Living as Art

Cool Baskets

This week I spent hours at a dealer waiting for my car to be repaired.  While waiting in a room filled entirely with people I was certain suffered from the swine flu, I reflected on days when my thoughts were virgin to worries – especially ones that involved broken cars, air born viruses and warranty’s.  My entire existence used to be utterly controlled by someone other than me.  Although not always pleasant…my job was simply to play and sleep. 

It all ended when my parents made me learn to ride a bike.  Santa brought me an unasked for pink Huffy with streamers, a long cushy seat, and a basket on the front.  I loved that basket. However, I could care less about the bike once attached to it, so I promptly removed that awesome basket from the Huffy and used it for my barbies. One day with that “you’re gonna do this whether you like it or not” look in his eyes, my dad told me, “it was time”.  I remember barely being able to hoist my leg over the unscratched, pink frame. I remember the terror I felt immediately as I began to pedal with my dad running behind me holding on to the seat.  I remember screaming, “Don’t let go! Don’t let go!” and I remember him saying, “I’m letting go now…”  I remember how a crack in the sidewalk sent my steering askew and how sore my knees felt after the savage concrete scraped the skin off of them.

Since then, I have had many first rides.  Ones that left me bruised and bleeding, dreaming of reclaiming the moments before the ride as my reality once more.  A few weeks ago, my friends, husband and I visited a metaphysical mall in Sedona, AZ.  Cowboy malls, clothing malls, book malls, craft malls, and antique malls heavily seasoned my undeniable Oklahoma flavor, one that lacked even a hint of the metaphysical. We wanted to talk to the people inside, the searchers and the guides.  Curious about how God’s power had been repackaged in a new age version of “truth”, we entered as obvious tourists. Paul must have felt much the same when he walked into Athens.  An entire room displayed the various gods for sale on hundreds of shelves.  They came in every shape, size, medium and price one could want.  If a god was more of a commitment than you were willing to make, saints offered a nice compromise.  I felt dizzy. Why did I feel so nervous?

I hadn’t felt this nervous since my parents made me learn to drive.  My first car was a  1979 Honda civic, which would have been fine anytime before 1989.  It cost $500.  Most of the letters on the back went missing leaving the lonely “o” and “d” awkwardly marking the back hatch. Much like that unasked for bike, the “od” entered my life.  Much unlike 99.9% of the 16-year-old population, I didn’t want my license. I understood economics more than most my age and I wasn’t interested in using my limited resources on fuel.  However, my mom grew weary of me relying so heavily on her adept driving skills.  She wanted to refocus her cabby role on my nowhere near sixteen-year-old brothers.  After one failed driving test at 16, finally at 17 my mom couldn’t wait any longer for my driving independence. 

Determined to teach me, we took the “od” on a drive.  As I attempted to coordinate the clutch, brake, shift, and accelerator dance, I longed for my pink Huffy.  Not far into the lesson, I had to stop on a hill.  This alone constituted terse tones and tense words between mom and me.  However we both became silent when a brand new, right-off-the-lot, red corvette pulled up behind the “od”. My brilliant mother gets out of the car and asks if they wouldn’t mind backing up, way back.  I remember the sweat running down my back onto the black fuzzy fur covered seat.  After three or four lurches, one stall and restart, I launched like a rocket out onto the street.

I felt just as clumsy and out of control as my first Huffy ride or my first drive in the “od” when I first attempted to embrace the power of God’s Spirit working in my life. I had always had dreams, visions and thoughts that eventually, actually happened.  I sometimes sat down with people and knew either their past or a directive for their future.  The church wasn’t there to run behind me or to direct traffic as I embarked on my first Spirit experiences. No one told me that the Spirit’s influence and power in my life was like riding a bike and driving a car – that His operation through me would become as natural as breathing.   I didn’t know that operating in God’s Spirit should be a necessary life function.  I didn’t know that He was a gift that would offer me much more than spiritual status or an irrelevant emotional encounter. Like the searchers in the metaphysical mall – I became desperate enough to investigate – to explore – to hike my leg over the unasked for and unfamiliar gift in my life and attempt to see where it would take me.  I knew it would be awkward, I knew I might have a few out of control moments, and I might end up hitting something I wanted to avoid, or shooting ahead at a faster pace than I’d anticipated, but unlike before – I was ready – I wanted to go where I felt in my heart God’s Spirit might take me.  I knew it wouldn’t be somewhere I could get on my own two legs.

Walking by all the gods and gimmicks punctuated everything.  The vivid colors of the rocks and crystals used for healing, the smells of the herbs, incense and other “natural” products that balanced the body, the faces of those questing for love, peace, and happiness.  For a full and balanced life.  I had expected something so different – for them to be so different than me.  Their sudden familiarity startled me. Something other than judgment wafted in the room.  Compassion. 

We shared conversation with a lady that ran the facility and interviewed another woman that read auras.  After sharing with them why we were there, both suggested we visit several of the vortexes that surrounded the area.  I had never heard of a vortex.  Iphones revolutionized information much like airplanes did transportation.  We found out those vortexes happen when energy and power spiral from the earth to one of the designated, specific locations (imagine an upside down tornado).  People visit one site to find balance, one to strengthen the male characteristics such as courageousness and the ability to reason, and they visit others to enhance their feminine attributes of nurturing and emotional response.  We drove to several of the vortex sites but the pouring rain dissuaded us from making the three hour long hike to their pinnacle of power; but many other people determinedly made the trek.  We asked one man as he returned from the trail if he had in fact experienced the power of the vortex – his answered “yes” that it had a “very powerful energy and presence”. 

We headed to our hotel.  Our Oklahoma flavor had been spiced up a bit with the new experiences added into our recipe.  I reflected on the ridiculous possibility that anyone might feel power at any of the vortexes, or that people thought they might buy power at the metaphysical mall.  Then I thought about church.  My church.  What if the searchers and guides we had met that day disbelieved that the church provided any kind of spiritual energy or power.  Although I myself regularly encountered it – they might perceive my going to church much like I perceive their visiting the vortexes.  Questions poured over me like the rain that accompanied our ride.  How can the church show the searchers that God is more powerful than all their vortexes combined?  How can we show them that everything they could buy or experience in that metaphysical mall was free with Jesus?  How could God’s presence, power, energy be so evident that anyone searching would see it?

After three hours, a mechanic came out to my table in the infested waiting room and told me they didn’t have the part they needed to fix my car.  I had to come back and sit and wait.  I really didn’t have a choice. I now am the mom cabby who drives my children to their life experiences.  I need the car.  It had to be fixed.  All because of the pink Huffy.  What once was so difficult to embrace is now mandatory for my functionality.

People everywhere are just like me - hesitant at first to trust anything but their own two legs to get them anywhere they need to go. Reluctant to relinquish denominations, churches or people the responsibility of driving our spiritual experiences.  As I drove off the car manufacturers lot I thought about the searchers out there. I wondered how many lived disappointed from visiting powerless vortexes or powerless churches. Without God’s Spirit, we won’t be able to access real power, authentic love, absolute peace, and unmolested joy, no-matter how cool the basket…

Check out these two podcasts.....
Mars Hill - Intentions - Rob Bell - Audio 12/5/09
Mars Hill - Luke: Jesus And Demons - Mark Driscoll 2/14/10

March 6, 2010 - 17 Years and Counting

I first encountered my husband one summer at a swim party.   We were 12.  He got in a fight with another boy and so impressed me that he became the headline of every note I would pass for the remainder of 6th grade.  My next major encounter with him was two years later.  We were 14.  It was fall.  We were at the high school football game sitting on a grassy hill, next to the bleachers watching – or at least pretending to watch – the game.  I tried to not look at him too often. Suddenly – he started to move toward me. Before I could give him the smile I’d rehearsed 29 times in my bathroom mirror, he grabbed my blue converse high top covered ankles and drug me down the hill as fast as he could run. I dug my fingers in the thick, cool sod but I could not stop the momentum or the scream detonating from my throat.  When we finally ran out of grass and hill, he turned to me and gave me a smile and his hand.  I returned my hand and a smile (I forgot the one I’d rehearsed) to him.  On the way down that hill, in just seconds, I lost my voice, two heirloom rings and my favorite jeans to grass stains, but I found the love of my life.

We married 6 years later.  During our years together – we’ve had 4 children, 5 dogs, 1 cat, and 10 cars.  We’ve lived in 10 homes, traveled to 27 states and 2 countries. He taught me to eat vegetables and fruit, and I taught him to eat meat.  Since those first encounters, we accumulated a montage of them.  Treasured ones, so valuable that we can live forever off of their interest alone. Dark and dingy ones, the kind we only hope to forget in time.  The neither brilliant nor the dull ones – the just matter-of-fact ones - that attached to us much like birthdates and social security numbers.  Individually – we could take some and leave others, but like ingredients to a favorite recipe, it took all of them to make our marriage delicious. 

What if after the first couple of encounters – I kept trying to recreate them?  What if every time we went on a date – I wanted him to take me to that same football stadium, pull me down the same hill, ruin the same jeans (if only I could get into those jeans again!) and me experience all the same emotions? What if all of these years, every encounter that wasn’t dazzling completely dissuaded us from our devotion to each?  What would our relationship look like?

A few weeks ago my husband, friends and I ate at the Red Planet Diner in Sedona Arizona.  It celebrates the community’s fixation on the metaphysical and paranormal.  It particularly came about as the result of over 5,000 visitors gathering at the Bell Rock vortex in 1987 in hopes that the top of the rock would open and expose a UFO or some kind of extraterrestrial happening.  This event served as a catalyst to the current new age culture and tourism of Sedona.

When my husband read the story to me, I rolled my eyes and made that sound someone makes when they feel superior to all humanity.  In the middle of my snooty “guffaw” truth slinked in from nowhere, grabbed my ankles and pulled me down my haughty hill. 

Years ago – in the infant stages of my spiritual journey, I encountered God many times in inexplicable ways. I could physically feel His presence, I saw visions, and experienced His power surging through me to help others.  I fell in love, and ashamedly it was more with encountering God than God Himself.  I became addicted to the euphoric physical reaction to Him.  I found myself attempting to reset the same stage week after week, day after day to recreate that spiritual high.  Eventually – like any addict – I became desperate - willing to do just about anything for another “hit” of God’s Spirit.

I began to question everything.  Was I crazy?  Had I ever really encountered God?  Did God still love me?  Had I made him angry?  What had I done so terribly wrong?  I felt abandoned, rejected and lonely - like I was the kid forgotten at the gas station on a family trip. 

One afternoon at the pinnacle of my misery, my four children and husband went outside to play in the yard.  Oklahoma has two official perfect days of weather a year – and it was one of them.  They begged me to go play with them, but in an act of arrogant penance I chose to clean the house instead.  In my OCD frenzy I glanced out the window and saw their faces exploding with smiles of delight, heard their voices pealing melodiously with life, and watched their bodies moving like ballerinas carried and thrown about by the breeze in natures magnificent theater. 

Have you ever had one of those moments when you crumple under the weight of sudden truth? 

How do we get things so wrong? Maybe it’s just because at the time, we had a limited understanding of what was really happening. 

Between ages three and four, my mother and I lived with my grandparents.  My Mema watched me in the evenings while Mom worked at Anthony’s department store.  One evening, I noticed Mema getting particularly “nervous” as we used to call it.  She circled anxiously throughout the house like a racehorse on a track.  Her circles quickened and she made her best effort to shoot me a sharp smile every now and then in an attempt to camouflage the panic in her eyes.  Soon, sounds started to come from her mouth – starting out low and mumbled and growing increasingly high and bell like. 

All of the sudden a siren sounded from somewhere – I wasn’t completely sure that it didn’t come from Mema until she snatched me up from my dolls and held me suffocatingly close to her as she danced “a jig” in her now three foot circles.  She began to plead “Jesus! Save us from the tomato!”  Terror shot through me like a bullet and I clutched her like I did the tree I climbed in her back yard. I hated tomatoes.  They were squishy and tart and I didn’t want them near anything on my plate.  I could not understand how one could evidently grow large and formidable that it could elicit this response from my otherwise peaceable grandmother. 

The lightening whipped the sky, the thunder growled, and the winds slapped the screen door.  Mema asked me if I “had Jesus in my heart”.  I did not want to take any chances with a giant tomato about to pummel me so she stopped dancing circles long enough for us to kneel in her living room as I prayed to the soundtrack of sirens, lightening, thunder, and slamming screen doors.  This began my Christian experience.

This is before I understood Oklahoma only had two beautiful days, and the others likely offered ice, humidity or tornadoes.  Of course looking back I realize my mistake, but in the moment I really didn’t know what I was encountering. 

As I watched my family out the window – I realized I had made a similar mistake.  I thought encountering God was visions and goose bumps.  Holding Pine-sol in one hand and paper towels in the other I finally understood that some of the most profound ways that I could encounter Him were playing football together in my back yard, without me.  How many encounters had I missed?  How many times had God tried to woo me, get my attention?  I felt myself sliding down a hill – ankles first. 


Today, My husband and I have been married 17 years. The many “encounters” I have had with him don’t mean anything outside of our relationship.  If encounters were all we wanted, we wouldn’t have lasted this long.  But we want a relationship – a good one – one that will experience encounters of every kind – brilliant ones, dull ones, matter-of-fact ones and many unexpected ones. 

Now, when we laugh about his romantic, chivalrous ankle pull, he tells me – “how else was I suppose to get your attention?”