The Wobbler

I just spent a week with my husband’s family in Jasper, Alberta.  Hanging out with my nieces (ages 5 and 2) is always an ear-tickling experience for me because my oldest niece is a talker with extraordinary artistry and a flare for communication.  She is inquisitive, imaginative and very smart so there’s no putting her off with a simple explanation about something.  She wants to know and understand the esoteric and I need to be ready with more than a two-word answer when I’m with her.

I think part of my captivation with my niece is that she reminds me of me.  Ask my mum and I was born talking.  I taught myself to read at three years of age and spent the next years of my life in the wonders and pursuit of knowledge – sometimes reading and learning about things far beyond my intellectual or emotional capacity.  (Seriously.  I would never recommend Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews to anyone but I’ll bet there are a lot of women my age who read it as teenagers.  The problem is that I read it when I was 7 – much, much too young to identify, parse, discard the themes therein.)  I loved, and still love, discovery.  And hence I loved, and admittedly still love, telling others about it, sounding like an authority principled with enlightenment that I delivered unto others.  I am here to tell you how it really is, in other words.

**

I was blessed to be raised in part by my Grandmother.  Her impact on my life is tangible, bearing new and different fruit often.  She bore suffering and sorrow and illness and adversity practically every day of her life and never wavered in her fervent love for Jesus.  She was quiet and meek unless she was yelling at the politicians on the news (how she would have loved this past election!).  She worked harder than almost anyone I’ve ever met and she made out of  her grade eight education a passion for education and advancement.  She exhorted, taught, cried over and prayed for me from the moment I was born.  She was the gentlest and strongest person to influence my life.

Growing up, I often spent weeks on end at her apartment and in the spare bedroom hung a plaque whose words would become a guiding prayer in my life:

Oh Lord, fill my mouth with worth

While stuff and nudge me when I’ve said enough

You see, a born talker does not necessarily make one a born listener.  An impart-er of knowledge does not necessarily equate to having a gift that discerns the right time to instruct and the right time to, well, to shut up.  Sometimes that gift has to be cultivated and practiced like any other discipline – and I found the richest soil for that discernment to grow in was silence.

So I would pray this “stuff and nudge me” prayer often.  I would pray it in small group, prayer circles, before leading worship, in my own church and in ones I was visiting, at camp, at work.  Lord, get me out of the way.  Help me to hear your Spirit, your words, your wisdom in the noise of this place and in the noise of my heart. I would picture God stuffing a handkerchief into my mouth, the end hanging between my lips as a signal that He had closed my mouth.  Sometimes I would see God packing my brain with cotton and giving me a small hip-check to remind me to be quiet.  This prayer was my reminder that listening was more important than formulating the brilliant answer or exhortation that everyone was waiting for.  I even prayed it this past March when I gave my testimony before my baptism.  A whole new congregation of people I didn’t know heard me ask God to help me tell what I could and when I’d said enough, leave the rest to Him.

And God took me at my word.

Part of Jesus growing me in the last two years, bringing greatness from the experience of my head injury, has been to “stuff and nudge” me.  Oh, I’m still a talker.  Par excellence.  But that image of God stuffing my head with cotton?  Yep.  Feel like that ALL THE TIME.  Brainquakes and migraines make it hard to fill my space with music or my own voice making conversation.  Not being able to read very much has opened me up to listening to books on CD or seriously thinking about what my own opinion and thoughts are on a given subject.  The silence of my new everyday life has taught me to fill my space with prayer and to listen for God’s voice in the stillness.  The different ways in which my brain now works has showed me that – yep.  I don’t know it all, there is still so much to be learned, so much that others have to teach me.  My niece is teaching me to listen to her own discoveries and findings – from learning about the concept of capacity to advising me on the best way to catch a fairy.

But the other part of that prayer, the “fill my mouth with worth” part is still essential.  It’s just that now it’s not about finding the eight-dollar word when the fifty-cent one might do; it’s not about instructing others in what I think I know.  The worth is in telling them about the compelling and everlasting love of Jesus, who is pulling me through a time of adversity and stretching.  It’s in giving that testimony and having His praise be ever on my lips.  It’s in smiling and expressing to a new friend how much I’m already amazed by them and how I want to know more about them, their walk, their journey.  Filling my mouth with worth is about asking Jesus to fill me with love and compassion and joyful encouragement for the church and the people of God.  It’s about praying for those who are important to me, particularly those who don’t know the Hand that holds them – and asking God to stuff down those doubts that come along with all these things.  To stuff me instead with His passion for every person, with the fruits of the Spirit, with grace and hope and resurrection-power.  Stuff and nudge me, Lord.  Move me.  Inspire me.  Quiet me.

**

My Grandmother died in 2008 at the age of 95, leaving behind only a drawerful of things to show for her life: her well-worn bible, the candies she used in the middle of the night to moisten her mouth, pictures of her family, the plaque I read and re-read and have prayed and prayed and prayed through thirty plus years of my life.  It reads:

Oh Lord, fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff

And nudge me when I’ve said enough

I don’t know when or how I got the quote wrong.  But I pray that God will always stuff and nudge me, whenever or however I need it.

A few years ago, I almost lost my life at an intersection.

It was a classic mistake.  The car in the lane closest to me stopped to allow me to cross.  The car in the next lane over, heading in the same direction, did not.

Remembering it now is a little surreal.  People on the other side of the street saw what was happening an instant before I did and yelled out to warn me.  I was busy looking at the ambulance with flashing lights whizzing past in the oncoming traffic lanes (ironic, no?) and consequently had my face turned away from the car in my own path.  At the cries of “Look out!”, I whipped my head around to see what misfortune had befallen some poor person and how I might be able to help them -

BANG!  Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!-thud.

The sound of my hands bouncing off several parts of the car as it passed, the tires just touching my shoe, close enough to leave marks on the toe.  My left hand bent backwards as it bore the brunt of the sideview mirror, enough to strain it badly but not break it.  And it really is true that some observations seem as though they’re happening incredibly slowly: I remember leaving a clear palm print in the sandy dust on the rear side of the car.

The driver never slowed down, never honked, didn’t stop and come to see if I was alright.  People all around (because of course, I do this walking away from a very busy, public beach) heard the bangs of my hands and came running so I can only assume that the driver must have heard some kind of ruckus.  Or maybe they were rockin’ out to some Neil Diamond song blasting in their space.  All I know is that I crossed the street, reassured onlookers that I was ok, and then walked back to our tent in which I had a nervous breakdown.

So wow.  I’m pretty careful at intersections these days.  Except for one.  An intersection I throw myself wholeheartedly, unabashedly into.

The intersection of unstoppable love and great despair.  Of grace and sin.  Of life and death.

The cross.

Jesus didn’t lose his life at an intersection.  He became the intersection – the point at which God rode roughshod over pain and sin and death.  It’s what I see when I look at the cross.  A visual reminder of the crossroad at which Jesus bled and died and conquered so that I might ditch the road that leads nowhere and rejoice along the one that leads to eternal life.

That’s an intersection in which I’m willing to lose my life – and find it, over and over again.

I’m a little late to the blog party.

I have lots of reasons why it’s taken me so long to get back into writing (some of them are even good!), but the main one is because until now I haven’t been able to spend any quality time with a computer monitor.   As it is, I’m not sure of the time window I have in which to jot down all the detritus that fills my head daily.  So this is an experiment in self-expression and in brain rehab.

You see, two years ago, I suffered what I thought was a fairly innocuous hit to the head.  It turned out to be much more severe than I would have ever guessed and so here I am on this side of a brain injury.  Healing.  Rehabbing.  The concussion (we think) shook my world literally.  My brain shakes.  It feels like someone constantly has me by the shoulders and is pushing me back and forth, side to side.  It’s not unlike being on a boat in rough waters except that you can’t get off.  For two years I’ve had headaches as house guests, many of them migraines that slouch down on the cushy couch of my brain and put their feet up to stay awhile.   In the beginning, I couldn’t read at all, although now I can read – ish – if I limit my reading to about 10 minutes a day. This is not the most efficient way I know to read a book.  I currently have 60 books downstairs that are waiting to be read. Before the accident, they would have lasted me 3 weeks.  Tops.

And then there’s light.  Light.  What was once a metaphor for my life (“You are the light of the world…  let your light shine before others…” Matthew 5:14-16) has become an equal opportunity enemy. My eyes, for lack of a diagnosed medical term, are wonky.  They don`t seem to be able to process light very well anymore.  Things like TVs and computers can be agony for me.  For one thing, the brightness of the screens can be just too much to handle and a computer’s refresh rate results in a flicker that plays chicken with the “brainquakes” in my head.  Add into that the fact that my brain now has trouble deciding whether I am moving or the image on the screen is.  If my brain makes the wrong call, I fall over.  It`s funny when you see it happen but it makes watching The Dark Knight a tad dangerous.

But here`s the thing.  Two years of no books, no TV, no church, not wanting to go out into the light of day, not wanting to see people – this became two years of hiding. Less and less conversation.  More and more pain.  And hiding is not the stuff of Life.  When the hiding was evident enough to be diagnosed as Depression, the first thing my doctor and the psychologist wanted to know was if I had people around me, people who would support me, people who would be there. The answer was a long time coming and when it did, it didn`t quite look like what I thought it would.  Some people were there, others weren`t. Some snuck in the back door of my heart while I was busy guarding the front entrance. Those who chose to come, came bearing the light of Christ.

So here I am.  I`m stepping tentatively into Light, squinting, my hand shielding my eyes. But the Light is where I`m supposed to be and I`m determined to live my way back into it.

Oh, and for this? Writing this blog at a computer that produces a flicker I can see and drives my eyes batty?  I`m wearing sunglasses.

Let the healing begin.