Not Quite

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Margaret

I absolutely love clear, chunky glass. It doesn’t much matter what shape it’s in, whether a figurine, a bowl, or just a blob, but the thicker the better. Imperfections or bubbles in the glass make it all the more interesting, and looking through a piece of it is something I often stop to do.

Ice does the same thing for me. The other day I was dropping some cubes into my tea and said, “Look, girls! This ice is almost completely clear!”

As I studied the beauty of each piece stacked in my glass, the girls were unimpressed. “Mom,” Louisa said, “it’s just ice, and it’s cold whether it’s clear or not.” She didn’t get it.

There’s one chronic problem with lovers of clear glass, though. We can hold it, gaze into it, and look through it, but we can’t get into it. Laugh if you must, but to be fully satisfied, that’s really what we want to do. There’s a whole world inside a chunk of glass.

I remember a special moment on a family vacation to the wintery Northwoods of Wisconsin one January. We visited the resort town of Eagle River and found a spectacular castle built with blocks of ice. Although it was dark outside, the castle was lit from inside, and some of the ice was clear and gasp-worthy.

That evening, while I reveled in the thick ice, our children, ages 16 to 20 months at the time, were enjoying the display, though not nearly as much as I was. Then I saw 7-year-old Hans put both hands on an ice block and press his nose in close. I came up behind him and said, “Isn’t it fabulous?”

“I see stuff in there, Mom,” he said.

Maybe what he really meant was, “I’d like to get in there and see it firsthand!” If that was it, for those few seconds he and I were on the same wavelength.

But as we walked away from the castle, I experienced the same incomplete feeling I always get when studying clear ice or glass. It’s a “not quite” sensation, something similar to our soul-feelings when we can’t quite see God or experience his physical presence. There are times when we have such an intense longing we can hardly stand it, but in this life our experience of him will always fall short of being deeply satisfying.

Thankfully his plans for our future include the one-on-one, visible relationship our hearts crave. The “not quite” will turn into “complete”. I’ve heard it theorized that hell might be the absence of God’s presence, meaning that the human heart’s longing for him will never be satisfied. And I can’t imagine any greater loss.

Although my love of clear glass can’t compare to my love for the Lord, in the back of my mind I have a feeling he’ll take away that less important “not quite” too, and turn it into something wonderfully complete.

“All my longings lie open before you, Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you.” (Psalm 38:9)

Try, Try, and Try Again

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Margaret

Back in the sixties, Elvis Presley recorded a love song called, “Trying to Get to You.”

I’ve been traveling over mountains,
Even through the valleys, too.
I’ve been traveling night and day;
I’ve been running all the way,
Baby, trying to get to you.

When someone is in love, nothing can dissuade him from wanting to be with his beloved. A great illustration of this was when my friend Carole was engaged to her Reggie in 1969. She was in Florida, preparing their first apartment, and he was finishing a job 1400 miles away, in Chicago

Being separated was torture, and they spent hours on the phone. Then one day Reggie couldn’t wait another minute and jumped into his orange VW Beetle, pointing it south. Except for gasoline stops, he put pedal to the metal, “trying to get to Carole.”

While in England recently I experienced another version of the same thing. Early each morning as Katy and Hans supervised the waking, dressing, and bed-making of their 4 children, I was “hiding out” in the next room, taking advantage of a few minutes devotional time. They facilitated my efforts by telling the children, “No one disturbs MeeMee when her door is closed.”

One morning while sitting on the bed praying, I heard whispers in the hall. “She’s in there!” Suddenly 10 little fingertips appeared under my door trying to get as close to me as possible without violating the parental edict. Soon a second and third set of fingertips appeared, “trying to get to me.” I felt very loved.

All of us will make a major effort to get close to who (or what) we love. That includes both appropriate love (such as between engaged couples) and inappropriate (like drugs, for example). When love is strong, we work hard “trying to get to” whoever or whatever it is.

I’ve wondered if I am that passionate toward the Father, Son, and Spirit. Am I “trying to get to them?” Or do I succumb to excuses not to try:

I’ll do my Bible study lesson after my work is done.
There will be other seasons of life when I can pray, but not now.
I can’t manage a spiritual life because I keep getting interrupted.

Our “get to you” factor is a good chance to see where we stand with the Lord. If we never get there, we probably should reassess.

On the flip side, anything I do to get to him can’t possibly compare with the effort he made to get to me. Jesus did it in two ways, first by setting aside divinity to put on humanity, and then by willingly suffering through death. His actions said, “I’ll do anything to get to you.”

When I remember Reggie’s race to Carole or my grandchildren’s fingertips under the door, I can ask myself, “Am I trying to get to God like that?”

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:23)

Cold Feet

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Margaret

Last week, when strapping Emerald into her stroller for a walk, we noticed a missing bootee had been placed atop the buggy’s hood. Later a neighbor said she’d found it on the road while walking her puppy 4 blocks away. “It had to be Emerald’s,” she said.

This week when I went to answer a gentle knock on my front door, there stood another neighbor holding up a pink bootee. “I found it on my walk,” she said, “2 blocks down. It had to be Emerald’s.”

Emerald is forever pulling off her socks/booties and dropping them along the way, like Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs. Although Birgitta, Louisa, and I try to keep an eye, it never fails that when we arrive home, one or both are missing.

All summer Emerald has been barefoot, but the other day it was chilly, so we tried socks and shoes. The darling purple slippers with Velcro straps were perfectly sized to her feet, but sure enough, by the end of the walk they were gone. We backtracked 3 blocks before we found the 2 socks and 2 shoes.

The next time we used her lace-up high-whites, but she balled up her toes so stiffly we couldn’t get them on. I have no idea what we’re going to do with our barefoot baby as seasonal temperatures dip further.

We 3 adults want only to help our little girl, but she views compulsory footwear as a withdrawal of her freedom to be barefoot. The spiritual parallel is obvious: God steadily tries to help us, too, but we often see his ideas as a withdrawal of our freedom. Emerald likes her way better than ours and will continue to pursue barefoot-ed-ness, a silly plan as winter approaches.

But do the rest of us respond to God with similar childishness?

For example, God says, “Why don’t you forgive that person you’re holding a grudge against? If you do, you’ll lose that chip on your shoulder that’s continually upsetting you.”

But rather than acquiesce, we respond Emerald-esque: “The way I’m handling it is better, so I’m going to continue in my anger.” At that point, God has a choice. He can either let us have our own way, stuck in our misery, or he can bring things to a head in an effort to help us, since he loves us dearly.

In the same way, we can give Emerald permission, so to speak, to go barefoot through our Michigan winter, or we can insist she wear footwear. Because we love her dearly, we’re going to insist. She’ll object only because she hasn’t had any experience with stinging-cold toes or painful frostbite, and we hope she never will.