Jesus mere. Where you are most human, most yourself, weakest, mere Jesus lives. Bringing your fearful self home is bringing Jesus home.

As long as your vulnerable self does not feel welcomed by you, it keeps so distant that it cannot show you its true beauty and wisdom. Thus, you survive without really living.

Try to keep your small, fearful self dose to you. This is going to be a struggle, because you have to live for a while with the ‘not yet’. Your deepest, truest self is not yet home. It quickly gets scared. Since your intimate self does not feel safe with you, it continues to look for others, especially those who offer it some real, though temporary, consolation. But when you become more childlike, it will no longer feel the need to dwell elsewhere. It will begin to look to you as home. Be patient. When you feel lonely, stay with your loneliness. Avoid the temptation to let your fearful self run off. Let it teach you its wisdom; let it tell you that you can live instead of just surviving. Gradua1ly you will become one, and you wi11 find that Jesus is living in your heart and offering you all you need.

Henri Nouwen

Sticking In The Hard Places.

by tashmcgill | Feb 19, 2008 | god ideas, Uncategorized

Life is really tough right now and day to day life is full of choices to do the right thing, the best thing, the grownup thing and the wise thing.

It makes my brain full, and there are too many things competing for attention in my headspace.

It was really good to regroup at the feet of my mentor and friend, Wok, yesterday. His words of wisdom and affirmation are like balm to the wounded soul. I’m soaking in Nouwen and getting ready to live in the pain that seems certain of this future.

It’s a process that includes a group of people, and we fill the spectrum in regards to our thoughts and feelings. A friend is trying to win me over to his side of the argument. Late last night I had to confront him and simply ask why he needed to win this argument so badly. He starts arguments about all sorts of things that always end being about this one core issue.

His honest response came, “Because this is so highly likely, that if you could just change your mind about *****, then it would be easier for you.”

but i have never loved the easy road
i like the rocky, turning path
i move around my shadow like the sun
i let the struggle break me til i’m soft
and i rise up the victor in the end
a softer girl than i began

I live in the shadowlands. it’s possible for me to wholeheartedly believe and want the best for someone, to see them fully and wholly embracing who they are. But that doesn’t always mean being on the same side, or in the same team. I can live with that, the holy disagreement. It sharpens our need and dependance on grace. Simply changing our minds is the easy way out for Christians.

Changing our minds probably reads more like burying the truth behind false humility, false grace and a hardness that means we lose something of ourselves. We change our minds, simply choosing not to confront the truth of what we think and feel.

I am not naturally prone to changing my mind. I’m more likely to grow into a new respect, a new belief, a new chapter than I am to change my mind. I prefer my mind to grow into opinions that differ or concur with the previous hypotheses and conclusions. It requires a softer approach to the shadows of grey. A willingness to listen more intently that rapid assumption requires. To truly live in the ‘benefit of the doubt’ means to learn to really listen to what is said, and not said with a fairer eye.

“The cup of life is the cup of joy as much as it is the cup of sorrow. It is the cup in which sorrows and joys, sadness and gladness, mourning and dancing are never separated. If joys could not be where sorrows are, the cup of life would never be drinkable. That is why we have to hold the cup in our hands and look carefully to see the joys hidden in our sorrows.” Henri Nouwen

Thank Judas For The Strong Heart, For This Belief.

by tashmcgill | Feb 8, 2008 | god ideas, Uncategorized

I’m standing in a dark place, when I was on the cusp of hope.
It wasn’t a hope born out of ambition, it was the hope that was born from a sense of coming home to myself. My skin felt like my own. My heart felt strong from a season of Judas’. I was saved.

There are some groups of people in life that you give yourself over to out of the firm conviction that it is what you ought to do. Sometimes it’s the very rightest thing to do, sometimes it’s just the ought-to that makes you do it. You give yourself over and over because you’re trying so hard to allow God to shape your character, trying to listen to the elders and authorities placed around you, jsut trying to do the damn best you can.

On the day that they come and ask more than they’ve ever asked before, you better have something to hold on to. You better have a heart made by the Judas experience.

People downcast, is despair
See the disillusion everywhere
Hoping their bad luck will change
Gets a little harder every day

Don’t spread the discontent
Don’t spread the lies
Don’t make the same mistakes
With your own life
Don’t disrespect yourself
Don’t loose your pride
And don’t think that
Everybody’s gonna choose your side

I May Know The Word But Not Say It
It’s like being stuck in the hardest place between the rock face and the boulder. One is breaking your back and the other is giving you nothing to hold on to. When you’re faced with that choice, you’ve got nowhere to go and they know it.

We’re political creatures, our slick underbellies covered in the writhing dirt of the places we go to in the midst of turmoil. Me, I look up to the light and cry out in anguish and sorrow… but I’m still stuck in the earth. I feel the darkness creeping into my body. I’m being forced to choose to do what I ought to do.

Just at the dawn of my hopeful season, when the Beloved Father has been promised light for the road, peace for my sorrows, joy for my sufferings, a new season of hope for the struggle that has been before… Judas comes and tells me I’m not done yet. Tells me of the dark road he wants me to walk. Judas comes and caresses my cheek with one hand, proclaiming what is beginning to satisfy him… and whispers in my ear how far I have to go.

With one breath he proclaims belief and in the other reminds me that I am far from acceptable. All at once Judas is my judge, my tormentor, my purgatory, my corruptor and still walks under the name friend.

The wound that comes from a friend is sharp, but this is sharper : that friendship is a guise of love, and words come to rape. On the eve of my ‘coming forth’, on the eve of God’s great promise of light – I am left naked, humiliated, unclothed and unacceptable. Judas’ ravaging of me leaves me unfit for anything.

This is the hard place. Because the only appropriate Christian response of someone in ministry is to accept hard words, untruthful or not, and respond with grace. But it feels so empty. It doesn’t feel like that has any strength or truth in it. My strong heart crumbles at acquiesing to accusation one more time.

What’s it like there outside
With the living?
From this broken down place
Where I hide
From the living
From the living

No, I don’t think I’ll remain
with the Living

I’m A Pocketbook Of Black Marks
I think I’m magnetic when it comes to black marks. What is it about my life that everyone else is won over to the joy of the God journey that is just hanging around my life occassionally… except Judas. Judas counts every failure, measures every fault. Sure, Judas measures some of my successes, but never the private ones that really matter. Stacked up against each other – my personal failings next to my public successes – the comparison is intimidating.

But if you were to ask me, I would say that I’m comfortably a work in progress. Not finished yet, nowhere near. But I know my story, where i’ve come from and where I’m going. I’m fearless about the future.

i might be made of pieces
but i’m not fucking broken
so move your hand from my cheek
and from my back
i don’t need your strength to stand
i’m not broken despite the best attempts

i might be made of pieces
mostly from the inside out
parts of the heart that live outside my shell
and beat a tattoo that I know on my soul
pieces, where’d i learn to be so strong
got it in pieces, from the broken ones
but i’m not broken i’m not broken
just a collection

Honesty Isn’t Just Choosing To Tell The Truth
It’s choosing to live it as well, big truths and little truths.