Who knew that a day could be made glorious because a boy wiggled his toes?

We pray and plead, reminding God — as if He needs reminding — of His infinite power, of His ability to work wonders, and all the while we remind ourselves of the many reasonable reasons why He should choose to deny our requests.  And so, although we pray and believe He is able, we settle ourselves to hear Him say “No.”  We forget that He is the God who designed us to glorify Him in our enjoyment of Him, the Father Who loves to give good gifts to His children, Whose goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.  We limit Him to our reasonable reasons, and we are astonished when it looks as though He may say “Yes.”

Answering “Yes” or “No,” He is the same God, steadfastly good; I know that.
But today the boy wiggled his toes; my God reminded me that He is larger than I ever think Him.
Glorious.

“Scandal of particularity.”

It’s a phrase Madeleine L’Engle uses in one of her books.  It surrounds me.

I bear the mark of scandal on my face as Hester Prynne did upon her chest.  Both marks of extravagant love.  But, while her mark was meant for shame, mine is glory.  While her lover hid himself and would have hidden all signs of his love if possible, my Lover proclaims His name from the mountain peaks and placed the mark on me Himself — not in one bold stamp of ownership, but gradually, deliberately, one particular eyelash at a time, until the row of white above my left eye was complete.

I knew that He did it, even then, when I was eight years old, but I liked to share the dermatologist’s diagnosis rather than that simpler answer, and was quick to add that the doctor said it might go away.  For though our culture claims to value uniqueness, would they not call it cruelty to mark a little child so, to make her face different from all other faces, to subject her to the incessant questioning of tactless peers?  They would be slow to believe you if you said it was a mark of love.  I was slow learning it, too.

Love.  Scandalously particular, selecting this lash and not that to lose its pigment, leaving, even sixteen years later, nine dark lashes amid the light ones.  I am struck with His ownership when I look in the mirror, forced to acknowledge that not even my face is my own, that I am a peculiar people, an elect exile, imperfect, but graced.

Love.  Scandalously particular.  Selecting one boy and not another to drive off a bridge and be pinned beneath his car.  Ordaining a drought so that the boy did not drown as he lay beneath the bridge, ordaining that his back broke low enough so that he did not suffocate while waiting for help, so that he was able to squeeze my hand when I stood beside his hospital bed today.  And you might say that the boy there with IVs and a neck brace does not look much like the work of Love, yet I stood there and knew it could be nothing but that.

Two weeks ago I wrote in my journal that God “will not waste wounds” and I wrote of the many I know whose wounds have made them beautiful.  And still we turn to God, indignant at each fresh injury, large or small, and want to know what He is about, hurting us.  And I, with the mark on my face which never gave me physical pain, and which some have called a “beauty mark,” I feel inadequate to say how His more violent marks will become beautiful.  But still I know that they must, and as I bear witness to His making of me, I bear witness to His knowledge of the particulars, others’ as well as mine.

He is scandalously particular.  I praise Him.

I lift up my eyes to the hills.
From where does my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, he who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
-Psalm 121

days

Dust rising and an earth-scent in the air above a field where two tractors ploughed at sunset.

Violent ripping of green husks to reveal perfect golden kernels beneath.

Tiny children holding hands and jumping up and down, unprompted, while I tried to lead them in a song.

Light shining through a white-fabric lampshade.

A room and closet newly clean.

Unnecessary remnants of a first year of graduate school no longer piled on and beside my desk.

Five boys laughing around the kitchen bar.

Mendelssohn and Chopin rediscovered on a pale blue evening.

Weeds pulled, soil raked, pine-straw spread, and a blister on my thumb.

Moonlight.

Shadows on the driveway; respite on the way back from getting the mail.

Time to sit and think of words and not feel as though there is need to be doing anything else.

about staying

Reading a journal from six years ago to remember what it was like not wanting to come to this place in which I’ve just been thrilled to learn I may stay.  I was hoping to find some passage to show how radically my feelings have changed in the past six years, but found this instead, which reminds that the most important things are just as they always have been:

July 10, 2005
But you, O God.  You will not remain behind when we go.  Your goodness is from eternity to eternity.  You are never more or less good.  You have been good to me this weekend from the foundation of the world.  You have been good to me tomorrow before time began.  You are good to me yesterday and last year beyond the end of time.  You give me life before my birth, and give life at the day of my death.  You receive my poor praise now and are worshiped by me beyond time’s end, where You are with me now and where I shall be with You eternally.  All the muddled strings of my life are already plain for You.  In You, I am already perfect and complete, lacking in nothing, though I myself have not gotten there yet …

I’d like to write more tonight — details of goodness tasted and seen round about me recently — but it’s late, and among the goodnesses of this good God is the sleep which He gives to His beloved.  I, possessing nothing but what He has given, accept this gift also, and am grateful.