Sweet Summertime

This is a hastily-written, spur-of-the-moment, subject-dying-for-attention piece; I went downstairs for a minute, ate a snack, came back up, and typed. Truth: I didn't intend for it be so creepy at the first, but I kind of like the way it ended up: a juxtaposition of light and dark, the malicious vs. the innocent. I'm keeping it, even if it is faintly twisted and slightly off-kilter.
I suppose, subconsciously, I'm also thinking about the way appearances can be so misleading, so deceptive, so...apparent! It's wrong and rude to make snap judgments and then to close our minds to a different truth than one we may have fabricated (not first impressions; those aren't voluntary, and we can't help them. We can only help what we do with them.); recognizing and overcoming that tendency is something with which I have struggled for a long time.
So now. Enough petty preaching: here instead is my paltry attempt at poetry, 'Ode to Summer.'


Deep, dark, red stains on a surface
In sharp contrast white and pristine.
For what this sacrifice? Spilled life juices
Are oozing, pooling, running from the scene.
Sharp and gleaming, sinisterly silver,
A tainted knife is lying nearby
Its teeth are full of bits of once living
Flesh now still; how happened this crime?
There are no lookers-on right now;
The place is silent and dead.
Witnesses seem to be few or none—
Or perhaps they’ve merely fled.
Now a finger, brown and smooth with sun
Dips down to stem the trickling tide
Now bathes itself in a few drops of the blood
Lifts it to crimson-colored lips, which sigh…


Strawberries, oh, strawberries.
How delicious, delectable, divine are these.
Tickling, teasing, terrorizing tart
A sun-kissed fruit shaped as a heart.


Bite-size bits of bon, berry bliss,
All cold winter long their sweet squelch we miss
The first warm days of spring herald this:
Strawberries will soon be ripe to be picked.


Festivals and carnivals, gay galas and fairs,
We seize a chance to celebrate these treats too often rare.
We bake them into pies and cakes; they occupy our culinary dreams;
They rest in downy shortbread cups, and drown in fresh whipped cream.
They create, as a garnish on a salad,
A new joie de vivre for the palate.
They are simply irresistible, the fiends,
When bathed in melted chocolate streams.


Sharp, succulent, sloppy little burst,
We thank you for your sweet sugars,
Surprising and sour, the evidence of your life,
We eat you by the peck; you are a delight.
You smell of green summer and hot sun and fresh air;
We crave your scent, pine for you everywhere.
We love your cool juices, refreshing and dark,
We never could hate you for leaving your mark
For staining our fingers and
On lips and tongues lingering
Oh, enticing strawberry,
You make our hearts want to sing!


On the slab of white, a dark, red stain;
But no crime was committed; no one left in pain.
It’s only a squirt of fresh strawberry juice
Funneling down to the hungry sink drain,
A delicious reminder, a last crimson view,
One final splash of summery, sweet, scarlet rain.

Helpless

"For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations."

~Psalm 100:5

God's grace and His mercy are never failing; in all things is He faithful, and He will never leave me nor forsake me.

I can't imagine a happier truth, a greater promise.

I can't. I cannot. I can not. 

What a depressing phrase; nobody enjoys admitting that they are unable - incapable, incompetent, inept. That kind of attitude - the negativity, the hopelessness and powerless that accompany the sentiment - is admonished against in a goal-driven, ambitious society. The phrase engenders a pessimism and a depression that can be well nigh impossible to overcome; yet, if we do not admit the limits of our abilities, we are truly deceiving ourselves.

I. Can't.

Every single day, I am confronted with the truth: I can't win, I can't be enough, I cannot fulfill others' expectations of me. I will never be enough. Even should I do something well, or complete a task to the best of my ability, it will be tainted with imperfection; I cannot accomplish anything without adding a modicum of disappointment into the equation.

Despite this knowledge, I continue to try to provide for myself, to strive; I constantly push aside the hand proffered to help and declare 'No! I will do for myself.'

Each time I fail, however, through the anger and the hurt, my God comforts me. No matter how I've disrespected Him or hated Him, He is there. He holds out His hands - those loving, capable hands with the cruel scars caused by my ill will - and gathers me to Himself, promising to hold me up, to sustain me. Even as I turn again and again to my idols - to my grades, to my parents, or to those things that should be good but that have become twisted and imperfect, such as love for others - He waits. Those other gods all fail me, but He never does. He gathers me back into His fold the instant I stumble and cry out, one of countless stray lambs, and soothes me with His voice:

'Be still, and know that I am God.' 

He alone is God.

He alone is good.

He alone loves me forever and will never disappoint me, never let me go, never tell me I am worthless or undeserving, no matter how true those things may be. 

He forgives me every time I spurn Him and tear my cares away from Him, clinging to them myself.

He waits ever so patiently for my fragile arms to grow weary, to receive my burdens and my worries back into Himself and to cradle an exhausted me and hold me close to His heart.

If I put pen to paper to list every example of God's faithfulness to me, I should have a book several hundred pages long by the time I had recalled everything; I will settle instead for just one example, the most recent in an ever-growing store.

Today, in a fit of frustration and self-contempt, I checked the Bible Gateway homepage, hoping to be distracted. Immediately upon reading the verse, I was humbled. Gently rebuked, I bowed my head in shame and wonder - shame at being caught turning once again to myself to fill me, and wonder that the God of the universe, the Good Shepherd, loves me.

“...And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

~Ephesians 3:17b-19

Love that surpasses knowledge - a fascinating, incomprehensible idea in a world where knowledge is equal to power. What surpasses power? Here: love does.

All the fullness of God - how does one measure that? It is impossible. God, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, is not an entity to be contained or parceled into measuring cups and spoons. He defies the bounds of logic, time, and place. He is infinite, and in such, so is His Love.

So I am left with queries. How? Why? Questions with answers I may never know, and at which I will always wonder. Even though I cannot (that phrase again) understand how overwhelmingly immeasurable is Christ's love for me, I can and will revel in the fact that it is there, and that it sustains me when all around me crumbles. 

When the people I trust and love the most reject me out of spite, or when they are unable to heal me in the face of their own brokenness.

When I've disappointed someone, and they tell me so in no uncertain terms.

When the tapestry of my future warps and snarls, and I'm left holding the threads of a broken dream.

Then, and always, God is there: reminding me with kindness; rebuking me with love; reaching for me with patience.

Thanks be to God. He reminds me, especially when I push Him away, that He loves me in spite of me, and that He will do so forever; in this truth am I glad – pleased to be powerless.

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

~Isaiah 53:6

"But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."
~Romans 3:21-24

I Cannot; but He Can.

'Jesus looked at them and said, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."'
~Matthew 19:26

Center Stage

You know what I love the most about the stage? Anonymity.

Yes.

Every time you step onstage, you’re a new person; you’re not you, not really. You’re a character – you’re given a role to play, and a set of lines to say, or a sequence of movements to execute (I hate that word. Execute. You’re not killing the movement, are you?), to exhibit , or a series of notes and lyrics to deliver. Every movement, every expression, comes not from you, but from your character. What would your character do in this situation? What would he say? How would he react? Terrified? Exhausted? Ecstatic? Indignant? Flummoxed? So rich and varied the emotions and expressions one can have; so many choices for the artist in his living medium to make. Everything you do contributes to an audience’s conception of your character. The most jovial person alive may play a cold-hearted killer; this, then, is what is seen, what is ingested. The carapace of character exhibited by the performer becomes that with which the audience is acquainted; the person underneath means very little at all beyond a physical cue to memory – and even that is altered mightily by makeup, dyes, costuming choices, etc. You, the actor, are a nobody. You are nothing.

And there is no greater bliss, no more freedom, than in that knowledge.

You, as you, are not. you are not known, you are not seen, you are not heard.

And you are completely and totally liberated.

And you are never as much yourself as when you are somebody else.

When else are you presented with opportunities to face fears, exhibit emotions, or think thoughts that you – as you – never would? Performing, truly performing, strips one of excesses, of all the pieces of the daily costume, all the props, all the routine affectations. A performer is naked. Beautifully so. Nothing but a raw, exposed soul upon the stage, one who has allowed another’s words and actions and feelings to completely overwhelm and saturate his own personality, who has interpreted a character in such a way that the character’s personality is his, even while that is exactly what it is not.

In a similar way, the Christian is given a role to play – not saying that the way we behave is an act. It is much more than a role. It is that absorption, that imputation, that substitution – of Christ’s person for your whole self. “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” Is there a higher characterization given? To act as Jesus did – “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

To be the Creator of the universe, living on earth, encased in the meaty, sweating, stinking parcel of flesh and blood of Your fallen creation, and yet to retain completely the highest degree of holiness and perfection of soul…

And this is not the extent to which the love and devotion of our Savior reaches; in addition to taking on the character, playing the role of ‘human,’ Jesus gives us His own perfection, his own character. We are commanded to act as He did – an impossible, insurmountable mandate – and we are provided with the means to do so (yet ‘this not of yourselves; it is the gift of God’), or at least, to give the appearance of doing so:

I have been crucified with Christ and  
I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

We are privileged – we are disguised, well-costumed: acting is often spoken of as being farcical, as employing a lot of smoke and mirrors, and the greatest illusion in history is that which occurs each time a soul accepts his most important role: ‘saved soul.’ Upon acceptance, Jesus the Christ imbues the soul with His life, and makes the man the kind of creature upon whom God may look and say ‘You are my child, whom I love.’ When our Audience looks at us, He does not see a pitiful scrap of humanity limping about on the world’s apron. He sees the unsurpassable beauty, everlasting strength, glorious and bright-shining perfection of His Son, and it brings Him joy.

Performance – acting, singing, dancing, all of it – is an amazing world. In it, you may pretend as much as you like and as long as possible to be whatever and whomever you please; it is one of the most glorious and exhilarating avenues of escape and imagination accessible to humankind…and it is but a shadow, but a mirror, of the ultimate (and so very, very real!) flight of fancy by which we sojourn home. To relinquish everything that is of you; to become nothing, and yet, in that very nothingness, to be given everything. What a sweet surrender it is.

Carpe Diem

I keep putting off posting on this blog.

I set it up to keep up with writing over the summer, to give myself some incentive not to let my vocabulary degenerate into nothing but set directions and commentary like 

"Dude. It's so hot today.

Who's on chair? Oh.

It is so hot."

Lame? Yes. Anyway. 

I guess I've just been waiting for that something; for the perfect subject that will make for the perfect first post that will set the tone of my blog as a literary achievement of which I can be forever proud...except, I know that if I keep waiting for it, it'll never come. Not ever (not to mention this is a lame little blog, not my grad school senior honors project).

I can spend my whole life (or my whole summer, at least) sitting in my room, lying on my bed, staring upward, waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning from the gods (clichéd phrase number one, check.); unless I get up and actually take a look around, however, nothing is ever going to hit. I can sit and stare at the white-plastered ceiling of my room for all eternity, but it'll look the same after three thousand blinks as it did after three. 

Yick.

No; opportunity doesn't necessarily always come knocking. Sometimes you have to go out and flip over a few rocks to find it - when you do, though, that's when it becomes worth it to have gotten so dirty and mucky, right? 

(Good grief. This combination of formulaic predictability and hopelessly trite inanity is nauseating.)

Point of this heretofore pointless post being: I'm posting, and I'm doing it now. I have nothing interesting or worthwhile to say, but I'm making myself say something - anything - so that I don't look back at this season and think 

Hm. It would have been really swell if I'd documented the summer somehow instead of internalizing and ignoring everything as usual. 

I don't presume so much so as to suppose that anybody will read any of this drivel; I'd be rather mortified, in fact, if somebody actually stumbled upon it. This is (as evidenced by the obscenely high number of first-degree personal pronouns already on the page) merely an experiment in self-improvement. In addition to keeping up with words over the lazy months, I'm doing my best to overcome a personal stumbling block, a hereditary disgrace: I'm a daydreamer. I come from a family with a long line of female dreamers. Great ladies, sweet women, blah, blah, blah. We don't do anything, though. The trap of 'tomorrow,' or 'the next day,' is one into which we constantly fall; Procrastination is a dear friend, and we always make time for her, but generally not until 'later.' This isn't to say that dreaming is bad; on the contrary, where would we be if folks didn't aspire and plan? The trouble is that often we suppose and muse and pontificate with absolutely no results of which to speak; we just sit around and think. One Fr. Alfred D'Souza explained 

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished buiness, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life."

 You can't sit around and wait for life to pass you by in order to begin living -- thinking is great, but you need somebody with drive, with get-up-and-go, with the ability to turn castles in the air into mansions on the ground. No amount of wishing can do that, and that's where I always fall short. I can never manage to turn my brilliant ideas (and by brilliant ideas I mean cockamamie idiocies) into realities (which, going by the aforementioned definition, is a very good thing for the rest of humanity). This is both tiresome and frustrating; how in the world am I supposed to get anywhere worthwhile on this planet unless I actually do things to get there? Answer to this infuriatingly vague self-probing: write a blog. 

You're kidding, right? How lame is that?

No really, give it a try.

I suppose it's better than nothing.

That's the spirit!

Alright. Here we go. Blog created, named for a poem that connotes a moment of achievement in a first semester English course, primed and ready for inspired pieces composed via the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,' and...

nothing.

Zero. Zip. Nada. Just waiting around; waiting for that moment when my mental tongue should be loosed and words in the form of heavenly prose or poetry would come pouring forth like the flood waters of the Nile river in the rainy season. I expected an epiphanic moment, one in which I would feel an immense self-satisfaction and be able to say with Dr. Doppler "All my life, I've been waiting for an opportunity like this, and here it is screaming, 'Go Delbert! Go Delbert!'" ...except, I suppose my cheerleader-minded opportunity might replace 'Delbert' with my name.

Unfortunately (or wonderfully, as the case may be), although there have been many small, inspirational moments that might have been worth setting to digital paper, none have yet made it to the screen from my brain, and I've already forgotten most of them. Instead of cursing my short attention span and flighty focus, however, I'm glad. The lack of intriguing subject matter has forced me to write a post about nothing, and for that, I shall be grateful; now my standards aren't quite as high as they would have been had this post actually been about something worth reading, and for the first time in a good long while, I've overcome my own self-imposed restrictions and artificial regulations and done something just to do it. No conditions met or plans made (and remade.). 

It feels kinda good.

Kinda free.

Lesson learned. Carpe Diem. Nike.

"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today." ~James Dean