SRPC campout happened last night at Lake Carl Blackwell. Mr. C built a nice big campfire at one of the camp sites. The wee kids ran around everywhere, squealing and poking along the lake shore, while the older kids disappeared to play a game of ultimate frisbee somewhere. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the middle of the proceedings, it began to sprinkle. The result was some slightly damp napkins and this rainbow.

 I told a story to these three little goons in one of the big tents. They only sat still for about ten seconds at a time. Most of the time, they were zipping and unzipping the window flaps, playing with a broom, and telling each other to be quiet. 

 

Now Playing: Mozart, Requiem, "Benedictus".

Another one of those cheesy cat-and-computer shots so popular among people who fancy themselves to be creative types.

This, however, is the people-eating (not people-pleasing) cat, Annie. The one, Emmaline, who was sneaking around my room earlier today. 

Shortly after I took this photo she jumped into my chair and decided to stalk me.

 

Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "Love and Thunder", "High Noon".

Miss these friends!

Spent all day today revising for the GRE, o joyous activity. In the morning, took a practice test, and in the afternoon, read chapter after chapter of The Princeton Review's guide to this wonderful exam. If I ever write a book, there shall be a mock heroic account of the hero doing battle with a fearsome standardized test monster.

Our cat Annie likes to jump up onto my windowsill and look out the window while I'm working. She bathes herself and sleeps up there, and wakes up if she hears the slightest sound outside. I'm a little bit afraid that someday she'll pull a boy-in-the-window trick as in the Book of Acts and fall out during one of her naps.

I've decided to make a tour of my music collection this fall and listen to it from start to finish. There are a lot of albums that I don't listen to at all, so it's high time for me to become reacquainted with whatever I have floating around in iTunes.

Ruth and I presented about our RP missions trips on Sunday. Hooray for Lorna and her straighteners! Petros's hair will never be the same (especially after that last haircut right before we left!). It was good to get to talk about what happened in Cyprus. I miss full time missions work. Maybe it's not really because I miss the actual service but because it made me feel good. Such is my heart. After I've been reading about God's grace, I come to God with my requests for the day and for my friends and relatives. And instead of asking purely with faith, expecting to receive whatever God decides is best, I come rationalizing, editing, choosing my words so that they'll be as pleasing as possible and make me look as good as possible. Prayer has become very difficult, especially, for some reason, after reading C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. I'm afraid that I'm just praying to the page. But how do I know for sure? Christ promises that we will ask the Father and that He will hear our requests because He loves us. But the enemy in my head whispers doubts constantly while I'm trying to pray so that praying becomes an effort, slogging it out, never sure whether I'm supposed to be "relying on the Spirit" or "excercising my responsibility", or something in between. 

Don't we all just love the tensions of the Christian life?

Now Playing: "Artificial Animals Riding on Neverland".

Good visit to Tulsa this weekend.

Philip and I hatched nefarious schemes on Thursday afternoon. Tara and I sat on the Bs' front porch and ate watermelon with their wee girls (except for the one who doesn't like watermelon, who pedaled a red tricycle around the porch) on Friday morning.

I ate lunch with Alyson--oh, how I've missed that absolutely deliciously gourmet ACAC food--on Friday and went to Woodward Park with Amy in the afternoon. I made the acquaintance of Amy's and Hannah's new cat, Piglet.

Amanda, Tara, and I ate at the restaurant where Crystal works on Thursday night, and on Friday night I met Alisha at the coffee shop, where we relaxed and poked quiet fun of some guy playing an awful piece on the out-of-tune piano.

Jenny and I visited the Farmer's Market this morning, and she bought an exuberant bouquet of zinnias, and we smelled packets of spices and taste-tested hot peppers (she did, anyway). Crystal bought the first Harry Potter book for me at the Ps' yard sale, and I talked poetry with Matt at Doubleshot in the afternoon.

Amanda, Tara, and I ate a late picnic lunch in Woodward Park under the big old oak trees before I came back to Stillwater.

Now Playing: Harry Gregson-Williams, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian soundtrack, "The Door in the Air".

Decided that it was too late to fill out graduate school applications, but not too late to blog. Go figure.

I spent the morning studying for the GRE, of course. The Hs came over so that my mother could help wee David with his reading. During lunch, my mother, Stephen, and I started to watch the old BBC Bleak House TV series.

On Sunday, Ruth and I are supposed to present about our RPM teams this past summer, so after lunch I went over my presentation a couple of times. I'm always so paranoid about being too long and too boring that when I actually read the presentation through, it was just barely long enough.

Going back over the photos and experiences from Cyprus has been really good, though, as a reminder of God's faithfulness. I saw God answer prayers spectacularly, immediately there: saw Him provide food for our weekend when we hadn't thought there was enough money, saw Him convert a guy who'd been sitting on the fence with regards to the faith, saw Him stirring the young people to ask questions about the Bible, saw Him protect us and provide grace for us.

Yesterday in my quiet time I read Psalm 136 with the refrain "His steadfast love endures forever". From Creation to the Exodus, God's love has been fastened on His people. He loves us patiently, persistently, powerfully. It's awesome to remember that the power that called the sun and stars into existence loves us.

In the afternoon, I ran errands. Stillwater is such an odd town. I drove down to the bank that we've gone to since I was less than five years old. Now I go there myself to cash my own checks. The teller, Charlotte, talks to me about the weather.

Then I walked across the street to the post office to post a letter to Catherine. I miss being able to walk to the post office in ACAC at TU. I have to drive all the way downtown to send international post now, and the post office is always absolutely packed with people standing in line.

The main excitement of the afternoon was gift hunting, though. I poked my nose into Murphy's, where the three shopkeepers were gossiping by the cash register. They let me browse among the colorful kitchenware unmolested. Then I went down to Elite Repeat, just out of curiosity. Mrs. O, our next door neighbor, was behind the counter. She asked me how Laura is doing--she has a particular soft spot for Laura.

Then I went over to Hallmark. I persisted past the racks of greeting cards to the far corner of the shop. Stationery and journals. Beautiful, beautiful things. Textiles, jewelry, and well-made printed matter--some of my favorite indulgences in life. I found some gorgeous journals.

Further down the street, I visited The Beadery. They have cats, sitting among the elegant bureaus and wardrobes and mirrors and racks full of jewelry.

Then I drove up Main Street. Turned at the art gallery. On one side of the street is a scooter shop, where rednecks and hip-hop types were working together on an ATV. Across the street is the international food market, which largely stocks Middle Eastern and Indian foods. I did manage to find a couple of boxes of PG Tips tea, though.

At home again, dragging my feet, I started to work on graduate school applications at last. Just then, of course, my mother called us for an early tea. My father and Stephen drive an hour north to Ponca City every Tuesday and Thursday for basketball practice now, and they have to leave at six o'clock.

Sarah and I met at the Marble Slab, over by OSU, this evening. It was a busy place tonight. Group after group kept coming in: sorority girls, guys from Countryside Baptist college group, families, couples, freshmen, giggling, greeting each other noisily.

Sarah and I ordered our ice cream and sat at a side table for an hour-and-a-half or so, talking. It got dark outside quickly. At about half eight, we walked around campus for awhile. Campus was quiet tonight. Everyone seemed to be studying in the library. We walked past the Student Union and Gundersen Hall, along behind the Civil Engineering Laboratory and the Library, past the Botany Department/Arts and Sciences Offices (we could see plants growing in a lab through a window), and onto the porch of the library. We walked down the lawn to the Student Union. We went up and stood on the balcony, looking at the dark formal gardens. The bell in the library tower struck nine o'clock.

When I got home, I had to weave my way through half-a-dozen spiderwebs hung along our front porch. My mother was sitting alone in the living room, knitting. We talked until the guys came home.

The wind outside slides through the trees, stroking the windchimes across the streets, and crickets purr gently.

Now Playing: Felix Mendelssohn, "Overture: The Hebrides".

Mendelssohn and Vivaldi both always put me in a good mood. Such joyful music.

Time for a change of layout, I felt. Still can't get rid of that lime green, though.

Now Playing: Brahms, Violin Concerto in D, Op. 77, "Adagio".

An adagio seems appropriate for a day like this. Early September, always full of the high, sharp-edged hum of crickets in the grass, like the whir of a bicycle chain. Sky is overcast, as it has been for most of the week, and all the windows are open.

I finally managed to make a start on all those applications this week. So far I have three of ten forms filled out and one fairly solid draft of a personal statement. At least, I hope it's fairly solid. We'll see what the professorial types say when they get their hands on it. Despite having graduated, I still live in awe of my undergraduate advisor and her pencil.

As usually happens when I've been away somewhere and come back, a foolish prodigal idea has crept into my head. And as also usually happens, it's taken about a year to work its way into the blinding light of day. (If anyone is counting, this is a record, because when I decided to cut my hair nice and short, that had been about six years in the making at least.)

I've decided to paint "my" room. Yellow, as a matter of fact. We'll see if it actually happens or not, though at this point I'm determined enough that it just might. Need some paint, a roller, loads of newspapers, a steamer and other unsavory items for stripping wallpaper, and probably some help. Don't worry, father dear, you won't be asked to paint: just move the dresser over there.... And would you mind managing the bed and all those bookshelves, too?

I'm thinking of making some curtains while I'm at it. Green? Yes, please. That way it will look like spring in November.

Of course this will all take time and effort and money, which I'm currently rather short on. The curtains may have to wait. But it's amusing to think about anyway.

On Wednesday I fished around and found a volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier downstairs in the basket by the piano. I tried to play Prelude No. 2, and was shocked by the state of my piano abilities. It has been over ten years, I guess, since I played seriously. Still!

Not to mention the fact that my poor family will probably get sick and tired of hearing me play Bach. Bach on the piano, Bach on the flute, with a little Vivaldi thrown in for good measure. Nothing like Baroque music to cheer things up. I'm not much one for crash-and-bang Romantic stuff, not to play, though I don't mind listening to it (as the current music choice shows).

Tomorrow is Sunday. With typical human attitude, I want my rest today, not tomorrow. To-do lists and I have a love-hate relationship. Their tyranny depresses me when I don't get as much done as I planned, but writing down everything I have to do helps me pretend that I have already done it, which alleviates stress. Always a good thing.

So now I'm going to cross "blog" off my list and write some e-mails.

Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "Love and Thunder", Track 3.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm bothering to post on here. Today I meant to start filling out the basics of graduate school applications, but I didn't even begin to bookmark them online. So much for making a good start, though this is just the beginning of the week.

Listening to Andrew Peterson in the evening has become my m.o. so far this fall. I wake up with his songs running through my head, songs about grace.

It's become increasingly evident that I don't understand grace at all. For months and months I've been trying to do the right thing. It's always in the back of my mind. Have I prayed with exactly the right mixture of truth and emotion? Have I participated with every ounce of my being in the worship service? Have I thought about God every moment today? Are my motives completely pure?

Of course this leads to a battle with assurance. Christ said, "Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you." In my quiet times I've been working through a list of the names of Christ, trying to know Him better. Last week I came to John 6, Christ as the Bread of Life. My father read that chapter to me when I came to him one night, teary-eyed, a little girl asking for help.

I have the same question of that chapter now as then, but it's not as easily answered: "Am I saved?" Now the question is complicated: "Have I come to Christ truly? Have I really and truly looked for Him?" Haunted by Hebrews 12 and the words about Esau who could not find repentance, "though he sought it diligently, with tears".

That response doesn't understand grace--at least, I don't think it does. Does my salvation rest on my coming to Christ, or on the work of Christ? The two are so closely intertwined, faith and salvation to faith, that I can't separate them. What if I don't have that faith?

None of this is helped by an undefinable sense of failure. The culture informs me in no uncertain terms that I'm a loser, someone with a B.A. who's living at home, and jobless for now. Which creates guilt, shame, loneliness, and resentment. An event in my life that I didn't plan isn't very flattering to my sense of control.

The "what ifs" crowd around. What if the relationships had gone smoothly? What if I had found some awesome missions opportunity for the year? If this time is part of God's plan, it feels completely unreasonable, almost petty. There's nothing grand or wonderful about it, just the challenge of obedience to the mundane.

In the end, though, I think it's basically a matter of perspective based on a misunderstanding of grace. If I understood the grace of God, I would know, as Mr. C puts it, that every day is God's gift to me; that what I have today is the very best thing God could give me for today.

Like the woman at the well, I'm thirsty but too confused to recognize the Savior sitting in front of me.

I've been missing the

WHITE RABBITS.

Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "Resurrection Letters, Vol. II", "The Good Confession (I Believe)".

Another of those apparently idyllic days, Crystal.

The alarm went off at six o'clock this morning. My mother, pastor's wife, and a couple of other women from church go out walking together at six o'clock, except for when one of them has a birthday. Then they meet at Panera for breakfast at half six in the morning.

The sunrise was beautiful, eyebrow pink and purple clouds raised across aquamarine sky, burnt umber and orange just along the horizon, rich, gritty colors. Panera was nearly deserted at that hour, as is to be expected in a town full of university students. There are a couple of "regulars" who are always there, every morning, including one slim older woman who said, "Oh, you all are back! I've missed you!" and gave up her seat on the sofas behind the fireplace just for us.

Mrs. P, Mrs. C, and my mother settled themselves chuckling on the fat leather sofas, pleased. Stephanie joined us. We ordered breakfast. Cinnamon crunch bagels and ginger tea, very good. The women chattered and giggled about all sorts of things--mostly having to do with their children. Dawn came quickly outside.

We went our separate ways at about eight o'clock. My father had already left for work by the time we were home. I went straight upstairs, changed out of my nice clothes into running clothes, and sat down at my desk to revise for the GRE. Maths. Percentages, fractions, square roots, and absolute values--oh, yes, my best friends ever, particularly at that hour of the morning.

In the middle of revising, the phone rang. It was a woman at the library requesting an interview with me this Thursday for the position I've applied for. First call back to date. (Incidentally, after lunch, Mrs. E, our neighbor across the street who's been taking a lively interest in the job hunt proceedings, came over with the business card of a friend of hers who runs the Domestic Violence Shelter here. My mother glowed with pleasure. I, on the other hand, feel as overwhelmed as ever, sick to my stomach with all the expectations.)

By ten o'clock I had had enough maths, and I went outside to get the neighbor's dog, Moochy. (Laura and I object to the name somewhat since it sounds ridiculous when shouted.) She was full of life, as usual, which meant two enormous muddy paw prints on my shirt by the time I managed to clip the lead onto her collar.

My mother decided to come with me. We walked over to Boomer Lake and around it. The morning was amazingly cool. Moochy trotted happily beside the path, sniffing everything and greeting every dog we met. A big heron eyed us dourly from a log under a bank, and geese flew crying through the chilly sky.

My mother showed us a grove of trees on the hilltop above the lake. One of the women who lives in a house adjacent to the lake keeps a gorgeous garden, full of flowers, and a cooler of water by her back gate for frisbee golf players who get thirsty. My mother gave Moochy a drink out of a plastic cup, and then we walked home.

It was a quarter past noon by the time we were back. I showered. Stephen came back from his Latin class, and we ate lunch. Then I sat down to finish revising for today.

After that, work was just beginning. I had finished a couple of e-mails and was on Facebook replying to Mr. L when Catherine messaged me. So I sat down on the floor under the window and talked to her on Skype for an hour-and-a-half. Since I was sitting on the floor by the bookshelf, I opened two of the photo albums from two years ago. Laughed with her on the phone about all those times.

After that, I worked on an e-mail to Naomi for awhile. At about a quarter to six, Nicole rang. Caught up on each other's lives. We talked a lot about books, too: Wodehouse, Allingham, Woolf, Hugo. And when she rang off, Anna rang.

As a result, I missed eating tea with my parents and Stephen. But when I got downstairs to eat, Laura had just rung, and my mother was talking to her on the phone while my father started to wash the dishes. I sat by the phone and listened in on the conversation. My mother was full of questions, and Laura was full of answers and more questions, so between the two of them they were talking away happily.

After she rang off, my father read Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. We had family worship.

When I went upstairs to bed, Annie came and sat in my lap. She purred and put her head on my chest and nudged me whenever I stopped rubbing her ears. To me being with this cat (in a good mood) is relaxing and reassuring. She's so complacent, so content, so happy with the pleasure of the moment.

Photos from end-of-summer adventures here.

Summer reading this year has consisted of:

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
The Practice of Godliness by Jerry Bridges
Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead
Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
The Most of P.G. Wodehouse by P.G. Wodehouse (who else?!)
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty (I should hope so!)
The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham

In progress:

Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "Resurrection Letters", Track 2.

I said good-bye to Tara this morning and went to meet my family at the aquarium in Jenks.

The drive down to Jenks was nerve wracking. Not only is the road full of tremendous potholes from all the rain this summer, but it's also a tangle of construction (to fix the potholes, of course). Sliding down treacherous interstate ramps with the rain pounding on my windshield made for a few tense moments, and then of course I got off the highway too early and had to pick my way through south Tulsa, along Riverside, until I found a bridge that took me across the river to Jenks.

At half ten, my mother, Laura, and Stephen pulled up beside me. By the time we had bought our tickets, it was nearly eleven o'clock. The otters and beavers were going to be fed at eleven o'clock, so we walked back to the Oklahoma exhibit. The keeper teased the beavers out of their untidy burrow with a big bowl full of grapes, apples, bananas, and sweet potato slices. The beavers were like enormous guinea pigs: fat, furry, and content.

The otters, on the other hand, were much more gratifying to watch. The keeper tossed freshwater clams into their tank. The three lithe beasts popped out of their den, slithered down a concrete slide, and splashed into the shallow water, where they whirled around and around in circles, gnawing at the blue clamshells. Even after they finished eating, they swam and swam, paddling, somersaulting, flipping, whirling, twisting, and bobbing up occasionally to make sure that we were still watching. Meanwhile, the racoons in the next cage sedately ate their mixture of fruit and cat food.

So we went back to the beginning and looked at the tanks. Tanks of crustaceans: hermit crabs, horseshoe crabs, big Carribbean crabs, lobsters. Also, starfish, sea urchins, anemones, sea hares, and sea cucumbers. Then a series of tanks full of shape-shifters: pufferfish, box fish, mud skippers, lungfish, lookdowns (shiny aluminum foil fish with weird straight heads), and so forth. On the other side of the main hall was a series of ocean creatures: four varieties of jellyfish, absolutely mesmerizing to watch, dreamily expanding and contracting, trailing their tentacles like comets' tails. Also, a couple of tanks of small sharks, pirhanas, arrowfish, and an electric eel. The eel's tank was set up so that its shocks registered as sonic bursts from a speaker just above the glass.

There were also seahorses, tiny ones and bigger ones. Solemn, like old women fluttering around their tank. Lionfish, extravagantly elegant, rayed and finned like Chinese dragon kites. A lonely cuttlefish scooting around in green dim water. Next door on one side was a nautilus; on the other side, there was, of all things, an octopus. Not just any octopus, though: a monstrous creature, gigantic bulbous head, eight suckered arms seeping everywhere. Arms rippling, it opened itself against the glass like a terrible star. Huge, hideously fast, it wove around its tank.

We walked on out into the ocean area. In the centre, the tank of rays, bat-winged sleek creatures flying around their tank. A couple of petting pools with crabs, starfish, and small sharks and rays. Tanks full of coral reef fish. Beds of anemones, iridescent, fluorescent pink, yellow, and green.

We stepped out to eat lunch on the back deck overlooking the river. The rain had stopped, but the wooden benches were wet. Then we went back inside, in time for the shark feeding at half one. The aquarium's shark tank is arranged so that a tunnel runs down underneath the tank itself, permitting the viewer to look up at the sharks as well as to either side. The beasts have gotten bigger over the years we've been coming here. Lemon, bull, and nurse sharks swam expectantly around the tank. I counted about fifteen sharks. The largest one was about nine feet long, and the next one wasn't much smaller. They were enormous, powerful, stunningly fast. Sleek bodies wove from side to side as they soared through the water, overhead, around us.

At feeding time, the tunnel under the tank was full of people. Lights above the tank were switched on. The first few chunks of raw fish were ignored by the beasts, but after one of the nurse sharks found a big piece and burst it apart, the others began to be excited. Big round slices of salmon, whole dead fish, and clouds of shrimp were released into the water gradually over a period of fifteen or twenty minutes. The sharks whipped through the water, seizing the meat in their mouths, gulping it, spitting it back out, thrashing their heads to break the chunks apart. The water filled with a haze of particles and fish organs. It was awesome and terrifying.

We watched and watched. It was fascinating, mesmerizing, to watch the rhythm of the big animals as they swathed through the water. After a few minutes, the crowd dispersed, but we stayed until the sharks had obviously eaten their fill. Then we walked back to the sea area. We visited the biggest coral reef tank, where some sort of angelfish took an interest in Laura and me and swam up and down against the glass where we were sitting.

We went back to the Oklahoma exhibit then. Oklahoma fish aren't nearly as colorful, but they make up for it with size. Gargantuan alligator snapping turtles, gars, paddlefish, and catfish, gargantuan shapes suspended in vague green depths.

Back at home, after tea, at seven o'clock, Laura and I drove over to the Aspen in Fountain Square to meet Sarah, Rachel, Elizabeth, and Anna. Sunshine on the storefronts was warm. Laura and I joined Sarah and Rachel, waiting outside for Elizabeth and Anna.

When they showed up, Rachel left because she's caught THE cold (I generously gave it to Anna, who shared it with Rachel), but the rest of us went inside and ordered. The coffee shop wasn't too busy this early in the evening. We chose a snug back corner with a big armchair and a long sofa done in pretty copper-and-green upholstery. After we got our drinks, we handed them around, all taking a taste. Then we spent the whole evening talking and laughing.

As the evening went on, more and more people drifted into the coffee shop. Most of them were students, coming in groups or alone to study. Outside it quickly became dark. We were all reluctant to leave, but at about half ten Laura started to wilt onto Elizabeth. Stepping into the evening, we were met by strange musty humidity. The evening smelled like a mildewed library.

Laura and I drove home. The streets were quiet. Eerie ground fog was seeping up below the dam, silver in the light from the intramural field. The windscreen misted with humidity. Unnaturally cold night air made me shiver and was full of weird furtive smells, musky smells, animal and plant smells. The stars hung bright and close in the black sky above it all.

part ii.

Now Playing: More crickets.

"Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel! I am the one who helps you, declares the Lord; your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. Behold, I make of you a threshing sledge, new, sharp, and having teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and crush them, and you shall make the hills like chaff; you shall winnow them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the tempest shall scatter them. And you shall rejoice in the Lord; in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory", vs. 14-16.

The last two transformations are my favorites. This one is surreal: from worm to threshing sledge. Worm is easy enough, a little slimy squidgy creature squirming around on the sidewalk after it rains. When I think of threshing sledge, I think of an enormous combine crawling through a field of wheat. Or of the clutters of agricultural tools I've seen in sheds, all sharp curved teeth, steel blades, interlocked slashing parts.

The mountains here, Pastor explained today, are the obstacles we face in life, the problems, pains, and decisions we encounter. And God promises that these worms, us, will go from being helpless to being so powerful that we slash the mountains into dust. Beat our problems fine as sand. This doesn't mean that God will take away the challenges. Instead, as we go through them, He will conquer them through us. All the suffering, all the evil, winnowed and blown away. All the fruit left behind: rejoicing in God.

"When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive. I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together, that they may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it", vs. 17-20.

A beautiful final transformation: desert to garden. This transformation comes as the direct result of our prayers as God promises to "answer" us. Hope! So much hope. If I am in the wilderness, the garden is coming. God Himself transforms barrenness, loneliness, and danger into fruitfulness, fellowship, and peace. He creates a paradise in response to His people's prayers. I can't imagine that the prayers here are extremely articulate: people whose tongues are "parched with thirst" probably aren't the best communicators. Yet God in His grace answers our weakness with far more than we could ever imagine. Restoration, return to an Eden made even more lovely.

What does this mean?

When Satan comes and tells me that because I have sinned again, God will not accept me--when he comes and says that because my heart is hard, God will not listen to my request for forgiveness--that I am to stand on the welcome of Christ. Stand on the truth of His unshakeable work. Stand on the truth of His promise that the enemy will be defeated.

When my fear tells me that I will never get through "this" (whatever it is), that I will never be happy again, that I will always be lonely, useless, and afraid--that I am to pray to the God who makes worms into sharp weapons, who makes deserts into gardens. No matter how weak and inarticulate the prayer is, He will hear me, and His answer will be staggeringly gorgeous. Ultimately, Christ Himself.

part i.

Now Playing: Crickets.

Isaiah 41:1-20 was the sermon text this morning for the Stillwater RPC. I read through it in my quiet time beforehand. The passage is full of transformation, of turning, of metamorphosis. God's majesty, like the mountains along the skyline, is displayed in His ability to change one thing into another.

"But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend; you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, 'You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off'; fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand," vs. 8-10.

Israel goes from being taken "from the ends of the earth" to being welcomed by God. God's people go from being on the outside to being on the inside, from being cast off to being chosen, from being alone at the farthest corners to being at God's side. This is the act of salvation, of entering into right relationship with God. I forget that it is at once so simple yet so monumental. When I ask for forgiveness, forgiveness is something that I must buy with the proper amount of feeling bad. I have to agonize and cry and work up the proper emotions before I can feel forgiven.

But as Lloyd-Jones says earlier in the chapter I quoted a couple of posts ago, forgiveness is much simpler than that. "Ask, and it will be given." There is no need for me to press and hound myself and feel even guiltier for my hard heart. As soon as I ask that my sins are forgiven, they are forgiven--the gift of faith enables me then to believe. Christ's work stands untouched by whatever mood happens to be passing over me, so His forgiveness is always the same. It is simple, pure, kind, gentle. Because of His free grace, He makes me welcome.

"Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded; those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish. You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them; those who war against you shall be as nothing at all. For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, 'Fear not, I am the one who helps you'," vs. 11-13.

In a sense, the passage follows a sort of narrative. If the last three verses were about going from being outside to being in God's fellowship, these verses remind me of the struggle that immediately begins between the sinner and sin. As soon as I believe in Christ, my sins become my enemies. I might have cherished them before, but now they are angry at me, and I am angry at them. Another transformation.

God's promise here goes beyond just opening my eyes to this transformation. He promises a further change: my enemies, my sins, "shall be as nothing and shall perish". I find myself engaged in warfare. The further I go with God, the more conscious I become of this warfare. Everyone is probably exhausted by now of my constant references to The Screwtape Letters, but my recent rereading of them reminded me of the pressing reality of the conflict. Satan uses anything, anything--how tired I am, how hungry I am, what hormones happen to be in my system, how other people behave, whether it's sunny or cloudy--to make me stumble.

But this is God's promise. Those sins and the devil who uses them will both be defeated completely. Instead of fighting and failing again and again, I will not be able to find my sins. God will complete His work, and He will help me.

Now Playing: Sufjan Stevens, "Seven Swans", "All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands".

15 August 2009.

Following in the footsteps of the great Bilbo Baggins, I woke up later this morning than I meant to. On the morning of an adventure, waking up late is always a good sign of more mishaps to come. This particular morning, the mishap of waking up late was accompanied by dismal rain. While I dressed, a short sharp shower rattled on the leaves outside.

I went downstairs and ate breakfast with my parents. We had family worship, and then I packed lunch into a cooler. I loaded the paraphernalia necessary for the day's adventure into the back of the Buick: old newspapers, two very rusty shovels, an empty laundry detergent bucket, two ragged beach towels, a stack of CDs, my bag of odds and ends, bug spray, sun screen, and the cooler.

As I was loading the car, Sarah pulled up in her pickup truck. We added her belongings to the assortment already in the car: another rusty shovel, bug spray, a cooler, a sack full of provisions, a couple of textbooks, and an ill-fated pink plastic bucket. In the midst of our preparations, our third companion arrived in the back of her parents' car. Elizabeth added a wallet of CDs to our collection of junk.

After the appropriate farewells, and a stop to fill the tank of our faithful automobile, the three of us started out on our grand adventure.

Elizabeth sat in the front seat with me and "navigated". Sarah sat in the back seat and revised. We listened to an Indelible Grace CD, The Chieftains, and a mix of Tenth Avenue North and Switchfoot. We drove north, then west, then north again on I-35. The hour-and-a-half passed uneventfully. It was when we turned off I-35 onto Highway 60 that the adventure really began.

We were driving through green Oklahoma countryside--unnaturally green for this time of year. Dry field corn rattled in broad fields and tried to counteract the lushness of the grass growing in the pastures and ditches. We drove through small towns strung along the two-lane highway: Pond Creek, on the far side of a big old metal bridge, Lamont, and Jet. Each town with its big grain silo, its old houses with their broad porches, its school, its smattering of churches and convenience stores. We drove up and down over little hills. Ravines, pastures, plots of purple alfalfa, sorghum, and corn. Cattle and horses. We drove past windbreaks of enormous old trees, American elms and junipers stooped by the wind and hollowed out inside like caverns, their inner branches battered and bare, their outer branches making gaunt shells.

We met a couple of other mishaps during our trip, both of which took the form of brief thunderstorms.

Once we got to Jet, we drove around awhile before we figured out where we needed to be. We could see Great Salt Lake shimmering red and pale blue far away through dips in the trees. Google Maps was only useful to a point. We took a gravel road that branched off Highway 38. As the car bumped through the potholes, it startled a doe and fawn, which bounded off the road and stood to one side, staring. We also scared up a couple of armadillos. We found ourselves on the shore of the lake in a quiet grove of pecan trees.

Then we got back on Highway 38 and drove on until we came to the entrance of Great Salt Plains State Park. It took more winding around before we finally came to a car park and got out. We walked to the edge of the car park and looked down: there was the spillway. Two big concrete dams, with high concrete walls on either side, holding back the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River. Sarah and I had both come here as schoolchildren on field trips. It was smaller than I had remembered it being. Disappointing, particularly since everything is meant to be bigger on an adventure.

An enormous vortex of turkey vultures was hovering over the spillway, catching the heat rising from the concrete. Six cormorants and a big white heron were fishing on the edge of the spillway. Whenever the sun came out, the cormorants would stretch out their dark wings. A man was fishing with long rods from the wall that ran beside the spillway. Far below, in the dark green-and-brown pool between the first barrier and the second barrier, fish jumped out of the water. Sleepy splash and ripple. It was about eleven o'clock, but the morning was very quiet. The storm had left the air cool.

We carried snacks down from the car to the small playground. Elizabeth contributed clementines, Sarah contributed animal crackers, and I contributed bug spray. Ants swarmed on the ground. We sat under a big old mulberry tree and talked about children's books. Elizabeth bounced up and down on a see-saw with a chipped and flaking elephant on one side and a grinning horse on the other.

Fortified by our midmorning snack, we drove on around the lake. A swerved to avoid a big copperhead slithering across the road. We drove up to Highway 11, then turned back south into part of the wildlife refuge that borders the lake. Just as we pulled into the car park, a family with a couple of small children pulled in, too. They courteously let us go first. We walked around the Eagle Nesting Nature Trail, a lovely little loop, a mile-and-a-half or so.

We crossed a dry creek on a rickety bridge. We walked through a grove of wild catalpas: beautiful, strong old trees, their big branches writhing up like sea monsters' necks, rearing broad-leafed green canopies high overhead. Catalpas that have been allowed to grow freely like that are rare in the city.

We found a platform overlooking a bay with a telescope mounted on the railing. Birds were feeding and bathing out in the shallow water of the bay. White herons, egrets, great blue herons, small green herons, mallard ducks, ibises. Perhaps some spoonbills, too. We watched them through the telescope. Sleek silhouettes against the silver water, quick graceful actions, flick of beak and wing. The rising wind stirred our hair and ruffled the flat surface of the water.

We walked on, down the broad grassy path under the trees. Tiny tree frogs and grasshoppers bounced out of the way. Elizabeth spotted a couple of big toads. I mistook a water moccasin for a stick. It was shedding its skin, to Sarah's complete disgust. The wind, gathering strength, made sounds of rushing wings in the trees above us, willow trees, tamarisks, cottonwoods, sand plums. In the small marshes on our right, birds were feeding. Startled by our passing, they flew screaming into the air. Eerie cries of herons echoing in the woods.

We found a dragonfly as big as my hand. Smaller dragonflies with bodies like iridescent needles hovered over leaves. Sarah heard the thunder of hooves down in a muddy part of the swamp, and when we peered through the leaves, we saw another doe standing a little distance away, waving her ears at us. A little further on, Elizabeth saw a muddy pool frothing and writhing with baby snakes. Sarah and I were both jumpy and avoided every stick we saw lying on the path.

The path had been high and broad, grassy, built up on a dam through the marshy area, overgrown with willow trees. As we turned back toward the car, it began to run a little more uphill, and we found ourselves walking on gravel through groves of junipers. Under their feathery branches it was very still and aromatic. We walked on and on, through small sunny places where buffalo grass and bluestem and prickly pear cactus were growing, through a grove of cottonwood trees, and finally out into the car park again.

It was half one, and we were all quite hungry by now, so we took our lunches over to a picnic table beside a small green pond. I prayed, and we ate what we had in the coolers: sandwiches, peaches, and some Cadbury's chocolate that I'd brought along. Mosquitoes fluttered over the green water in swarms whenever a turtle decided to surface. Sarah and I fed the crusts of our sandwiches to red-eared turtles and bluegills swimming in the shallows. The wind moved gently in the big tree above us and rustled a thick stand of cattails across the water.

As we were preparing to leave, Elizabeth and I both saw something large and furry "humping" along the far shore. It disappeared behind the cattails. Then it stuck its face out of the cattails above the bank and looked at us quizzically. It was a raccoon! Raccoons are mostly nocturnal, so seeing one during broad daylight was very unusual. It delicately pattered down to the water and washed its paws. It paused a moment, stared at us again, and then turned tail and leisurely made its way back into the woods. We stood, staring at it, until it disappeared.

On the road again, we drove on a trail made specially for cars through the woods. Elizabeth flipped through Anna's CD case, laughing at the selection. Sarah read out the names of the marshes as we passed them: Little, Intermediate, and Big. Most of the marshes were dry, their deep bowl beds full of wild lotus and lily leaves gone brown at the edges like burned paper.

We hit the highway again and drove west. We drove through "hickville", a ridiculously disreputable town meant to be a lakeside resort and consisting mostly of battered old buildings painted bright pink and blue. Then we turned south. Drove through Cherokee, through fields of alfalfa, and then turned off onto a side road. This took us east again, back to the lake, to the selenite crystal digging area.

Because Great Salt Lake was formed by damming the Salt Fork of the river, an unusual geological formation occupies the southwestern corner of the area: 11,000 square acres of salt flats. Driving out onto the salt flats is a surreal experience akin to driving onto the surface of the moon. On either side the white shining salt lies sparkling, perfectly flat, so that the water to the northeast shimmers like a mirage, heat rising from the flats shimmering with the reflection of the water. Battered wooden posts mark the roadway.

Part of the flats have been designated as a public space for crystal digging. By some trick of the soil, the combined salt, sand, and clay form beautiful hexagonal crystals. These are usually right under the surface, in the first six inches or so of soil. Intrepid adventurers that we were, we had pledged never to return home until we had discovered some of the buried treasure. For that purpose, we had come thoroughly equipped. The two buckets, two towels, three shovels, and sun screen were all unearthed from the back of the car, and we set out onto the salt flats to dig.

The digging area of the flats looks even more eerie, in a way, than the untouched areas. It has been littered with shallow holes and small heaps of soil that sparkle where forgotten crystals have been exposed. The combination of holes and mounds gives the place the appearance of a meteor field. Other groups of people were dotted over the expanse. Redneck central, as far as we could tell.

We found a place and started to dig. The sun beat down onto our backs, and the powerful wind scoured over the unbroken expanse of sand and salt. Close to the ground, our voices sounded strangely covert, as though we were inside, because by contrast the wind was so loud in our ears when we stood up. At first we just hacked into the soil, but then we got the hang of it. Elizabeth and I would carefully overturn a small shovelful, and the three of us would each take a clod and begin to break apart the sand and clay. Embedded in the soil, the crystals flashed like glass. I sliced a finger open on one of them. We made a heap of crystals next to us. Unwashed, they looked like chunks of brown sugar.

We spent about an hour on the flats, though it didn't seem like that long. When our heap of crystals got big enough, we put it into Sarah's pink bucket and settled down to digging again. As soon as we took our hands off the bucket, though, an especially strong gust of wind came along. The bucket bucked off the shovel I had leaned on it, scattered our crystals all over the ground, and scudded away. The wind was so strong that it was going much too fast for any of us to catch it. We stood laughing helplessly, watching it as it scudded away from us. Far in the distance, it hit a mound of salt and bounced merrily into the air. In about five minutes it was out of sight.

We laughed ourselves silly, put the crystals into my bucket, and sank my bucket deep into a hole where it would be out of the wind. Some of the crystals we found were as long as my palm.

At about four o'clock, we packed up and walked back to the car. Dazed by sun and wind. Sarah sat in the front seat with me. We listened to a mix CD that Anna had put together: Rascal Flatts, Brad Paisley, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, etc. Long black road stretched straight before us, running up and down over the little hills. Lush grass in the ditches rushed and rushed in the wind. We chased blue cloud shadows. Out in the fields, the sun would catch the top of a stand of trees and burn them green and yellow.

We dropped Elizabeth off at her house, and then Sarah and I drove back to my house where her truck was parked. The town is busy with students again. I helped her pack her things into her truck, and we said good-bye. I was very tired.

Now Playing: C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, "Aslan Makes A Door In The Air".

An excellent paragraph from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, the chapter on feelings and their contribution to spiritual depression.

"Finally, let me put it in this way: Do you want to know supreme joy, do you want to experience a happiness that eludes description? There is only one thing to do, really seek Him, seek Him Himself, turn to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. If you find that your feelings are depressed do not sit down and commiserate with yourself, do not try to work something up but--this is the simple essence of it--go directly to Him and seek His face, as the little child who is miserable and unhappy because somebody else has taken or broken his toy, runs to its father or its mother. So if you and I find ourselves afflicted by this condition, there is only one thing to do, it is to go to Him. If you seek the Lord Jesus Christ and find Him there is no need to worry about your happiness and your joy. He is our joy and our happiness, even as He is our peace. He is our life, He is everything. So avoid the incitements and the temptations of Satan to give feelings this great prominence at the centre. Put at the centre the only One who has a right to be there, the Lord of Glory, Who so loved you that He went to the Cross and bore the punishment and the shame of your sins and died for you. Seek Him, seek His face, and all other things shall be added unto you."

Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "Resurrection Letters, Vol. II", "I've Got News For You".

This post brought to you courtesy Laura and Stephen.

An amazing video of the night sky here.

If you have some spare time and are trying to break your addiction to Facebook, have a look at some new links in the sidebar! Karen's gorgeous photography under "companions" and an amazing first chapter of a story under "miscellaneous": "the wonderful world of manaqua".

Now Playing: Chris Thile, "Stealing Second", "Ah, Spring".

I didn't expect today to be as eventful as it turned out to be.

Before sitting down to breakfast, I hunted in the laundry room for the box of books Aunt Lisa loaned us. It has been sequestered behind the set of box springs from my apartment, and I had to dig to find the one I wanted: Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham, the first of her Albert Campion mysteries. Laura and I had our usual reading party while we ate breakfast. She's working on The Silmarillion.

After breakfast, I did my quiet time and then went for a bike ride. A strong southeast wind was feeding into a big storm system to the northwest, which was hovering ominously along the horizon. I flew with the wind at my back, then labored along the other side of the lake. Listened to the sermon Pastor D preached at the MWPCY retreat at the end of May. An excellent portrait of Christ from John 1:1-18.

At home, I showered. Both the sink and shower drains in the girls' bathroom have become unaccountably blocked, so Laura and I spent the rest of the morning slogging away at them. The shower drain did absolutely nothing, neither better nor worse. The sink drain, however, spat disgusting clouds of black flakes into the water and reeked of sewage.

We ate an early lunch because a woman was coming at one o'clock to give Laura a Mary Kay makeup consultation. She spent about an hour-and-a-half dabbing spots of products onto sample trays and helping us put on makeup. Laura pulled disgusted faces at me the whole time whenever Mrs. W wasn't looking.

After Mrs. W left, I went upstairs to clean the bathroom. When that was done, I sat down with my laptop to finish registering for GRE exams, buying preparation materials, reading e-mails, and so forth. The mere mention of the GRE makes me tremble from head to toe. I also looked at the NOC website to see if they have any job openings.

At about five o'clock, I settled down for a break with Mystery Mile. A storm was beginning to blow over. All afternoon there had been thunder, but so far the storm had been too small and too far away. Stephen was playing with miniatures in the green attic, and he and Laura kept a fanatic eye on the radar. Laura was ecstatic. The sky became darker and darker. The wind veered around to the northwest and began to tear at the trees. I sat down on my bed, turned on the lamp, and started to read. Laura bounced in with her laptop to join me.

The wind roared in the maple trees, silvering the leaves, pale backs the color of the summer sky. For a long time there was just a gale, but then it started to rain. Sheets and sheets of rain poured down the street and rattled on the windows like artillery fire. The thunder, which had disappeared during the windstorm, returned with renewed fury. Stephen, Laura, and I all watched the storm through the windows. The lamplight made my small room feel like the cabin of a ship reeling through a storm.

My mother called us downstairs for an early tea. Just as my father finished giving thanks (and I in my head praying for God to protect us), the electricity flickered, and the house went dark. Rain pounded on the windows, lightning blazed in the darkness, and thunder cracked overhead. We scrounged candles from the living room and put them in among the dishes on the table. Laura lit them. We ate our leftovers by candlelight.

Laura's laptop had battery power, so she obligingly brought it downstairs so that we could watch The Dick Van Dyke show while we ate dessert. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of the nightly episode.... Outside, the storm was beginning to move away.

The sun came out suddenly, turning the rain to gold. Across the dark east, a double rainbow emerged, and the lower arc rippled into iridescence, adding a third crescent. The colors stood out vividly against the grey sheet of cloud in the east. All around us the golden rain fell shining. Green leaves and branches were scattered everywhere.

When the rainbows disappeared, we went inside. Laura played Ravel on the piano. I read Mystery Mile sitting on the floor in the sunshine streaming through the open front door. My mother, Laura, and I went for a walk. The whole neighborhood was out of power. People were outside cleaning up the debris from the storm. A man down the street had started up a backyard generator. My mother stopped to say hello to everyone, of course.

At the end of the street, we paused to look at the northwest. Another storm was blowing in, dark all over the northwestern sky, hiding the sunset. We walked home again. Laura bounced along, thrilled at the prospect of another storm. My father was reading to Stephen in the living room. Outside, my mother went up and down the yard, calling Annie. The silly cat had crawled through Philip's bedroom window and was running around on the roof in the gloaming.

We did family worship. Now my mother is reading a book about third culture kids. Sandy sits at the front door, looking out into the darkness. The white bell-shaped flowers on the hostas shimmer wetly in the porch light. The other storm is blowing in on a cold north wind that rushes in the maple trees. Annie sits beside me on a chair, bathing herself. The wind eddies through the front door.

Now Playing: The Decemberists, "The Picaresque", "Eli, The Barrow Boy".

Yesterday evening was Noah B.'s ordination service in Enid.

Because delegates from presbytery were coming down early to interview a candidate for the pastorate in Sterling, we planned to leave for Enid at a quarter past twelve. In the afternoon, while my parents were sitting in on the interview, Missy and I went to a coffee shop together. We arrived back at the Christian highschool where the service was to be held "just in time to do nothing". When the meeting with the candidate ended, the delegates came out, and we served them tea.

The ordination service began at half six. It was a very formal service, with plenty of steps to go through, but everyone seemed very happy. Afterward, Noah cut the cake with wee Katie's help, and everyone stayed for the session. Some of the guys immediately took Noah's new frisbee outside to play a game, though the evening was very windy. The big red moon was rising quickly over the trees as we carried the leftover food to the car.

Photos from the event are here.

Lovely evening yesterday! Laura, Sarah, me, Elizabeth, Rachel, and Anna.

Now Playing: Nick Drake, "River Man".

The McCs are staying with us this week, which means that a holiday atmosphere has overtaken the house. I came downstairs at about nine o'clock. Of course, the adults had already eaten, so I proceeded to eat my breakfast quietly. I got about halfway through a P.G. Wodehouse story when Abe came sauntering down, yawning, and poked at the cereal.

After breakfast, the morning drifted by quietly. I think Abe, Peter, my mother, Laura, Stephen, and Lydia watched a Dr. Who episode. Uncle Scott ensconced himself in the living room with an enormous stack of my father's books on theology, while I sat on the sofa and worked on editing a friend's book manuscript. Lunchtime came along, and we had a picnic meal of leftovers and sandwiches.

We got lunch cleared away quickly. The afternoon was wonderfully cool and clear for Oklahoma at the end of July, just barely breaking 80 F. So Uncle Scott, who has a twisted knee from playing ultimate frisbee, and some of the boys piled into the minivan and drove over to Boomer Lake, while Laura and I collected Moochy, and we walked over to the lake.

The guys (Uncle Scott, Abe, Peter, and Stephen) decided to play frisbee golf, while my mother, Aunt Anna, Lydia, Laura, Moochy, and I walked around the lake. Lydia had never been to a wetland area before, and she and Aunt Anna were full of questions about the lake and its flora and fauna. We walked past a gaggle of geese, saw a green heron perched on a tree stump, heard a turtle plop off a log into the lake, and watched a pair of white terns (very far from the ocean!) zip over the water.

We walked around the northern end of the lake to the peninsula where the veterans' memorial is. Laura and Lydia ran out onto the peninsula with Moochy, who had to be coaxed by Laura to chase sticks into the water.

We turned around and walked back to the house. Laura ran next door and got a brush and shampoo from Mrs. O while my mother filled the wading pool in the back yard. Lydia ran and put on a swimsuit, and we all gave Moochy a bath in the wading pool. The dog put up with the process. We scrubbed away, and Lydia brushed her vigorously. Fur scummed the water. After two shampoos, Laura took the dog next door.

I took a cold shower, then came downstairs to bake a chocolate cake for tonight. The Bs were coming over for tea: Noah, Lydia, and their three small children.

My mother had organized an ultimate frisbee match at the OSU track at seven o'clock for the CY, and since we were running a little late on the meal, the youth and the Bs drove over shortly after the meal.

Once the dishes were washed, we drove over to the OSU track, where the match was already in full swing. As we walked towards the green grassy oval inset in the track, I prompted Aunt Anna on the names of the players: Sam, J.D., Elizabeth, Anna, Hannah, Logan, Jonathan, Stephen, Laura, and of course Abe, Peter, and Lydia, as well as Noah. Uncle Scott, my parents, Lydia B., and the three small ones set up camp chairs at one end of the track to watch. Aunt Anna joined Sarah and me, perched on a big tractor tyre that was sitting on its side near the long jump pads.

Sarah and I sat and chatted with Aunt Anna for awhile, with each other, and with Elizabeth when she took a break from the game. The huge blue sky opened above us. OSU's bulky brick buildings looked diminutive under the enormous evening sky as they caught the level rays of the sun. Other people were walking or jogging around the track.

Dusk deepened overhead. Wee Katie scampered over to show us her pink teddy bear. As it began to grow dark, my mother brought out the chocolate cake and served it to everyone. We all sat around on the long jump pads in front of the adults' chairs. Uncle Scott bounced Julia, the littlest B., on his knee and hummed the Purdue fight song to her. Anna and Elizabeth joked around with J.D. Sarah and I dozed on each other's shoulders. Aunt Anna and Lydia lay on their backs and looked at the stars.

We stayed there a long time, talking. People began to leave slowly. It was nearly dark, and the stars were beginning to flash like jewels in a hydrangea-colored sky, when my father started to move toward the car. Everyone lingered in the car park. We were home by a quarter to ten.

Photos from today are here.

One very good book I've been reading lately is Lloyd-Jones's Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure. Lloyd-Jones's prose could be condensed to about half its length, but his work is very valuable on a topic I find seldom addressed anywhere else.

One quote, which I found particularly appropriate to some of the things I've posted here in the last month.

"Would you like to be rid of this spiritual depression? The first thing you have to do is to say farewell now once and for ever to your past. Realize that it has been covered and blotted out in Christ. Never look back at your sins again. Say: 'It is finished, it is covered by the Blood of Christ'. That is your first step. Take that and finish with yourself and all this talk about goodness, and look to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only then that true happiness and joy are possible for you.... Blessed be the Name of God for such a wondrous salvation for desperate sinners."

You'd think it would be so simple: make a choice and stick with it.

But no.

Why is decision making always so hard? Does it have to be so hard? It seems as though every time I try to make up my mind about some big part of life, I agonize for weeks, choose the wrong things, agonize some more, and make another choice, which also turns out to be "wrong". If "what-ifs" were monsters that hid under my bed, I'd have been gobbled up in my sleep long ago.

I hate waking up in the morning and feeling vaguely as though I've stumbled into a nightmare. An endless, pointless succession of days, unrelieved by freedom from care. Unrelieved by certainty. I keep saying to myself, "If I could just be sure...." Or, if I am really ambitious, "If I could just be happy...."

Sometimes I begin to despair. This whole business of "knowing God's will" and "glorifying God" is rather terrifying if one looks at it in an unbalanced way (which is usually how my brain works). I begin to labor under the delusion that God's will is completely impossible, a waste of time. Burdened by His command to use one's talents well, I become pinned down by fear that I will choose the option that glorifies Him the least.

And then what? A year of unmitigated sinfulness, being separate from Him because I didn't follow His will for me? Losing some of the joy I could have had in Heaven because I wasn't faithful in small things? Paul says that some people will be saved by the skin of their teeth, their works burned up, their souls barely saved. The fears mock me.

So I try to choose the thing that looks as though it will honor God most. But what if that option is not the thing that I prefer? Or love?

The more I consider the question of making decisions and knowing God's will, the more conscious I become of my sinfulness. Every motive is shot through with sin. Warped, no matter how righteous it seemed when it first occurred to me. Even when I think I have right motives, they are polluted with self-righteousness! Oh, the sweet, sweet, poisonous irony.

As soon as I am confronted with a decision, I plunge back into a prison of doubt and fear. Confronted more vividly than ever by my sinfulness, I am driven even more to despair. How can someone like this ever hope to choose what will glorify God most? Or glorify Him once they have made the decision? How can I ever be sure that He is pleased with me?

The need to rest in Christ's righteousness presses upon me as the answer to some of these questions. If every way I turn, I am confronted by sinfulness, I must remember that He is the one who has taken away those sins. For me to claim them as my own is, in an odd sense, stealing: they are His, and His righteousness is mine. That is what substitutionary atonement means.

Our assistant pastor preached a good message today about how those who recognize their lack of righteousness are those who are declared righteous by God. Some hope for me, anyway. No matter which direction life ends up heading, I will carry my sin into it. But Christ has already forgiven that sin and given me the power to overcome it. Because of Him, God is eternally pleased, well-pleased, delighted by me.

He is alive in me.

I still don't know how all of this will help me make right choices--or do a better job of entering the process of making decisions. Decisions are an enormous stumbling block for me, an area of sin that I need to recognize and deal with. But at least there is hope. I'm not walking into it alone. Far from it. The sovereign God is on my side, holding my hand, gently leading me. Whatever way I go, it will have been the way where His love could most clearly be shown to me and through me.

Anna and I were laughing last night about the end of the world coming in 2012, according to some people. Emily remarked dryly at one point that people are much more ready to believe Mayan calendars than the Bible. And I am amazed that we so quickly scoff at them for not trusting God with the end of the world, but we do not trust God with our own lives.

He promises that the righteous person shall be like a tree, planted by streams of living water, a tree that never fades, and that gives fruit in its season. He is the God of peace.

Now Playing: Brahms, A German Requiem, Track 7, "Blessed Are the Dead".

We came back from the Midwest Presbytery family camp at Horn Creek, Colorado, on Thursday. Since we used to go to Horn Creek nearly every year for family camp until about six years ago, I have very good childhood memories of the campground. It's probably one of my favorite places in the world, and this year it was especially beautiful. The Sangre de Christo mountains in southern Colorado have had unusually heavy rainfall this year, so the whole valley on the approach to the mountains was green. The mountains marched along the western edge of the valley, green to their peaks. Awesomely beautiful, yet vaguely menacing.

We arrived at camp in the early afternoon. Horn Creek Christian Camp is split into three campsites: Mountain Meadows, which has a lodge, a gym, a large dining hall with an upstairs meeting room, and a big circle of cabins; the Ranch, which has a couple of big meeting spaces, cabins, two small lodges, and a dining hall; and another resort area. We had the use of Mountain Meadows and the Ranch this year. About two hundred people from the midwest came to attend the camp, which was very encouraging since in past years attendance at the Colorado camp has been dwindling.

Philip, Laura, Stephen, Anna, and I started out the conference with one typical Horn Creek activity, a visit to the horse barn up near the Ranch. It was just the same as I remembered it, and, fittingly enough, an afternoon thunderstorm blew in, forcing us to take refuge in the barn. It always storms in the afternoon in the mountains. We watched the horses eating their hay and teased Anna after one of the horses sneezed on her feet.

Saturday evening, we had our first meeting with the entire camp, and afterwards, campfire in the meeting room above Mountain Meadows dining hall. The usual ridiculous songs and a pillowfight. Campfire used to be restricted to the CY, but these last few years, even the adults and small children have started to participate.

On Sabbath day in the afternoon, we had a Psalm sing in the arena at the Ranch--a long building, set into the ground, covered with a metal roof. When the requisite afternoon thunderstorm blew in, the noise of the rain drumming on the roof nearly drowned out the sound of a hundred fifty people singing.

Monday was pancake breakfast day, a Horn Creek tradition. It's always funny to watch the wee kids trying to catch pancakes on their plates as the chef flips them. Usually some pancakes end up on the ground, and the manager joked that if we get hit in the head by a falling pancake later in the week, it's probably because some squirrel tried to hide the extra ones in a tree.

In the afternoon, Laura, Philip, Stephen, and I went to the water slide with Will and Buck. Horn Creek has a really good set of three water slides, one short one for small children, and two long, fast ones that stretch down the mountainside. Walking up to the top of the hill from the pool at the bottom of the waterslide is very, very chilly work, and by the end of an hour-long stint, Laura was practically blue in the face. So she and I went down to the hot tub and soaked ourselves in there for awhile. We were joined by about ten small children, who'd all had the same idea and were cavorting in the bubble jets.

Tuesday, my parents, Philip, Laura, Stephen, Keith, Carla, and I went hiking up to a waterfall about ten minutes north of camp. It was a very steep climb, and my parents turned around about halfway up. The mosquitoes were absolutely awful on the trail. The wildflowers, though, were beautiful. So many different colors and shapes. For some reason, many of the flowers up here seem to have more vivid colors, seem to be more graceful and elongated, even though the climate can be much harsher. The waterfall was well worth seeing: a series of steep cascades over dark rocks into a black gorge, with pine trees growing stiff and straight up the sides. As we turned to hike back down, it began to storm on us. The trees were thick enough that we didn't get too wet, but down at the car park where my parents were, it hailed.

On Wednesday, Amelia, Laura, and I went for a horseback ride together for a couple of hours in the afternoon. That was probably one of the best parts of camp for me. I've always loved horseback riding, and we couldn't have had a more perfect afternoon. Just the three of us and the wrangler. Laura's horse was very sleepy and kept trying to graze while she was riding it. We rode through a big meadow with a spectacular view of Horn Peak on one side and the valley on the other. The sunshine rippled in lush grass and wildflowers, up to the horses' knees. We splashed through clear creeks and saw strip marks on pine trees where porcupines had eaten the bark.

Each day, Dr. G, from College Hill RPC, would give a talk in the morning to the entire camp. The theme selected this year was the church, so all of his messages were about some aspect of the church and our work in it. After the main message, we split up into age groups either for classes (for the smaller children) or for discussion times (for CY and adults). Then came lunch, followed by an afternoon of recreation. Usually there was some sort of program in the evening: New Song performed on Monday night; Tuesday night was the consecration service and CY skit night; Wednesday night was western night with square dancing and music.

With such a full schedule, I found it difficult to find time to spend by myself with the Lord. Quiet times are enriched in the mountains, though. When I sat outside in the early mornings, the woods were full of birds and big grey squirrels. Hummingbirds buzzed past my ears. At night, the stars were stunning. One night, Amelia and I walked out into the woods, found a clearing, and lay on our backs in the grass. So many stars that the constellations were lost in the blaze.

So Horn Creek was good this year: all the traditional activities, teaching, and fellowship. A lot of people didn't recognize me, and when I was introduced to them, they'd say, "Oh, yes, I think I know you! You used to have long hair, right?" Nice to know that the entire presbytery notices one's haircut!

And the week ended with one more traditional activity: getting sick to my stomach Thursday morning. At least it was at the end!

On the whole, though, very refreshing.

Photos from Horn Creek are here.

Now Playing: Flook, "Haven", Track 7, "Padraig's".

Tonight Sarah and I were looking through my mother's photo albums from 2003 and 2006. It was funny to see the photos of music recitals, drama club performances, and back yard escapades. Chubby Philip, Stephen, Sam, and J.D.; Laura with her long hair; Dani and Ben much, much shorter than they are now.

I'm always bothered by what I see of myself in old pictures. Ridiculous skinny kid with rebellious hair and dark shadows under her eyes. Afraid, worrying, self-pitying. Not, of course, that those things have changed, but I've become better at hiding them. I hate being forced to remember because I inevitably remember all the things I did wrong: not only the things that were obvious to everyone, but all the secret mean childish mistakes that no one else knows about, that persist.

Mistakes? Or sins? It strikes me that the main reason remembering disturbs me is because it reminds me that I'm not perfect. Sins are mistakes, are the foolish slip-ups that betrayed my deep dark secrets to my family and friends. To me, they look like mistakes, flaws in the flawless mask I try to build for myself.

I am always hiding my imperfections to win the approval of the people around me. Because underneath this skin, I desperately need to be loved. Because underneath whatever poise I manage to present, I'm insecure. I don't believe that I am loved.

This attitude toward sin is wrong in the first place. Sins are mistakes--the uncomfortable reminders that I'm not perfect and can't hide that imperfection from other people or from myself. But sin ought to be sin--offenses against the eternally holy God. Acts of rebellion that anger Him and mock the sacrifice of His Son. Not accidents that need to be smoothed over but flagrant acts of defiance against my Creator.

In the second place, this desperate need for approval is also wrong. Born from the knowledge of true evil living in me, it is itself a marker of my sinfulness. It betrays the fact that I know I am not worthy of being loved. I become willing to go to any lengths to hide that fact.

But: 1 John 2:1, "If anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." Such a precious name of Christ! He is the righteous one, the one who loves perfectly, faithfully, patiently. His righteousness presents me to God. It pleads my need for forgiveness. It pleads my need for love, my need for approval, my need for security.

The righteousness of the Son cannot be denied by the Father. By His sacrifice, Christ has brought me into the eternal fellowship of the Trinity so that I share in the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit for one another. My Advocate establishes peace for me. Peace with the holy God, peace with myself, peace with people.

So now I have freedom to obey God. I am required to let my shame go: my mistakes are not mistakes, but sins against God. If He has forgiven them, I cannot hold onto them. I am required to let the guilt go because Christ has taken it. And I have freedom to love people without fear.

All very easy to write.... Now to live it out!

Now Playing: Flook, "Haven", Track 6, "Wrong Foot Forward".

Stolen posts! For more of these two writers, visit the links on the sidebar.

Peter, 7 July 2009:

Being lazy and being bored. Two things that should never be an issue by themselves, much less together. However, the society of "more now" has brought the idea that 1) I need to be entertained (boredom) and 2) I shouldn't have to work very hard to get it (laziness). Now what is immediately apparent in that? (the obvious questions are often the most enlightening)

Consider for a moment man's purpose. The Westminster confession/catechism says "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever". Now tell me, what part of that says anything about enjoying myself? At what point in life am I supposed to glorify God by, say, attempting to get the most out of my satellite tv subscription? Boredom is not to be taken lightly, by anybody involved. Chances are whoever it is needs to be doing something, and is merely avoiding it.

God said there would be toil. From the day that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, from the day that the ground was accursed because of our fallen nature, man has had to work to bring forth food from the ground (and by implication, any source of nourishment). Sorry guys, no free lunch.
Proverbs 10:4 "He becomes poor who works with a lazy hand, but the hand of the diligent brings wealth."

Ok, you knew that already, didn't you. And if you didn't, read it again. It'll be important someday.

But what is more imminent for the believer is the trap of apathy. When a man simply doesn't care enough to carry out God's will on earth, he's already sunk deep in. The intermediate temptations are rather obscure, making them easier to fall into than ever before.

So often there comes a time when our time becomes a daily drag -- get through the day, make it to the next. One day down, another to come. While many of us (this I freely admit) are quite willing and able to carry out God's will in some big adventure, in traveling to Mexico to minister, even just getting on the road again, it's the typical, the ordinary, routine, that our adversary can use against us -- unless we guard against him. (Be sober and self-controlled. Be watchful. Your adversary the devil, walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. -1Peter5:8)

What has become of us if we are no longer passionate for the gospel? People, pay attention.
"Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked," declares the Lord GOD, "rather than that he should turn from his ways and live? ~Ezekiel 18:23

The wicked are many in number, and it brings glory to the Lord that they "turn from their ways and live"!

(My note: Reading C.S. Lewis's essay "The Weight of Glory" would be an excellent follow-up to this one.)

~

Anna, 29 June 2009:

Sometimes what we need from the Bible is not the fulfillment of our dream, but the swallowing up of our failed dream in the all-satisfying glory of Christ. We do not always know the path of deepest joy. But all Scripture is inspired by God to take us there. Therefore Scripture is worth more than all this world can offer.

-John Piper

While I was in Cyprus, I was thinking a lot about Christ as our Mediator since as a team we were studying Hebrews.

"But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet."

Hebrews 10:12-13

Christ came at God's command, so His work, His sacrifice, is completely pleasing to God. He gives God joy by His obedience, and because He is my Mediator, God sees me through Him. Thus, God is pleased by my obedience, though it is the obedience of Christ.

Christ offered Himself in my place as one final, complete, perfect sacrifice. God's anger is fully satisfied, and my sins are fully paid. He is so precious that He only needed to offer Himself once, and that one death was enough to pay for all the sins of all His people.

Christ then entered the eternal, immediate presence of God and sits there reigning. He presents us continuously before God because He lives continuously. Because God is pleased with Him, He welcomes us into His presence.

So the fruit of Christ's work includes acceptance with God for me. My sins are erased, covered with the eternally pleasing blood of the Son.

And I can obey God as Christ did. The author of Hebrews quotes Jeremiah, "I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds." My heart and mind are being remade to match Christ's, remade in His image. This enables me to obey as He obeyed.

Photos at long last from the last six weeks!

Some here.

And more here.

And even more here.

Christ is our Priest.

"We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man." Hebrews 8:1-2.

No earthly priest would have dared to sit down in the temple or the tabernacle, but Christ is seated at God's right hand. He is so honored and so pure, so precious and so beloved to the Father that He can minister for us even as He rests in God's presence.

He has entered Heaven itself for us. Instead of ministering in a shadow, He ministers in the real thing, God's own presence, not a symbol of God's presence. Because of His human nature, He knows our needs exactly and knows how to pray for God on our behalf. His prayers for us are immediate, wise, faithful. He never pauses or stops in His ministry.

What does that mean for me? That He knows what I need before I need it. That His prayers are accepted by the Father, even are pleasing to the Father. I am welcomed there because He is the one who has invited me, even into the presence of the holy Creator.

Also, that whatever sins and mistakes I make, they are covered by His faithful ministry. God can never cast me out because His Son prays for me continuously. Peace.

The Cyprus team has been going well. It's been an intense three weeks, though.

Our first week was spent mostly painting the church hall. Technically, we were staining it, since it's covered in wooden siding. That was our first introduction to the blazing Cyprus sun, at least for Andrew and me. We would spend most mornings and at least part of most afternoons working on the building. For lunch, members of the Greek church brought us food, so we got to try Cypriot cooking. We also went to Finikoudes, the beach in Larnaca, one afternoon.

Every evening, we ran youth club for young people ages 12-18 at the church hall. The young people here are a wonderful bunch. Not very mature in their faith, perhaps, but full of energy and life. No cliques; everyone is friends with everyone else. They're all very talented, too, an artsy bunch. They love to act and ham it up, which makes youth club a lot of fun. We played games with them for about an hour-and-a-half each evening, followed by a talk or testimony by one of the team members.

During our second week, we ran Bible club for kids ages 5-12 at the church. On the day when we had the most, there were forty-five; on the day when we had the least, there were twenty-four. We began each day with opening exercises--singing, a story from the life of Joseph, and memory verse. Then half of the kids played games outside while the other half worked on a craft, and then they traded places. The kids had loads and loads of energy. Even after running around in the sun all morning, most of them were still active enough to chase Andrew all over the church property, laughing and screaming, while we cleaned up.

We continued to run youth club in the evenings during that week, which made the week quite intense. We would eat lunch at the house of someone in the church after Bible club, usually at about two o'clock in the afternoon. We'd get back to our house at about four o'clock, sleep for a little while, then go to youth club at about six o'clock. We wouldn't get back from youth club until at least half ten, sometimes later. But it was well worth it. We did activities with the youth: a photo scavenger hunt, a film night, a games night, a beach night, etc. They were up for the silliest things. For the photo scavenger hunt, one of the guys pretended to eat a live pigeon.

Last weekend, on Saturday afternoon, we went with fourteen of the young people (ages 16-18) up into the Troodos Mountains for youth camp. We stayed there until late Tuesday afternoon. The mountains aren't anything like the Rockies, but they smelled and felt the same. Pine trees thick on steep rocky slopes, blue ridges marching away into the distance. Our camp was on top of one of the mountains, and from the back of the kitchen, where we washed dishes, we had a lovely view of a long blue valley.

John George from Northern Ireland was our speaker for the weekend. He gave three talks on Ecclesiastes, which were really challenging. A call to put God at the centre of our lives: not to waste life, but to spend it pursuing Him. The young people were very responsive, and we had good discussion times after each talk.

Our days during camp were pretty free. We spent a lot of time just hanging out, playing games, going for walks, stargazing, sitting around talking, etc. A woman from the church and her daughter cooked for us, and we all helped with the chores. The tents were canvas pavilions set up on concrete pads with proper beds inside. We spent most of our time outside, though, sitting in the warm sunshine.

Yesterday, the youth group went on a trip to Waterworld, a water park about half-an-hour from Larnaca. Since it was the day after camp, the team and the young people who'd gone to camp were all still really tired. There were about thirty of us in the group, and we had a lot of fun. The water park was small enough that we could do most of the rides before lunch and then spend the afternoon either going back on ones we'd done or just relaxing. Lorna worked on her tan. I swam in some of the pools reserved for swimming and watched the young people go down the rides again.

Today we've been resting. It's been good to have some time to ourselves. Andrew has spent most of the day up in his room on his laptop, and Lorna, Kait, and I have spent most of it sitting in the living area, reading or on the internet, and listening to Lorna's iPod (she has an apparently inexhaustible music collection). Kait is making pizza for us tonight, and Chris and some of his friends are coming over to watch a film with us.

Cyprus is a lot like Oklahoma in many ways. Flat, with some big hills, and extremely dry. The fields are already brown, round haybales trundled untidily to bake in the sun. The houses are all white blocks, very square, with water tanks on top. Here, though, they can grow rhododendrons and bouganvillea, and there are palm trees everywhere.

Today I went for a walk along the big salt lake near the Mastris' house (we're staying with Adam and Jeanette Mastris, who are away in the States for their son's wedding at the minute). It's so barren. The salt lake is mostly empty at this time of year, one dead flat sheet of salt sparkling in the sun, stretching away with a tiny sheen of water in the middle. To the west, there are houses--square and white with red roofs--, and beyond them the vague blue bulk of the foothills rising against a bleached blue sky. Dead eucalyptus trees grew along the path with their bark hanging in shreds, and thick stands of bamboo grew ten or twelve feet high where the land was lower. I saw a fluffy cat playing with an enormous black snake that must've been four or five feet long--very surreal.

Tomorrow we're going to a nicer beach for the day with Chris and company (Alisia Burgess, Martha, a girl from youth club, and Alex, her college-aged brother), and then on Saturday to Paphos. Sabbath day will be another day of double church--first the English church, then the Greek--and on Monday I assume we'll be packing up.

Church here is quite an experience. Both the English and the Greek groups are small, though the Greek group is slightly larger. During Greek church, we sit at the back, and one of the elders interprets for us. Thus there's a constant low muttering undercurrent during the service of Greek being turned into English. Both churches, however, sing Psalms, so when the Greek church sings a Psalm to a familiar tune, we just sing that same Psalm in English.

Andrew and I fly back to the States on Tuesday. Our flights leave at the joyous time of 5:00 a.m. We go from Larnaca to Heathrow, where he takes a plane to Kansas, and I take a plane to Houston, and then to Oklahoma City. It's going to be a long, long day.