But God

With a singe bite, with a single swallow, they destroyed it all. Their tattered innocence dropped from them, leaving them naked and afraid, trembling under the inadequate covering of leaves and branches, hiding from their all-seeing, all-knowing Maker.

But God called them. And clothed them. And rekindled hope.

He was a crazy old man, living alone as a God-fearer in a world of wickedness. Beam by beam, he built a boat in a land that had never seen more than a mist, prophesying death and destruction with each hammer-blow. In that boat, he alone, and his family of eight and a whole bunch of beasts floated, feeling forgotten, on a sea without end.

But God called him. And carried him to dry land. And rekindled hope.

They were old. Ancient. Long past the days of youthful passion, monthly anticipation, monthly disappointment. The lack of a monthly flow was a testiment to nothing but the relentless passage of years. The monthly crushing disappointment had long settled to an ache of regret for what never was, never would be.

But God called them. And caused them to conceive. And rekindled hope.

They lay crushed under their burdens, ground to the dust under the boots of their oppressors, building bricks in the baking sun. For generations, they had been born and died as slaves, until they scarcely remembered the concept of freedom. The promises of long ago seemed but fanciful dreams, and survival depended on resigning themselves to another day under the whip.

But God called them. And conquered the king. And rekindled hope.

They stood by the sea, trapped. Before them, the sea waves lapped softly on the shore, taunting them with sounds of peace in the face of terror.  Behind them, the cloud of dust under the hooves of their enemies' horses rose to join the pillar of cloud and fire, obliterating the horizon, obliterating any hope of escape. There was nowhere to go. There was nowhere to run.

But God called them. And cleaved the sea. And rekindled hope.

And so it goes, over and over. We are at the end of our rope. We are beyond our own abilities. We are in despair. There is no way out. There is no way forward. There is no hope. It's over. It's done. The end.

But God

But God steps in and changes it all.

The last one left. The kid nobody wanted. Too short, too stupid, too awkward, too slow to be anything but a liabilty.

But God. But God called her and chose her and loved her!

Broken and battered by life, with a heart so scarred it could hardly feel, and so scared it didn't dare try again.

But God. But God called her and healed her and restored her to life!

Left without a father, defenseless and alone, trying to be brave, trying to be tough, but always crying for her father's love.

But God. Oh, but God called her and wrapped her in his Father arms until she could rest there and hear his heart beat his Father love for her. Abba. Abba. Abba.

Cold in the grave he lay, three days cold and stiff. Battered, beaten, bruised, wrapped, and left in the tomb. Crucified. Dead. Buried. The end.

But God. Oh, shout it from the rooftops: But God!!

But God defeated death! He is not dead! He is alive! And he comes again!

But God. And my world, as I know it, shifts. And will never again be the same.

Because God.

Thank God.

Cliches

I hate cliches.

"God is good all the time. All the time, God is good."
"When God closes a door, he opens a window."
"Don't worry, God's got something better for you."
"It's all right, he (or she) is in a better place now."
"At least he (or she) isn't suffering anymore."
"God is going to turn this for good."
"It's a God thing."
"God's going to show up."

Oh, and "God will never give you more than you can handle."

The list could go on. You get the point. I hate cliches.

But why? Why do I hate them so? Why, especially, considering that some of them are rock-solid scriptural truths?  Sure, it's debatable that if God closes a door he opens a window. I'm not sure that Sound of Music is a terribly reliable source of sound theology. And it's an outright lie that God never gives us more than we can handle. He does so all the time; that's why we need him. But let's face it; many of the cliches we Christians love to throw out are straight from Scripture. They're true. After all, God is good all the time. He will turn all things in my life for good. All of life is a God thing, and he doesn't just show up, he is always there. So why do they grate so?

I think partly it is because cliches lack nuance. You aren't willing to wrestle with me the nuances of a life where what is better is not always nicer or more comfortable, where God is always there but sometimes feels hidden, where what I want is not always what I get, and I am called to trust most when my eyes see the least. When I ask God for ice cream, and he gives me Brussels sprouts, I get that he's giving me something better. Brussels sprouts have more nutrition. They are cruciferous (loosely translated to mean, packed full of good things, but tasting kinda bad). Brussels sprouts will make me healthy and strong. Ice cream will just make me fat. I get it. God is giving me something "better". But the fact is, I don't want Brussels sprouts. They taste bad. They smell bad when they're cooking. I have to choke them down, one painful green ball at a time. Ice cream would slip down so smoothly. But when you slam me with the cliche, you fail to acknowledge all that nuance. You say, "God's got something better for you," and I hear, "You asked God for ice cream, and he's going to give you cheesecake instead. Or an ice cream sundae with a cherry on top." And I am left to choke down the Brussels sprouts alone.

But I mostly hate cliches because they lack empathy and compassion. It's not the words themselves that sting so fiercely, but the timing and the manner in which they are spoken. They may well be truth, but they are truth that I am not ready to hear in this moment that my heart is broken. You have not taken the time to hear my heart. You have not sat in silence with me in the pain. You have not cried with me. You just spout to me a cliche that feels like a slap across the cheek to snap me out of what you think is hysteria. What you say is, "God is going to turn this for good," but because you have not taken any time to hear me cry, what I hear is, "Your tears are not legitimate. You shouldn't feel that way." Closer to the truth, I think you are saying, "Your tears make me uncomfortable, so I'm going to say something to make you stop crying so I don't have to feel so awkward." You cannot stand to face my pain with me, so you give me cold comfort and walk away, and I am left to cry my tears alone.

That's mostly, I think, why I hate cliches.

I will never forget one of the worst days of my life. I ended up talking with someone with whom I had no intention to do so. I had been so beaten up with cliches that I had learned that it was best to keep my mouth shut and walk alone. But that day, for some reason which remains elusive still, I talked. For the first time in my life, I experienced something different. He listened. He cared. He had tears in his eyes. He sat in the darkness with me. He sat there in the misery and did not try to change it. And then he said, "Marianne, I don't know what to say. I don't have any words to make you feel better. I don't know why things like this happen. But what I do know is this: somehow, in some way, in ways we don't understand, God is still good, and all that comes from his hand is goodness."

And it wasn't a cliche.  It wasn't a cliche because he had sat in the pain with me. It was stated after the silence, after the tears, after the acknowledgement that the circumstances were terrible and heart-shattering and worthy of lament. What he gave me that day was a rock-solid truth I could anchor my life on. It helped me see that, as dark as my life looked, there was still light and goodness that I could count on. There was nuance, and empathy, and care, and because of that, what might have been just another cliche became a hope to which I have clung with white knuckles through dark, dark days and nights.

I hate cliches. I hate them, not because they are not true (because many of them are) but because they are a brush-off so you don't have to deal with my messiness and hurt. I know the truth. I know the answers. I even know that I'm messy and mixed-up and miserable. What I need is someone who is willing to walk through the mire and messiness with  me.

And when you do that, your words stop being cliche and become for me life. And truth.

Goodbye, Spock

If you know me at all, you know that I do not keep up on celebrity anything. I really couldn't care any less about the size of Kim's bottom or the colour of her hair, or who won the Oscars or who is dating whomever.

But this past week, Spock died. And I was a little taken aback at how much it bothered me. To borrow his phrase, it was . . . illogical. And fascinating. Because I know that Spock is a fictitious character in a hopelessly outdated and cheesy series that lived only three years, and was finished before I was even born. Still, it is so. I felt downright melancholy.

I discovered Star Trek in the reruns of the reruns. I was in my late teens. We had our very first ever TV. It was actually an Apple computer monitor which my brothers and I hooked up to bunny ears. Then we strung wires from the bunny ears and wove the wires through the wire mesh of the screen in my bedroom window. I don't know if there's any possibility that it made the picture clearer, but we thought it did. And then we would crowd into my bedroom and watch this cool show about Kirk and McCoy and Spock, exploring strange new worlds, going bravely where no man had gone before. We kept the volume down. We thought we'd get into trouble. We didn't want my mom to discover that we'd figured out a way to turn the monitor into a TV, let alone that we were watching this space show.

She discovered us one day. She stuck her head in, and stood and watched for about thirty seconds, and said, "Oh, Star Trek." And walked out. We stared at each other in outright astonishment. Mom knew about Star Trek? And she was ok with us watching it? No way! (I still don't know how that happened.) After that, we watched it openly. We still strung the wires up. It seemed we got the best reception from that upstairs bedroom facing Toronto.

Eventually, the monitor-comme-TV moved downstairs onto the dining room table. We got a real TV. We set up a tower antenna and could get more channels. When I moved out, I got cable. Now I could watch The Next Generation. It wasn't as good. Because Data wasn't Spock.

I haven't watched Star Trek in years. I haven't even thought about Star Trek in years. But when I read in the paper that Leonard Nimoy had died, I was shocked. Spock was dead. For good this time. There would be no Star Trek III to bring him back to life. He was gone. And I realised how much Spock had meant to me.

I was an awkward, angry, out-of-place kid at that time. I loved learning, especially about things I wanted to learn about. I read voraciously. I was known by first name at the public library, and signed out armloads of books at once. I would spend hours in the library, reading encyclopedias about whatever struck my interest at that time. These were the days before Google. I would hook onto a topic and learn as much as I could about it. While all the other girls my age were off studying how to put on make-up and fancy clothes, and how to flirt with boys, I was reading about the Monitor and the Merrimack, about the real mutiny on the Bounty, and about Grey Owl.

I was an introvert in a house full of extroverts. I wanted to be in my bedroom, reading, naturally. That made me anti-social and a loner. The younger me sat in the school playground, back against a wall, nose in a book. I was always being told to put my books away and play with the other kids. My desire, even my need, to be alone caused all kinds of problems. I didn't know about introversion or extroversion. I just knew that normal people liked being with other people, and people who wanted or needed to be alone were weird, anti-social misfits.

I loved fixing things. I didn't really see the point in crying about something if I could fix it. I made decisions logically, based on what was practical, pragmatic, or the right thing to do. In a large, extended family that "discussed" issues at top volume and heated passion, I quickly learned that logic and sense don't necessarily rule the day; passion and volume did.

I learned to blend in. I learned to be loud and passionate. I learned to put on a great extroverted face, which I could maintain for a while. I could never stifle my love for learning, but I did learn to not talk about it. I emotionally hung around on the fringes, talking sort of sensibly about the things that everyone else was talking about, but never talking about the things that really interested me. But the real me, the inside me, the me that longed for silence and solitude, conversations about big ideas, and the quiet and sensible solution to problems was dying behind my mask.

And then I met Spock.

He was brilliant. And a loner. And logical. And dispassionate in crisis. He still managed to care. I could see it. It showed in his actions. He was loyal to death. "I am, and always will be, your friend." Bones thought he was a freak. But anyone with half a brain could see that he was the anchor who held the Enterprise together. He didn't quite fit in, but he didn't care. He just was who he was, and when Bones went off, he cocked an eyebrow and carried on. He never changed who he was to placate the irrational and emotional doctor.

I didn't realise, all those years ago when I was watching Spock on TV, what I realised the moment I read the headline that Leonard Nimoy had died: the man from Vulcan was my first glimmer that the inside me was ok. It was ok to be an introvert. It was ok to love reading and research, and to have a headful of random facts, none of which involved makeup or fashion or interior design. It was ok to think through a decision rather than to feel through it. I was ok. It took many more years and a whole lot of real, live, flesh-and-red-blood people who love me and cheer me on for me to be comfortable with that, but Mr Spock opened my eyes to the idea that I could be ok. I think that if God can use a donkey to talk to someone, maybe he could use even a fictitious half-alien to reach one of his lost children who needed a glimmer of hope.

My hope is strong today. I hadn't thought of Spock in years. But I'm glad he was there when I was 16.

Goodbye, Spock.