The Dream

I awoke slowly, my consciousness rising like an air bubble through a subconscious fog thick as molasses.  First my limbs began to tingle followed by a fluttering of my eyelids and finally ending in clearly formed thought. A smile spreads wide and languidly across my face as I fight to hold on to every sensation.  Though my eyes remain closed I know my room is dark and still.  It must be the middle of the night. My dog remains deep in sleep at my side, undisturbed by my midnight vigil.

He was cradled safely into my side, I could feel his strong hand holding mine and his head nestled like a puzzle piece under my chin. But no...that’s my own hand tucked into myself, I can clearly distinguish dream from reality as the pressure of him holding me begins to fade into memory. Can you have a memory of something that has never happened? 

I feel myself physically drawn to him although it is not a passionate hold we are in.  It is somehow complete attraction filled with perfect chastity. It is calming, peaceful and imbued with happiness...contentment. It is the definition of contentment. Two souls at complete rest in each other.

He is familiar to me. I dream of him periodically, most often he is pointing out where I can improve or something I have failed to do. His is a voice not void of care but forever testing, as if to root out any impurities held within the depths of my character.  But sometimes...sometimes it is all gentleness. I am never surprised by the judgmental dreams, I always feel as though I do not score well under his scrutiny. But these dreams, the quiet and beautiful ones, they always catch me off guard. 

Usually there aren’t many details. I wake remembering the sound of his voice, a reassuring look and always the comforting touch of his hand in mine. 

This time is different. The narrative ran longer and was more rich in detail. 

I stepped out of a building and as I looked up into the night sky I felt him walk up and stop beside me. I was watching lightning flash inside boiling and distant thunderclouds. Tracing with my eyes the outline of the light ripping a great seam in the ether and cutting through the thin veil of clouds. So powerful and yet so delicate. My focus shifted as I realized he was speaking to me and in vain I strained to comprehend the last lines of what he was saying, something about being frustrated with the games that were being played inside. 

I think that was it, I attempt a response. 

‘Closer or further...I always like playing that game.’, my eyes have not left the symphony of light playing out above us and I feel Him shift his gaze upward beside me. ‘I never get tired of that either.’, he replies softly, ‘even if the storm is very close it still doesn’t scare me.’ I remain silent for a moment unwilling to admit that I feel fear if the storm clouds are close by. 

I think if he is not afraid then maybe I don’t need to be either. ‘Closer’, I whisper as a giant bolt streaks across the night, ‘further’, he replies as small echos of light illuminate the cotton ball outline of clouds.

We move as if in unison, laying side by side on the gravel of the parking lot. There’s a better view from that perspective. Somewhere in the middle of our independent and yet unified reverie his hand finds its way to mine and envelopes it quietly, securely and with an unexplained assurance. We don’t address the change, we both accept it as though it were an expected end and a long awaited beginning. 

Rain begins to fall steadily. A welcome cold to quiet any building heat. We do not move, we are moved by the water that now flows around us. We are two entwined branches living and yet unable, no...unwilling to move. The current grows stronger and we begin to shift into one another. He is curled into me, his head tucked under my chin as I gently kiss his forehead. I am his comfort and his hand holding my own is my source of strength.

We are content. 

I feel the blood flowing into my fingers, the heat circulating through my veins. I know I am waking before I wake.

On Being a Part of Your World

         Have you ever found yourself sitting in a room full of people conversing in groups around you and all at once realized you are not a part of any conversation happening?  You sit there observing and listening, understanding the words but failing to understand what it all means.  You wonder how it is possible that less than a minute before you were 'in' the group and all of a sudden you are not only 'out' it is as though you were never a part of it at all.  You have this sinking feeling of loneliness as you realize that not only does no one in the room need your interaction...you don't need theirs either.  You aren't angry nor do you feel wounded by anyone, you just don't feel a connection to anything happening around you.

Ever feel like this?  If so...this post is for you.

         For reasons that are not pertinent to this post, I found myself entering this past weekend with a fresh realization that I am not good at keeping in contact with friends and loved ones on a regular basis.  This was not the first time in my life that I have come to such a realization.  I have arrived at it no less than a dozen times before, but I had yet to find a solution that I felt was successful.  Each time I had left the moment with a greater determination to 'do better' in the future and each time I had quickly reverted to my normal patterns of socialization.  This Thursday evening I decided to take an active approach to solving the problem.  I am terrible at keeping lines of communication and socialization open?  No worries, I would spend the next three days actively exposing and reinforcing those lines wherever possible.  I would even create new ones if necessary.

          I spent each day texting, messaging, calling, meeting and visiting with as many people as I reasonably could.  I went to social gatherings, stayed longer than I'm naturally inclined to and tried with all of my energy to be as actively involved as possible.  On Sunday afternoon I found myself sitting off to the side of a group actively in conversation.  I had just one moment before been a part of the conversation...I swear I was! But somehow not only was I out of the group but I had no clue what the line of conversation even was anymore.  I tried for a couple minutes to pull myself back in, but it was like mentally treading water as the sounds of multiple conversations in the room crashed over me like a tidal wave.  I gave in and sat back allowing all the words to become white noise.  I looked around at the room full of people who I love and who I know love me and realized I was feeling more alone than I would have felt if I had just gone home to do chores alone. 

          I pictured all of us swimming in an ocean.  I could see them all above me splashing and playing together but each time I tried to surface with them I would find my passage blocked by some unseen barrier.  We were all in the same water, but I was forever in a different layer unable to see clearly what they saw or communicate what I saw.  I felt overwhelmed and wanted to just give up and go home, but I had decided to be more open and available..more willing to socialize like everyone does with such ease.  So, I decided to just go breathe in the church chapel for a bit and try to engage after a break.  As I walked into the chapel another group was in a deep conversation about security in church after the terrible recent attack in Texas.  As I sat there I thought, "Here is a conversation I can follow.  This has a purpose and meaning that is close to my heart and my professional perspective."  I wanted to interject with a statement that would contrast the need for security with the need to worship G-d free from fear, I hoped to spark a debate on the balance between those two needs...but not surprisingly my words did not convey what my heart and mind were thinking.  I came across as abrupt and against personal security and emergency preparedness (two things I am not against.) and quickly caused the end of the entire conversation in a very awkward way.  As everyone filed out and I tried to explain myself better to the single individual who remained I felt my heart sink lower and even more disconnected.  I gave up and headed for my car.  May as well get chores done right?

          I cried all the way to the laundromat.  What the thunder is wrong with me?  How can I not have normal social interactions.  It's as if everyone speaks Italian and I am fluent in Spanish.  I hear their words and feel like I should understand, but at the end of the day we are speaking different languages and I come away even more frustrated for having tried.  How is it that I have dear friends who I converse with easily on a regular basis, but sitting in a social gathering I feel like I am hanging onto a sinking piece of the Titanic, still alive but slowly freezing to death?  Am I just really a terrible person who doesn't know how to interact and has had people holding me up my entire life?  Am I completely a social dead weight that offers nothing to a friendship or social interaction?!  As I dried my tears I told myself I was just being overly emotional, but I also said a prayer that G-d would be so kind as to reassure me that someone could see me and understand me, that He would show me how I am connected with others.

          Thankfully while I was doing laundry I chatted with two of my brothers and two dear friends who reassured me that they also often feel more lonely after a social gathering than if they had stayed alone the entire time.  This was an amazingly uplifting reassurance at just the right moment.  At least if I am a total social reject I am not the only one.  I began to feel comforted enough to start objectively analyzing the weekend and what had caused this feeling of disconnection and loneliness.  During my analysis I realized that even though I am terrible at some types of social interaction and connection, this didn't mean I am a social reject.  There are many social interactions that I am especially gifted in.  I am great at one-on-one or small group conversations, I am good at recognizing when someone may need a word or a gift as a reminder that they are loved and remembered, I make a great emotional sponge during an emergency, I am phenomenal at all of the background quiet service stuff that many people don't even realize is necessary and there is no better emotional bulwark during times of trial.  I simply stink at remembering when a birthday is or congratulating someone on a life event or, you know...all the normal basic social norms that come easily for so many people.  A simple example: when most people meet someone new they want to know normal things like, "what do you do for a living?".   When I meet someone new I want to ask questions like, "If you could float into a crowd through the air like a returning warrior, what theme music would be playing in the background."  The wavelength I often travel through life on is quite different from most, but what if that's not bad?  What if I am not designed to fit social norms because I am designed to fit a different social purpose?  What if instead of putting so much energy and time into 'fitting' into social gatherings and expected social connections, I just opted out and put my time into the social gifts I have been given?

          I internally mulled over these questions as I finished my chores and participated in church choir practices.  I felt some level of comfort, but still ached to know that somehow I was not so very disconnected from the people in my life who I dearly love.  I still felt a part of my soul singing Ariel's song 'A Part of Your World'  I longed to know that even though I often see things from a singular perspective I was in some way connected to loved ones in deep and lasting ways.  As the evening church service began I felt a lingering sadness and separation, and pushed it aside to focus on the sermon.  The next hour was possibly one of the coolest gifts and reminders that I have ever been given in a sermon.  The minister spoke on love.  What it is to love G-d and to love one another.  The topic was poignant, but it wasn't the topic that moved me.  The minister began scripture by scripture and thought by thought to lay out the exact learning process that I have undergone in my personal studies on that very topic. As he spoke that lonely and separated part of my heart began to come into focus and it was as if G-d himself were speaking to my heart to reassure me, 'Just because your perspective is different from others doesn't mean you can't all share my perspective'.

My Point

          Finally we have arrived at the point of all this rambling.  Here is a truth that we humans do not like to admit, we all do this thing called life alone.  Yes our paths cross and sometimes our perspectives are similar.  Many of you are blessed with the ability to share perspectives fairly often and have a common social interaction because of it.  Some of us are rarely looking through that particular perspective and more often feel the solitude of our journey.  And yet for as lonely as this journey can be...we are all together when we are looking down the path of life through the perspective of its creator.  In Christ we all share the same perspective and are intrinsically connected for all of space and time.  So, when we find ourselves feeling alone in our travels...we just need to shift ourselves to His perspective and we will be reminded that we are never alone.

Today I am breaking all of my blog rules.  The song linked below speaks to me of the very point I am trying to make.  It all comes back to our creator and when we come to Him we will know exactly who we are and where we belong...In Him.

New Every Morning

On Abraham's Sacrifice

          I have been deeply musing of late on the sacrifice of Abraham to G-d on the mount in Moriah.  If you want to check it out, peruse chapter 22 of Genesis.  (I suggest reading it out of the Tanakh as that is my favorite.) In it you will find the story of Abraham, a flawed man who despite his flaws consistently returns and obeys the voice of his G-d.  A man not unlike you and I, seeking to do what is right and true but often finding ourselves doing things our own way instead of trusting that G-d will fulfill His words in His way without our intervention.  Let me give you a quick recap of his life:

          Abraham started out as Abram, a good man seeking to follow the G-d of heaven and earth with whom he had a personal and intimate relationship.  Abram married his half sister (Idk...social norms were different back then I guess.) Sarai who was apparently the most beautiful woman ever born (or all the other women alive were quite ugly, who knows) and they started a life together.  Abram is given a promise from G-d that he will bear a son and his descendants will be as the stars in the heavens for number...only fly in the ointment is that for all of her beauty Sarai apparently cannot bear children.  Years go by and this lack of offspring does not dim the love between the two, however it becomes apparent to both of them that this promise surely cannot be true.  It's not happening and surely G-d must have meant something else.  G-d reassures Abram a second time that he will be given an heir and all of the earth will be blessed from his line.  And this time when G-d tells Abram He even shows the depth of His intentions by making a covenant with Abram basically stating that if He does not fulfill His end of the bargain, He should be as dead animals left bare for a sacrifice.  (That's right...the G-d of heaven and earth deigns to promise a mortal that if He does not fulfill His promise, Abram can consider Him as nothing more than a dead animal. Seems like that should be enough to reassure Abram right?  But Abram is human just like you and I, and decades are passing with no promise fulfilled and every passing day makes that promise less and less possible in human eyes.)
          Time goes by and Abram makes multiple decisions out of fear and his own understanding of what must be right.  (Not the least of these is the decision that his successor must come from Sarai's maid because it's not biologically possible for Sarai to bear children.)  Angels come out of nowhere and yet again the promise is repeated to Abram, and G-d Himself speaks to Abram to reassure him and gives both he and Sarai new names.  They will now be Abraham and Sarah, the beginning of a people who will fill the earth and bring a blessing upon all mankind.
          Still more time passes, but finally...after DECADES of waiting. Decades of wondering if G-d would accomplish this promise, if it could even be possible, if he had misunderstood, why he couldn't just make a successor his own way since it seemed clear the promise given would never come.  After decades of poor decisions, missteps, repentance, family anguish, financial success and waiting (albeit sometimes impatiently).  His G-d fulfilled the promise given so many times in so many ways.  Sarah conceived and bore him Issac.  Abraham loved Issac as only a father longing for decades for a promised child could.  Issac embodied everything that was his promised future.  All of the physical and financial success, all of the hopes for descendants, everything he had ever hoped or dreamed of was balanced on the shoulders of his beloved son Issac.  And this is where chapter 22 comes into play, what Abraham's trials for all of those decades had been leading up to.  The climactic question that G-d had slowly built up over time.
        
          Do you trust and love me enough to give it all back to me?

          The Test of Free Will

          At the beginning of chapter 22 we find Abraham a wealthy man who is happy beyond measure.  You could say he has been rewarded for his faith and belief in G-d by the advent of the birth of his son, but I do not see it quite that way.  To me the birth of Issac was the beginning of a test that Abraham had been given multiple times throughout his life.  Sometimes he passed, but more often he failed it.  The test of his free will.  When faced with trusting in the almighty G-d to make a way when there seems no possible way, would he choose to rely on what he could not see/understand or would he choose his own way that seemed more reasonable and possible to his human mind?  Each time the test had been given his future and happiness lay in the balance, and often he acted out of his fears and human nature to pick his own way over an unknown way of even the one true G-d.  

          Now here he was an old man, possibly thinking he had finally achieved what he had so long hoped for and so often disbelieved.  But what we often see as the resolution of a story, G-d sees as the middle or even the beginning because He sees that our hearts still are not proven to fully belong to Him.  We still don't trust His will over our own, His blessings over our desires, His future over our plans.  This is where I believe Abraham was at the fateful beginning of chapter 22, still in the middle of his story and still waiting to serve G-d first with all that he had.

          And so it was that G-d asked Abraham, not for something important as a proof of his will, but for EVERYTHING that he held most dear.  G-d asked Abraham to take his beloved and promised son.  The son who signified his happiness and his promised future, the son that G-d himself gave to him...and sacrifice him as an offering to Him.  

          Now scholars debate the meaning of this story quite a bit.  They question whether it was literal or figurative.  They try to diminish or explain away the horror of the almighty G-d asking someone to kill another innocent person as a human sacrifice to prove allegiance to Him.  I am not going to muse on those things, because honestly I believe those questions are roadblocks that trip us up and hide the true importance of this history.  I want to discuss what Issac symbolized to Abraham and what I better understand about my relationship with G-d through this story.

What Will I Sacrifice?

          In Psalm 51 we are told that the sacrifices of G-d are a broken spirit, that a broken and contrite heart will not be despised by G-d.  My spirit is my will and it must be my own choice to break it and freely give it to G-d.  He will not ever force it from me.  

          In the account of Abraham let us consider what Issac symbolized to him.  He was taking his only son, his beloved promise given to him by G-d, the one set to inherit all of the worldly goods he had worked so much for, the only hope of a succession coming from himself and his loved wife Sarah...and he was faced with the choice to kill every possible future happiness with no explanation or reassurance as to why or to yet again rely on his human understanding and decide for himself that G-d couldn't possibly be asking such a huge sacrifice He must have meant something else.  

          Have you ever stood there?  Have you ever stood alone faced with that long awaited promise, everything you ever hoped for and never expected staring you in the face and the very G-d who made that promise and provided it...calling you to willingly give it all back to Him with no explanation beyond, "because I asked for it"?  Maybe it literally means EVERYTHING to you and your future happiness, maybe you even know without a doubt that it was promised to you by G-d and therefore it should rightfully belong to you but He is asking you not only to give it back to Him but to cut it open in his presence and let it burn away until there is nothing left.  No more hope, no more blessing, no more future...not even a new promise that all will be restored.  

          Think about that one thing you have been promised.  Perhaps you have obtained it, perhaps you are still waiting for it, perhaps you are unsure it is coming but you believe you have been told it will.  Name it to yourself and carry it to the top of the mountain of sacrifice in your heart.  That new house you have been scrimping and saving for, that job you have worked yourself to the bone for, that success in finance that you are going to use for good, that long awaited for child, your health or the health of a family member, that life partner who you long to build a future with...whatever it is take a moment and look it in the eye.  Are you willing to let all of it go for no other reason than to choose G-d's will over your own?  

          Do you hear the voice of your G-d asking, "Will you give me everything...even this?  Will you trust my plan more than your own wisdom?  Will you follow me even if you don't understand what I am doing or why?  Will you love me more than anything this life can offer, even more than any future hopes and dreams?".  I hear Him asking me to sacrifice everything in my power to give, my free will, and to trust Him to keep His promises even if I cannot understand how He will begin to do so.  

Climbing the Mountains of Moriah

          In the account of Abraham given in Genesis chapter 22, we are told about one journey in Abraham's lifetime but I wonder sometimes if we realize that his life was full of many journey's to that mountaintop.  The mountains of Moriah exist in each of our hearts, that sacred place where we are called daily to make the sacrifice of our spirit, our free will, and turn over our hopes and dreams to a faithful G-d who's ways we cannot hope to fully understand.  Do we know that sometimes a sacrifice has already been prepared in the place of what we are willing to give up and sometimes what He asks us to give is not meant for us and in those moments we must be willing to follow through, to rip out and burn away any part that is required of us trusting that He knows there is something greater yet to come?  Do we love and trust Him enough to do what He asks without knowing what the outcome will be?

          May G-d bless and hold each of His children up and give them the strength to climb that mountain of sacrifice every day and say, "Here am I Lord, let my will be your own.".